[growingkittens]

I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.

Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.

[Aurornis]

It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients.

Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.

> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.

Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.

> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.

You are grossly over-diagnosing.

When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.

[growingkittens]

A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.

Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.

People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.

[mjburgess]

You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem.

Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher

[LordDragonfang]

> To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.

Almost all of my social circle is somewhere on the spectrum, and quite a few are diagnosed.

So I can say with some authority that there are absolutely some people who use it as an excuse, which is made even more apparent than the people that aren't using it as one. TikTok and other high-information-low-veracity social media is only making this trend worse. It's not bigotry to acknowledge that.

(Most of said individuals ended up getting cut out of said social circle, after the people actually making an effort got tired of them constantly using their disability as an excuse not to even try to modify bad behavior)

That said, I'm not against diagnosis, or even self-diagnosis. Improved diagnosis is a good thing! But mostly because it makes it easier to understand how you can structure things to adapt to it. Or to quote a coworker's email signature:

> “Undiagnosed neurodivergence is like being handed a video game that has been set to hard mode, but having people tell you over and over "it's on easy, why do you keep dying? " Diagnosis is learning the game is on hard mode. It doesn't make it easier, but you can strategize.”

[sfink]

I agree completely with this comment, though most often I see it for ADHD. It's a level of nuance that people don't seem to be able to handle, though. People want to be on either the "just suck it up, losers" side or the "the duty of society is to make sure nothing is ever hard for anybody" side. It pisses me off to see people take advantage of the accommodations that are needed by some, and saddens me when people who legitimately need accommodation for some things end up depending on it for everything.

It would be nice if there were objective tests that said exactly where someone is, but those are both impossible and would be subverted even if they were possible.

[growingkittens]

There will always be humans who take advantage of a system, that is not in question.

Believing that "too many" autistic people are using it as an excuse - an entire category of people - is bigotry.

[spicyusername]

I never said autism was an excuse not to deal with life.

I did say that it is common for people to see themselves in the descriptions of many psychiatric disorders, because many of the symptoms are experiences that most people can relate to, in some form or another, and then use that as a vehicle to avoid enduring some of life's necessary suffering.