I'm curious how that could work. That peaks my interest because I've known people who have autism and seem great at socializing. I don't have autism, but I'm very socially awkward, and if autistic people can do that I find it inspirational for my own socializing journey.

A podcaster on Radio Free Totebag casually said it, and idk if it was just as a passing joke, or if they were speaking factually. They mentioned a therapist not liking that they still say they're autistic when it's an old diagnosis.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]
    ·
    10 months ago

    This is untrue.

    I'm going to explain autism and why you can't cure it or fix it by socialising but please don't take it as me trying to drag you or anything, it's just for educational purposes and to raise awareness.

    So first off, autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder. The way that the autistic brain develops is fundamentally different to that of an allistic person (a person who is not autistic.)

    Because of the differences in the brain, there is no diet or supplement or medication or behavioural exposure that can cure autism.

    Autism is often seen from an outsider perspective as people who are socially awkward, who miss cues, who comes off as rude or arrogant, and who are very fixated on routines/rituals/narrow interests.

    While this is generally true, it's not a complete picture. If we take asthma as an analogy, from the outside it looks like a person who is often breathless or who is unfit. But that doesn't capture the internal experience of asthma - one where your airways become inflamed and restricted, making it difficult if not downright impossible to get enough air into your lungs.

    A person who has lost their breath can stop and regulate their breathing to address the issue. A person who is having an asthma attack will also be breathless but regulating your breathing has a very limited impact on the situation and it's not something that can be treated or fixed simply by learning how to breathe differently. In a similar way, if you understand autism simply as a condition that is characterised by social awkwardness then it's easy to presume that exposure therapy or coaching can fix the social awkwardness and thus cure the underlying condition.

    The reality is that autism is a spectrum disorder, meaning that it is like an umbrella term for a collection of conditions that are interrelated and which present differently in different people. In diagnostic criteria autism is characterised by difficulties with socialising such as communication, reciprocity, and initiating and/or sustaining social contact as well as having repetitive behaviours, narrow interests that are excessive, and responses to sensory input being either markedly lower than typical or markedly higher (very often it's a combination).

    Socialising can give autistic people the opportunity to develop their communication skills but it doesn't address the underlying impairment with regards to communication, and even if it did that wouldn't be sufficient to eliminate all the other parts of the condition.

    Think of it like a person who has profound hearing loss - if they are exposed to behavioural supports and therapy through a speech pathologist, especially from a young age when the brain is developing all those connections for language, then they can develop the skills to speak although due to their disability they have to work a lot harder to compensate and they are always going to experience an atypical degree of difficulty in speaking. That's a lot like how it is for autistic people with regards to socialising.

    (I've stuck to the diagnostic definition of autism here for the sake of simplicity and I have also avoided the discussion on the double-empathy problem and its implications for autistic communication because this is meant to be a 101, not a deep exploration of autism so don't take this as a personal statement of position or anything.)

      • ReadFanon [any, any]
        ·
        10 months ago

        I partially agree with you on this. I think you're right that there are probably developmental routes that the human brain can take.

        My point of disagreement basically stems from my objection to the social model of disability, which I think you are either consciously drawing upon as influence or which you've arrived at as a concept independently, and my counterargument to this is that a disability is still going to cause impairment to the person regardless of the social context; you can take a person with paraplegia out into the woods, far away from society but their legs still aren't going to function properly.

        Similarly, an autistic person might have very restricted eating habits (super common) and this is likely going to have health implications for the autistic person whether they're living in New York or if they're foraging for berries in the wilderness. A more personal example here is that I am diagnosed with catatonia due to autism and it's a pretty settled matter - I am responsive to treatment and diagnostic probes that confirm that it's catatonia to the exclusion of virtually any other condition. In this example, my particular flavour of autism is itself inherently disabling and although radical changes to how society functions and sets its expectations would improve my life, I'm still going to suffer from debilitating bouts of catatonia regardless.

        Imo the same kinds of things can be said for ADHD and executive dysfunction, the overrepresentation in addiction stats, the associated ODD cluster of behaviours etc. although this topic is a huge discussion in itself.

        (So there's something of a neurodivergent civil war being waged in the discourse of late and I guess I'm tiptoeing around this as best I can in my comments because I don't want to see a split occuring within the neurodivergent community here on Hexbear as I don't believe that it's either necessary or productive. But that means I'm constantly finding myself at odds talking about this stuff because I'm mediating tensions between the mainstream experience of autism from the outside looking in, the DSM and ICD diagnostic criteria - which are pretty lopsided and woeful in their own right, and my own understanding and personal experience of autism along with what I have learned from leaders in the autistic advocacy movement. Apologies in advance if I'm coming off as a bit evasive in what I have said above - all of this stuff is very fraught at the moment.)