884
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
884 points (98.7% liked)
News
23397 readers
4473 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I might go a level deeper and argue that the formal education process requires a degree of attention and focus that lots of kids don't have. The "autism" diagnosis and subsequent treatment is more about fitting round kids into square holes than it is treating an actual mental disorder.
I can say from personal experience that Adderall helped me study even without ADD. Its a performance enhancing drug, of sorts. And if landing a diagnosis means giving your kids a chemical edge on the next state exam, then more parents are going to discover their children have a problem.
I might take this one step deeper and assert that the real problem we're attempting to medicate isn't autism, its poverty. The underlying fear of an autistic diagnosis is that the child won't grow up to be self-sufficient. The drugs (whether they're necessary or simply a competitive edge) are intended to turn children into the successful mindless drones who are capable of churning mechanically through rote exercises that the school system / workforce demands of them.
Its possible that this is entirely due to a survivorship bias. Kids with autism are considered "salvageable" in an age where drowning the weakest of six children in the bath tube because they're dead weight on the family income is no longer consider practical (fewer kids) or acceptable (surveillance state).
Also possible that autism - like a number of other disorders - is linked to aging mothers or sunlight deficiency or toxic food/water/air in a heavily industrial society.
Autism could arguably even be a kind-of beneficial mutation - the result of increasingly smart people having increasingly more mentally adapt babies with mental talents the rest of us dumb-dumbs only see as a handicap, because we're trying to fit them into those aforementioned square holes.
Okay, but that seems to be more prevalent now than it used to be. Is it really more prevalent? Or maybe the way we teach things has changed, leading to worse outcomes? Full disclosure: I was formally diagnosed with ASD in my later 30s; Asperger's didn't even exist as a diagnosis until after I had graduated from public schools. I had a very hard time focusing in all of my classes.
I know that there's a strong link between trisomy-23 (Downs Syndrome) and older mothers, but I hadn't heard of other genetic issues. I'm not disputing it, just saying I wasn't aware of them.
It is absolutely a handicap. This is undeniable. It's a handicap because it hinders your ability to interact appropriately with the world. I have greatly reduced empathy and communication ability; I can usually guess how people are feeling, but I don't really feel it in the way that most people say they do, and I don't really feel much of my own emotions. I can't just power through shit like some people can either; I'll sometimes go into complete shutdown when there's too much going on, things that most people have no issues with. There's a lot more, really. But trust me, it's a handicap in dealing with life.
Our education system has grown more rigid, more test-centric, and more exhausting under iterative attempts at reform. I'm not even speaking to "worse outcomes" so much as maladaptation. Kids with ADD are going to be more prone to exhibit symptoms in an environment that buckles them down and compels them to concentrate on singular tasks for longer amounts of time.
There's a number of physical and psychological correlations but not a ton of causation. So its mostly a conjecture.
I've heard different takes on this from different people. And I've seen at least a few people horrified at the idea of any kind of change in their condition, for fear of it taking away something fundamental about them.
So... idk. I definitely understand wanting relief from a handicap. But I've also heard people describe the tunnel vision and detachment as comparable to the deep immersion one gets in a state of flow.