Agreed; in short: any monolithic system will have individuals with natural dispositions transverse to that order, those individuals provide resiliance and novelty but also risk driving decoherence and defection. Yay pluralism.

"You do it in your own post, attributing a defined, binary, thing as "I am somewhere on the spectrum"

"You either have some quantity of illness or you don't."

I'm not sure what kind of argument you are making for (or against?) "binary" symptoms. The DSM-5 clearly lays out the spectrum. There is a conglomerate of effects caused by autism, and where you are on "the spectrum" is determined by how many of the symptoms you have, and their severity.

There is nothing wrong with someone claiming "I'm on the spectrum" if you don't know how or what they were diagnosed with. That language is consistent with the DSM. Unless they admitted to self-diagnosing, it seems wrong to assume someone is lying about their own experience.

"You can't just ascribe some quirky, possibly somewhat anti-social, behavior as being on the spectrum"

Quriky, somewhat anti-social behaviour (in your words) essentially is one of the dialogistic criteria. But nobody would be diagnosed with autism for that alone. Just like how autistic folks usually avoid eye contact. That doesn't mean they ALL avoid eye contact, and it also doesn't mean anyone who avoids eye contact is autistic. It's a wholistic diagnosis. One would need to be experiencing SEVERAL of the symptoms to receive an autism diagnosis. IME, the majority on the spectrum are indeed level 1, and high functioning, even to the point others might question if they are really autistic.

If you take issue with people self-diagnosing, I don't think anyone would disagree. But your combativeness in just discussing the topic kind of looks similar to people who refuse to accept that autism is really a thing ("there were no autisms back in my day" kind of thing).

I both agree and disagree with the over-diagnosis claim. Yes, everyone is suddenly autistic, which lessens the meaning or impact of the term. Also, the DSM 5 reclassifies a good portion of human behavior under the umbrella of ASD, so this is in part driven by the diagnostic model itself. We continue to see rising rates of severe autism in children, which are likely attributable to this reclassification as well as better common understanding of the diagnostic criteria. Presumably, just as many adults either qualify now or would have qualified as children.

At the same time, there’s the neurodiversity movement that seeks to destigmatize and depathologize these diagnoses for both high functioning and more profoundly disabled individuals. Just because you don’t conform to the norm - and ASD is heavily defined in relation to deviation from an underspecified norm - does not make you “mentally ill.” So we have autism as an identity additional to a diagnosis, which I think can be really empowering for people, and also cause confusion and frustration for others. It’s a reclaiming of “disability” from the paternalistic and abusive medical and pseudoscientific practitioners that have been harming autistic people for decades.

I also wish you were not being downvoted. You express some common sentiments and I think your comment adds to the conversation.

> It comes as no surprise that psychiatry, and medicine in general, is suffering from a massive reproducibility crisis.

Psychiatry still hasn't coped with the fact that it spent most of the 20th century taking Freud seriously. More recently, it still hasn't figured out a way to repudiate the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic in the 80s. The people who were involved are literally still working, and have moved on to Facilitated Communication in severe autism, Gender Identity, and are still pushing around the fraud of Multiple Personality Disorder. Literally the same people involved in all of them, and now their children. [edit: forgot about one of the most important, Recovered Memory Syndrome]

There's just no scientific method in most of psychology, it's simply guru-led systemic theories delivered mostly (but often entirely) by a single person who is licensing practitioners. What comes along with that is a complete inability for any of these theories to die. They just eventually become unpopular and unprofitable, and people jump onto the next thing.

The psychopharmacological revolution has complicated this even more, because now there are billions of dollars wrapped up in it. The only advantage to SSRIs and the new generation of knockoffs was that they didn't cause tardive dyskinesia, there was never any statistical evidence that they performed any better than the previous drugs. And in the case of the previous drugs, they weren't ever shown to have much of an effect other than quieting down patients. They were all based on the wackjob theory that people having epileptic seizures suddenly became sane, and were one of the ways of inducing a seizure-like state, along with freezing baths, saline injections, electrocution, etc. All of the pioneers were also enthusiastic lobotomists.

How can we say that these new tactics are medicine or science when the statistics on mental illness keep getting worse?

>In the 1990s we drugged kids (especially young boys) who weren't able to sit still with ADHD medication

This never happened. We did not overprescribe Ritalin.

What actually happened, is uninformed people like you with no actual evidence spread FUD about how giving kids well understood medicine was "bad" and the direct result of that was people like me, my sister, and my brother who all had stereotypical ADHD symptoms that we inherited from our stereotypically ADHD parents were tested and rejected an ADHD diagnosis by untrained school guidance counselors terrified of something that wasn't happening.

Each of us spent the next 30 years utterly failing to thrive due to struggling with these symptoms, and experienced immense suffering from normal life things. We all have finally gotten real diagnosis, and some of us are getting real treatment, and we are so much better off now and able to function, and we are even able to pass those learnings back up the chain to our parents.

A huge part of the "ADHD Epidemic" right now is the fact that a couple million people with clear ADHD symptoms were passed over by people who were supposed to be helping them due to the exact FUD you are spreading now.

>This generation it's autism, and it's likely over-diagnosed just as much as ADHD.

ADHD is not overdiagnosed. Autism is not overdiagnosed. Provide any evidence at all to support your shit claims.

If someone with just a whiff of autism struggle gets diagnosed as autism, that's fine, and they will be explained how they might not even need significant support, and they don't really get any treatment at all. For people with gentle autism like that, it's mostly just about understanding why you are the way you are. "Oh, that's why I <X>". And you suddenly have a framework and vocabulary to better explain the struggles you have and the problems you experience, and a way to bond with people who have similar difficulties, and a way to think about your own brain that can help you lessen the negative impact of being different.

>It comes as no surprise that psychiatry, and medicine in general, is suffering from a massive reproducibility crisis.

There is ZERO reproducibility crisis in ADHD science, and amphetamine based ADHD medications are some of the most well supported, scientifically, medicine we have full stop. You can literally measure physiological brain differences of people with ADHD, and if you give a kid with ADHD a stimulant medication for their life, those measurable differences go away

If you give ADHD people stimulants, all cause mortality decreases. They become statistically better drivers, which is something that ADHD people are statistically worse than average at. You lower all forms of addiction and substance abuse, because ADHD people struggle with self medicating and abusing substances as a rule. Notably, all the good Ritalin does for people who struggle with ADHD is not duplicated in people who do not have ADHD. People who take unprescribed Ritalin as a "study drug" have worse outcomes than people who take it for actual ADHD.

Giving kids with ADHD stimulants reduces bone fractures and STDs!

>You either have some quantity of illness or you don't.

This is stupid. Some people with bad eyesight need glasses to do normal day to day things while others don't, or only need glasses for reading, but both are diagnosed nearsighted

>Much to the disservice of people suffering from the condition.

Stop talking for me, you are doing an atrocious job of it.

>It's not anti-science to call into question the amount of bunk, p-hacked, corporate funded garbage coming out of even the highest tier of medical grade journals.

It is entirely antiscience to demonstrably have no clue what you are talking about and yet claim the experts are wrong. That is literally antiscience. There's no p-hacking in ADHD science. There's no corporate funded garbage for ADHD. Ritalin is old and cheap and no longer patent protected.

>If anything, your own post demonstrates the anti-scientific (pop-sci) instagramification of mental illness.

How dare you thumb your nose at kids self diagnosing on tiktok (not instagram, pay attention) as "pop-sci" when you yourself know only reactionary FUD. Shame on you. Educate yourself.