this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Autism
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I see little real value in diagnosis or doctors in general. That stems from my personal harsh reality of experiencing first hand the real limits and incompetency of current medicine. Go start having serious spinal issues that are not strait forward, and you will watch the house of cards fall apart.
Ultimately, none of us are like flags in the register if a computer; some binary state. We are all a spectrum. That applies to all things in life. You may be shifted strongly in one direction or another, but most of us fall somewhere close to the median.
I think a lot of people fail to understand that we all have the tendencies and mechanisms present for all disorders, baring schizophrenia. Labeling anything a disorder only means that whatever behavior is causing you distress and harm in a meaningful way. Just by asking if you have this issue is itself an admission of distress and you altered your day to go to the doctor, so you've already had it technically qualify as a disorder.
IMO, where possible, take the meds and see if it helps you in some tangible way. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. What I'm saying is the threshold for disorder is ridiculously blurry and rather meaningless. When stigmatized, it is outright harmful. For me it is largely a choice and a comfort zone. Maybe that is just my bias. I do not test as autistic. Even as a kid, I had the Machiavellian awareness to become whatever I wanted and bend a test to my desired outcome.
On the other hand, recognizing that certain tendencies can be detrimental to both yourself and those around you can be key to actually getting help changing or managing them.
I do agree that we should be careful with how we label it, though. There is a difference between “this is hurting you” and “something’s wrong with you”.
To this day, I can’t stand being asked “are you ok?”
I like to think of it as a large list of granular, contextual rpg stats.
"You get an average 6 for concentration while in a quiet room between 15-20 deg c. Assuming you've not taken more than 10 points of psychic damage in the last 3 hours and are well rested."
They are, in theory, comparing your scores in a set of somewhat defined contexts to see if , overall, it's causing you problems that might be helped in someway by a treatment that has worked for other people who have similar scores in the same set of criteria.
That sentence being so full of caveats is why I think diagnosis is hard for this sort of thing.
Our health, in all aspects, is in our own hands.
Finding a psychiatrist, general practitioner, oncologist, etc, who understands this and is interested in having a professional working relationship with their patients is the key to receiving tangible medicinal and therapeutic benefit from their expertise. The dehumanization and indignity common in that process isn't talked about enough and we're right to call attention to it and demand better.
There's a whole separate conversation about the industry of healthcare hidden in the subtext here (and so much more so if you're in the United States) but the principal is the same regardless. Expert diagnosticians can provide immense value when given appropriate tools and the space to use them. Capitalization and Industrialization mandate standardization which leaves little room for complex problem solving and edge cases.
I'm not arguing this excuses the constant malpractice. It doesn't because it can't. It can provide a framework for understanding and fighting back against its normalization though and I've found that helpful. At least in conversation.
Another aspect of this that I don't think is reducible in the same way is our proclivity for taxonomic coherence. I think it's one of our species' better qualities and that we let it drive us to premature conclusions about the rightness of the models we construct. The DSM is no exception. An effort may be well intentioned and still fall into the same traps and hurdles that bias and ego litter about. I'm not an anthropologist or historian but I have a pet theory that this phenomenon is also the root of delusion and dogma. We're adept at self-deception en masse. Doubly so when protecting our perceived identities to avoid social shame.