Modern day autism stigma

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Autism had the ret*d stigma. That is why in 1981 Lorna Wing proposed The Aspergers disorder diagnosis. Her idea was if you don’t call “high functioning” Autism, Autism parents would more readily seek an ASD diagnoses.

As much as we abhor the Rain Man stereotype today that 1988 movie was groundbreaking in it’s time and humanized Autistics to a degree.

In the early 90’s Wing’s proposal was adopted. What the members of the DSM who adopted Wing’s proposal could not have anticipated was the widespread adaptation of the Internet and how that tool would allow people to find each other. Still as we entered the 2010s the ret*d stigma was prevalent. A combination of the nuerodiversity movement and helicopter/snowplow parenting led to the Autistics have superpowers stereotype which has gained widespread currency.

Autism as a made for profit plague gained a lot of currency in the late 2000’s. Through the efforts of scientists and the neurodiversity movement it went underground but did not go away and has come roaring back with RFK Jr.

As far as the mass shooter stereotype goes that emerged in 2012 with rumors that turned out to be true that the suspect in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was Autistic. Since then defense attorneys have widely adopted the “autism defense” in an attempt to lower sentences. The good news is starting at the time of Sandy Hook both the anti neurodiversity movement and neurodiversity movement both have decried the stereotype. The autism defense has largely failed and autistics as mass shooters is not part of public discussions. While this has been a lot better then I feared I have to wonder what unspoken beliefs that autistics are dangerous have had on not obvious policies.

Aspergers was meant to describe Autistics who had no language delays and with average to above average intelligence. When the diagnosis was subsumed into the Autism Spectrum diagnosis it moved from a medical term to a colloquial one. This means Aspergers means whatever people want it to mean. Today it means socially awkward genius. The Aspie supremacists got what they wanted.

As far as people who identify as Aspie are Nazi’s stereotype I agree that is mostly a within the Autistic community controversy. Up until 2018 it was believed Hans Asperger was subtly working within the system to help Autistics. That year a journal article and a book by two historians with expertise in that time and place concluded that Hans Asperger while not a full fledged Nazi was complicit in the Nazi euthanasia program against disabled children. He did what he did to keep his career. For how Wrong Planet members reacted to the historians work in 2018 see this thread.

We have gone from the non human ret*d stigmas to a whole bunch of often conflicting harmful stereotypes including ret*d. While we are in an overall better place then 20 years ago the current situation is a hot mess.

As an Aspie I don't call myself a genius. I'm just a socially awkward bag of nerves.

When I first watched Rain Man I actually considered him lower-functioning, or at least moderate-functioning. But not high-functioning.
High-functioning is based more on how a person's social and self-care skills have developed, not so much intelligence. Usually high-functioning autistics (formally known as Asperger's syndrome) are more or less quirky individuals. This is not to say we don't have their own challenges, because we do. But we're just more complex and harder to diagnose.

I don't appreciate being called a "superior". But when you had no speech delays in childhood and you are more socially skilled than the autism criteria typically describes us as, it's just difficult to understand how you are positioned on the spectrum with the majority of autistic people who sit around the moderate-functioning area.

Autism is too complicated for the average person to understand.

It isn't a useful label like Down's Syndrome, in which everyone with it shares a number of similarities.

Most people have their own issues to deal with and rarely have the time to figure it out.

I was diagnosed about 20 years ago. I can't actually remember which term was used, beyond 'severe functional impairment'. I no longer have the bit of paper. But that was at the end of a reasonably stringent (though flawed) diagnostic process.

The diagnostic process these days seems significantly less stringent. In fact the 'walk in, walk out' that I have sometimes seen described seems to me... not a diagnostic process.

Perhaps paradoxically, in my opinion this has contributed to social stigma. Autism functions in some spaces more like a cultural label than a medical diagnosis, and it's been drawn into issues of personal politics and self-expression, and it can feel weirdly fraught or like weirdly contested ground.

I think the arbitrariness of the label has created space for confusion and distorted representation. As other people have mentioned, 'being on the spectrum' is sometimes understood these days as simply a failure to cope in modern society, or poor social development (which is rife due to various societal factors), or social awkwardness or anxiety.

I don't think those things should be stigmatised either, but the extent to which they've been conflated with autism as a diagnosis has been profoundly unhelpful, in my opinion.

This is a site where must members are supposed to be autistic. Still people are all over the place here in this thread with their different personal theories about Asperger vs Autism, high and low function etc. How are members of the general public supposed to know what autism is?

I can't remember where this quote came from (might have been a Twitter post, or someone's website), but hopefully it will give you an idea of what I mean by modern-day stigma:

"Autistic adults may be nonspeaking but they are not “non-verbal”.
Excited whoops, contented sighs, spontaneous laughter and echolalic emulation are just some of the
rich language my neurokin draw on, even when they don’t use mouth words."

And there's also this one from the blurb of a book:

"Learn to: 1- Eliminate harmful stereotypes from your thinking..."
Perfectly reasonable, but then the description of the author says:
"She always drives the speed limit and loves reading the dictionary in her spare time."

And please don't get me started on the private clinic who renamed "autism diagnosis" to "collaborative autistic identification". The book they wrote on it also has a "statement of privilege".

A while back I listened to a BBC podcast about "auti-gender".