[weeznerps]

I think anyone who is able to post on Hackernews does not have the kind of autism the GP comment is suggesting needs to be cured.

I wish there was a name that allowed us to distinguish the "old" autism of the 90s (non-verbal, severely disabled) with the new (apparently helpful?) kind of autism that other people frequently suggest me and many of my colleagues have.

[greyface-]

"Asperger's" and "autism" used to be classified differently in the DSM, and they (crudely) captured this difference. In DSM-5 (2013), they've both been merged under "autism spectrum disorder", in part because there's no widely agreed upon diagnostic criteria to differentiate the two.

I can't speak for whether this has been a net positive or net negative on the clinical side of things, but culturally, these sorts of conflicts seem to be happening with higher frequently since the merge.

[squigz]

> I think anyone who is able to post on Hackernews does not have the kind of autism the GP comment is suggesting needs to be cured.

What the...

[dimal]

I don't think most people understand how difficult things are for "high functioning" autistic people and how much work we have to put in just to get by in society.

It's not like I've had an easy life. At times, life has been pure torture. For example, I've barely been able to work at all for the past three years, because of being discriminated against in interviews, not because I was actually unable to work. The toll this took on my life and health has been incalculable.

From one angle, my autism is a superpower. From another, it's a curse. I'm able to solve intractable problems that other people can't. But since my way of solving these problems is impossible for neurotypicals to understand, and I can be kind of odd, I've been essentially unhireable. I've had to go into consulting because that's the only route open to me. And this is just one of many problems I've had fitting into society. It's exhausting to be "high functioning" in a society that doesn't accept what you are.

But yeah, I do agree that merging everything into one spectrum has made things unintentionally confusing.