alarajrogers: unknought:abcsofadhd:yurioboi:Please stop with this. Disorder is not a dirty word. Dis
alarajrogers: unknought:abcsofadhd:yurioboi:Please stop with this. Disorder is not a dirty word. Disabled is not a dirty word. There is a literal difference in an autistic brain vs an allistic brain. My autism affects stuff that doesnt do with modes of production (ex: my social life). I’m sorry but I would still be autistic and I would still struggle w/ daily life in a non-capitlistic society. The difference would be that that society would HOPEFULLY be better equipped with an infrastructure that would better protect ALL disabled people and help them thrive on an equitable basis. That does not NEGATE a disability nor the lived experience of disabled people. Capitalism exacerbates the affect of disability, but it is not the deciding factor in determining what a disorder or disability is. I would like to clarify I did not mention ADHD/ADD as I have done research but I am not a doctor nor am I add/ADHD and I didnt want to trample anyone’s words.Do better. Lemme speak as an ADHDer.Executive dysfunction would still be an issue, capitalism, or not.I’ve struggled to get myself to eat, go to the bathroom when I needed to pee real bad (till my stomach actually hurt).. or my chaotic emotions.Capitalism or not, they would still be an issue. Several points in various directions:I don’t think “capitalism” is really the most useful way to frame these sorts of discussions. Plenty of non-capitalist societies have been shitty to neurodivergent people in various ways. People aren’t generally trying to say that e.g. feudal Europe was a paradise of acceptance of neurodiversity, but rather trying to talk about what things would be like in their preferred society. Framing it in terms of capitalism versus not-capitalism discourages thinking about what features in particular this preferred society would have and how they would produce a difference in our understanding of autism and ADHD.Many of the most undeniably unpleasant symptoms of autism and ADHD look an awful lot like trauma symptoms, and growing up with autism or ADHD is certainly traumatizing for a lot of people. Rejection-sensitive dysphoria as a symptom of ADHD is an especially compelling example to me. Maybe there is some underlying neural mechanism which causes difficulties with focus and attention and also makes you especially sensitive to rejection and criticism, but it seems more plausible to me that the latter is an effect of growing up unable to meet the expectations of authority figures and peers. I think it’s not unreasonable to imagine that in a better world, rejection-sensitive dysphoria would not be a symptom of ADHD.It is nevertheless the case that regardless of how you change society, many people with ADHD and autism will struggle with things that are easy for neurotypical people and will suffer in ways that neurotypical people do not.There is a lot of variation among people with ADHD and autism, and some people could benefit more from societal changes than others. This does not correspond in any neat way to how “high-functioning” someone is in the present system.Even for differences that are bad and would still be bad under any external circumstances, it’s still worth questioning whether “disorder” is a good way to think about them. I can’t carry a tune or run a marathon or consistently remember to eat lunch, but only the last of those is seen as disordered. All of those are things that it would be nice to be able to do, but there seems to be a sense in which only one of them is considered something wrong with me. Is that a helpful way to think about things? I’m not sure, but I think it might not be. Yeah, if you think about it, there’s a lot of shit we accept as “people just can’t do that” that we don’t understand as disabilities, just, people can’t do that. And when someone comes along who can, they’re seen as amazing. We aren’t all pathetic weaklings because one little boy in Germany was born with superhuman strength. I’m going to use autism and allism as my examples for this because I’m autistic so it’s what I know, but this kind of thing could probably be done with most neurotypes.If we lived in a world where autism was the default, we might see allistics as disabled because of their terrible dependence on other people. They can’t go to the movies without another human being! They can’t go to a restaurant by themselves! Some of them start to mentally collapse after maybe one day of being mostly by themselves. And we might think it’s a normal variation to be able to, say, do complex arithmetic in your head. Steve can throw a dart really well, and Jen is an amazing dog trainer, and Bob can compute the square of any number you ask him, instantly. That’s all normal. Whereas Lisa, who can manage a social web of over 100 people, or Craig, who can call total strangers on the phone and try to sell them things, are amazing savant-like talents. Humans can’t do that kind of thing! If autism was the default, we might have op-eds about having to monitor allistics because they are inherently dishonest and untrustworthy – because they’re better at lying than autistic people are. We might have cop shows where the allistic cop is considered amazing because his unusual brain allows him to figure out when people are lying to him. Maybe we consider it a mental disorder that allistics cannot stop reading things into tone. The love of their life can say “I love you” but if they say it in a monotone, the allistic won’t believe it. Maybe we consider it a disability that they’re always assuming people said things they didn’t actually say, that they read motives into other people’s speech that aren’t there. Allistics suffer from a delusion of mind-reading, often expressed as a paranoid belief that other people are disrespecting them, lying to them, or insulting them, by wildly misinterpreting what people say. Also, allistics can’t stand up for their own beliefs! They will be swayed into thinking whatever their friend group tells them to think, easily! Then the allistic guy who stands strong in his opinions points out that that’s bullshit, he’s allistic and he doesn’t do that, but we dismiss him because he’s high-functioning allistic, he doesn’t count.What if it’s considered a perfectly normal thing that of course loud noises are painful, of course it’s nearly impossible to follow a conversation if everyone is talking, of course people can’t modulate their tone and keep their voices down without extensive training. And then here comes this guy who can control his tone of voice and he can follow a conversation with one person in a crowded room full of talking people and he doesn’t scream and drop to the ground when there’s a loud noise. But he can’t hear when the light bulbs are about to go dead! Yeah, ok, he’s got some great advantages with what he can hear, but it’s obvious that his allism has made him partially deaf.Allistics might have to mask and pretend they’re autistic. They might suffer emotional trauma because their needs are constantly being ignored and people are blowing them off because their need for constant companionship is just weird and stupid, man, just learn to love yourself and your own company! Have you tried just not feeling lonely? It’s all in your head. I don’t get lonely if I spend three or four days without talking to any of my friends, so why do you? They keep hearing conversations no one is having and it’s stressful because no one understands that they hear a secret language other people don’t speak. Maybe they’re treated as if they have a variant of schizophrenia because they read meaning into vocal tone. So… yes. There are a lot of aspects of autism that make us less able to function in the world, and we’d always be unable to function in those ways regardless of what kind of society we lived in. But in a society where we were the default, those inabilities wouldn’t be disabilities. They’d be normalized, and the abilities we have that generally allistics don’t would be seen as default human abilities, and allistic abilities that we don’t have would be seen as strange, superhuman and othering, whereas allistic needs that we don’t have would be seen as disabilities. There are neurotypes where it’s really, really hard not to see it as a disability. I can’t honestly see any point to depression. That’s a disease. No matter what kind of society you had, depression would be bad. High levels of constant anxiety would always be bad. Maybe in a better world, those conditions wouldn’t exist, maybe they are trauma responses. But things like autism and ADHD and schizophrenia and all that, those are a constellation of “things we can do that people without our neurotype can’t” and “things we can’t do that people without our neurotype can”, and the fact that these are seen as disabilities rather than normal human variation like Jessica can’t carry a tune to save her life and Rebecca can’t draw, that is because we live in an ableist society. (Not because we live in a capitalist society. Communism was not better for the disabled of any kind. Feudalism sucked for everyone who wasn’t on top. It’s not our economic system that causes us to suffer, it’s the fact that whatever the social systems in place are, they consider us weird outliers they don’t have to accomodate or accept, rather than perfectly normal variation.) What we want is not a society where the things we can’t do just magically go away or stop being anything anyone cares about doing. What we want is a society where the things we can’t do are seen as a normal thing to be unable to do, like Joe is actually shit at throwing a ball, and Eddie is all thumbs so don’t ask him to do any handyman work, and Lisa can’t modulate her tone, those are all reasonable things that normal human beings might not be able to do. Not disabilities. -- source link