re: #228 wrenchwench

We need to step back and discuss how we have been trained to look at ourselves (humans.)

Creationism still taints the thinking of academics and lay people.

There is this creationist concept that humans are all alike, all created “perfect”.

That there is a single thing that is called a “normal human”.

But we know we as a species are a polyglot of evolutionary swerves, of out-breeding with our closest cousins in the genus Homo.

As a population we can be sorted into groups but those sortings are no more definitive than the next architecture of sortings, or the next, or the next.

I’m thinking psychiatry and psychology are slowly making their way out of the fog of our creationist past, and acknowledging that “human” is a collection of traits that extend on spectrums.

And this gets me to autism. What if an autism diagnosis is simply the recognition that we humans have a variety of psychological traits that contribute to how we learn and communicate?

So much of psychology is about drawing lines on a spectrum, to diagnose an alleged disorder from whatever an average (whatever that means) human experiences.

I myself was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder long ago. Who is to say that one person’s anxiousness is another person’s anxiety disorder?

This also relates to the current drug shortages to treat ADHD. Turns out there is an uptick in diagnoses of ADHD, so the demand for Adderall has picked up. But all that means is that prior non-diagnosed cases of ADHD in adults were simply ignored.

Again, I think as a society, and the entire health care industry and professions, are coming to terms about the reality of Homo sapiens, that we all have differing traits on spectrums.

And so it will not surprise me if there are are many girls/women who might have some level of autism, but use the human-evolved capability of masking to cover it, or adapt within their social context. I suspect years from now it will be accepted that many humans have traits that could be classified as minimal autism.