This makes sense. I became a much happier person when I exited high school and realized that I actually could get positive outcomes from being weird. The "Mask" is more like a script imo, and it's good to be able to drop it when needed.
The examples of girls with autism trying to fit in with other girls was sad. I remember in middle school how my nerdy coed friend group got bullied for sitting together at lunch. The guys got called gay and the girls were shunned by other girls. There was a lot of explicit peer group pressure to only associate by gender. Fortunately most people grew out of this by high school.
Personally, I think I tended towards associating with males more often because I enjoyed competitive games (yugioh, magic, etc) and they were more likely to play. I always preferred hobbies with explicit rules to the comparative anarchy of navigating social circles. It's a shame that so many other girls get pressured by family and peers to avoid predominantly male social hobbies. I think they actually help improve self-confidence and create meaningful friendships far more easily for autistic folks than typical sleepovers or gossiping or whatever.
I am older now and go to FNM (Friday Night Magic), mostly, for my son who got me back into it. There are a couple of regulars, one of which is a girl that reminds me a lot of you and the other ladies in this article. When she is concentrating on her turn and play more of her tells come out as she focuses. I try to do two things 1.) Don't make small talk (unless they initiate with something specific) and 2.) Since we it is a card game and there is a pretense not to, I don't make eye contact. She actually talks /lot/ more of I do those two things. The guy in the group has a kind of opposite problem and rambles a lot but his train of thought is funny (genuinely funny/witty) to me and my son so w e don't mind.
Our group is also (super male heavy) but very nice and in a more liberal area. It is a great to get out and be nerdy and give everyone a social thing where everyone has immediate common ground. Age 12-50. It really is cool. Not sure I had much of a point and I had already figured most of this out (we have a niece who is on the spectrum), but.. I didn't realize quite how deep it could go with the practice social things / mask. Being not so great at social things myself I just find it exhausting to do more normal social stuff, but I don't have to practice, I am just an introvert.
I was an uninhibited schizoid when I was in secondary school. Loud, disruptive, annoying, trashed a lot of potential of friendship and acceptance, basked in name-calling. It was probably my most mentally liberated time of my life.
But ever since I left, I wonder if I've learned to conceal these behaviours to maintain the life and career I currently have. So the article kind of unnerves me, leaves me wondering I falling into the same mental traps described. Either that, or maybe I've learned to manage by behaviour in a different way. Self knowledge is a fickle thing.
I'm living in Sweden. The cultural elite and the whole country behaves like a insecure high-school class where everyone is anxiously watching what everyone else is doing, what's 'right' and what's 'out'.
We are extremely conformist.
The topic of immigration and integration is obvious, but also extreme feminism, environmental issues is on the list.
You can self-select yourself away from them. Most people probably don't grow out of that by high school, but then most people aren't worth your time anyway
Years ago I visited Jamaica. When nice local people greeted me, to show they were nice they would say "respect", but with an emphasis on the first syllable, like "REE-spect". That's what I want to say to you for posting this. REspect, mon.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever gotten angry about a downvote.
tinyegg, I think it was an exemplary and inspirational action, and I hope your seed of courage bears fruit. Although it might be practical to add contact info to your profile :)
As a child I rocked back and forth for hours finally stopping at nineteen with a huge amount of effort. I always did it behind closed doors. I was sexual abused and abandoned in my early teens. I came to California to help an AI researcher but ended up as a bio engineer and now a SAHM. The library was my refuge as a kid, no academic parents, no inspiring teachers. Fitting in was and is a huge challenge.
I guess stories of people with autism who are merely socially scared and shy are easier to approach. Meanwhile there are parents who live every day in fear of how the hell can their son or daughter endure when they die.
My daughter was diagnosed severe/non-verbale at age 3. If this woman is able to live a life such as this and able to use the bathroom, have a job, etc I'm hopeful of at least that for my daughter. It gives me hope. But I've met parents of children who are much much worse.
Something must be done to change this narrative that Autism isn't curable. The stigma certainly doesn't help either.
Temple Grandin gives me hope for severely autistic people. She's an amazing example of someone who has done well for herself despite very pronounced deficits and original diagnosis of non-verbal autism.
I'm not very hopeful that it will ever be fully "curable", though maybe I'll be proven wrong. If we could at least medically correct for the overstimulation and hypersensitivity aspects, it would be such a huge win. I strongly believe the most negative and impairing parts of autism stem from this part. The people who are "merely" socially awkward often hide these aspects or avoid situations that would trigger them (ex: I carry ear plugs on my keychain because street noise or crowds in restaurants can be overwhelming, and I don't do tech conferences any more for the same reason). The more severe amongst us unfortunately usually need more than muffled sound to feel in control.
That said, I do think there are ways of coping, tools, practices, that will make life for autistic people much better going forward. We need to keep researching those just as much a cure or pregnancy-time diagnosis. I hope things do get better for both you and your daughter.
You may want to try switching to non-scented soaps, laundry detergent and cleaners. Do you feel or have you been told she has sensory processing disorder? Another thing to try is talking to her, a lot. If you have a wife who works have her stay at home and work with your daughter on meeting milestones. Get whole genome sequencing done. See if she has any issues with methylation etc. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4203003/
Give her Dha and a multivitamin with more bioavailable forms of each vitamin or a whole food vitamin. My daughter will take these along with greens and fruit in smoothie form. Basically, do everything you can.
> Something must be done to change this narrative that Autism isn't curable.
As an autistic person I don't think it's curable, nor do I think it's something that I would want cured. The impression I get is that my brain is just wired differently from allistic people, 'curing' me would basically mean replacing me with someone else.
I wonder if it's because we're afraid of what 'cured' means. I know to some people who are mild on the spectrum their autism could be a source of strength and wonder. I would be remiss to say that if my daughter can tend to herself and lead an enriched life that to me is 'cured' she could still be autistic but she could talk and if someone touched her inappropriately or if she was in pain she'd be able to tell me... that to me be is at least in a step in the right direction.
Visit a group home and it's one of the hardest areas to see. Young autistic adults incessantly masterbating, covered in bruises, unable to use a bathroom etc. Yet they are still intelligent and are self-aware. That to me is the hardest pill to swallow.
Right now treatments are being tested with umbilical cord tissue originated stem cells that are extremely promising. My daughter participated at one study at Duke and went from 0 words to a little over 100. Her ATEC score dropped from 120+ to around 70. However I fear this valuable research will die if we start normalizing autism or other mental illness as something we just 'deal with'
I've read Neurotribes and I can understand the argument but there's rehabilitation and I think the metaphor around a prosthesis is very accurate.
Strength and wonder? That's a very odd description. More like, it's the only way we know how to interpret ourselves, our world, our relationships. It's not the easiest, but for those of us that have been able to find meaning and value through this interpretation... why would we give that up just to make other people feel more comfortable around us? We're not hurting anyone. That's why many adults who function decently don't want to be cured.
Of course we support medical research and treatment to improve functioning, especially for severe cases. That's not what a cure is though. A cure is becoming a fundamentally a different person. Or if some folks get their wish, it's pre-natal detection of autism so parents can prevent autistics from being born at all. We don't want to normalize autism to prevent treatment, we want to normalize it enough so that we don't get written off as valueless people not worthy of being born.
The message of "mitigating not curing" autism comes from adults who have been through really bad attempts at cures (usually marketed to their parents). Some young adults with autism I knew had undergone "applied behavior analysis" that manifested as corporal punishment (being squirted in the eyes with a water bottle; being denied access to the bathroom; being beaten with a stick; having drugs hidden in food) that are completely unacceptable for a child.
I truly believe that every person with autism would vastly prefer being able to live independently. Science needs to find a "mechanism of action" for autism before it would be possible to find a "cure", which means people with autism being subjected to medical research. (Have you ever tried to get a person with autism to lie still in a MRI?) In the meantime, the best standard of care is to teach strategies to help them live as independent a life as possible -- and to teach these strategies in a caring and humane way.
For what it's worth, psychiatrists are doctors, and therefore covered under the single-payer health care in Canada. If you live in the United States, consider whether moving north could be beneficial for your daughter. (If she has friends at school, though, I would avoid moving her.)
Canada denies families with Autism :( already looked into it. The system here pushes ABA hare. Very hard. People swear by it. But when I saw my daughter gets stressed and count to 10 touches her eyes and ears and says random strings of whatever she can think of because she thinks someone wants to hear something... I pulled her out literally last month. Autism is just scary. Literally I cannot go to a store with her. I've tried to do an MRI I know... I even participated in a big research study with SCTs.
I hope we can find treatments and the right set of accomodations.
A thing I heard is that you can't cure many mental illnesses, much like you often can't cure a missing limb. But if you find the right prosthetic your life can become much better.
I hope we can find this for more and more people on the spectrum.
The way it looks now Autism isn't curable, sort of like schizophrenia, but an even deeper ingrained part the person. As far as i understand even if we could, "cutting" it out or modifying it would change the personality drastically.
Its very manageable though, and depending on where on the spectrum you are there still a chance for a completely normal life.
I think the stigma is strong because the people that are "highly functional" enough to hide it, will. No one at my workplace knows that i have it and just think im a tad weird. I think i prefer not to tell anyone since it might make colleagues doubt my performance and abilities, or make it harder for me getting job next time.
I am male, but I can totally relate. I was diagnosed with (relatively mild) autism spectrum disorder last year at the age of 37. I kind of suspected for a long time, but somehow several psychiatrists and psychologists managed to miss it.
I wish I had gotten that diagnosis earlier, because it makes it a lot easier to explain to people how I am different.
I am not sure if I would call it covering it up, but a lot of my social skills are the result of a very conscious cognitive learning process. By now it is fairly automatic, but on a not-so-good day I tend to avoid eye contact and communication in general. Writing, strangely is much, much easier. On the upside, I managed to - partly - turn this to my advantage by making a point of being explicitly polite to people.
I'm very similar to you, got diagnosed early 30's, now 38. Still haven't gotten the hang of the eye-contact thing, I know I basically avoid eye-contact, it's not a conscious thing. I have to force myself to make eye contact and always feels weird to do. As far as I understand the lack of eye contact is an issue for allistic people so I try to remember, but I usually fail.
It might seem somewhat ironic for a borderline-autist, but I find it kind of comforting that I am not the only one with this condition.
To me, eye contact gets harder if I have to focus. Greeting people or answering simple tech-support questions is not a big deal, but when I have to explain - or listen to! - something moderately complex, eye contact becomes difficult.
I suspect the phenomenon is related to the Clippy-disaster with MS Office; recognizing faces takes a lot of brain power, and the human brain allocates a significant chunk to that specific task (at least that is what a neurologist once told me).
Somebody wrote a Master's thesis or Ph.D. thesis in psychology about why Clippy was hated so much, and it was basically because face-like things at the margin of our field of vision take up a lot of "bandwidth" in the brain and thus distract from other things.
I think knowing the symptoms of autism and such can help you explain at least to yourself how you're different; I think that peace of mind and acceptance is the most important. I'm fairly sure I'm somewhere on the spectrum too, but it's mild and I'm managing fine. I'm afraid I'd turn it into a victim complex if I were to get a diagnosis.
> I'm fairly sure I'm somewhere on the spectrum too, but it's mild and I'm managing fine
I am happy for you, then. As long as it does not make you unhappy, there is no need to put a label on it.
> I'm afraid I'd turn it into a victim complex if I were to get a diagnosis.
To me, it was bit of a relief, actually. It means that - to a degree - I can be more comfortable with who I am rather than try to be somebody I am not.
OTOH, I have been suffering from a recurring depression that I now suspect is intimately intertwined with my condition.
I have the label of autism, but I struggle to communicate exactly what (if any) accommodations I could be asking for at work. Are there any resources you've found useful for this?
My major problem in the workplace is my recurring depression. Last year my boss suggested I reduce my workload and go from a 40 hour week to a 30 hour week (with a proportionate pay cut). That has been a big, positive change for me. I kind of miss the money, but all in all, I think it was worth it. I am not sure that is a helpful answer, though. :(
Both my kids are aspie. My son was diagnosed when he was seven because of some speech delay when he was younger and social awkwardness.
My daughter was diagnosed at sixteen after two years of missed school and barely leaving the house due to incredibly high anxiety. Oh, and the first time she was assessed eighteen months prior she was only "borderline" aspie even though in retrospect she has been effected much more profoundly. (She also had a similar speech delay when she was younger too, btw.)
We need to get a lot better at recognising the condition in girls, as we have with boys.
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If you are wanting to know more about autism in all its flavours, google for just about anything by Tony Attwood. In more recent years he has been concentrating more on autism in women, so adding "women" to your search terms will surface specific material in that regard.
I’ve found https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com to be an amazing resource for improving interpersonal skills. Folks in the spectrum may also appreciate reading the content there. And asking for help when a situation just seems unfathomable.
Anybody know any stories or resources about autistic motherhood? It strikes me that being a mother with autism could be a challenge, for example when it comes to 'bonding' with the baby. Yet I haven't seen it discussed anywhere.
The internet does appear to have some resources. I can't vouch for their quality, having just used a search engine, but they're at least a starting point:
A friend of a friend spoke about getting pregnant and having a baby. For the entire duration up until the baby's birth, she worried because she didn't have any strong feelings. The moment the baby was delivered, something inside her said "This! This is what I was made for!". And then an hour later the feeling passed.
Her kids seem to have automatically adjusted to her condition, being more vocal when they need something, or something is wrong (otherwise she wouldn't know).
The movie "Snow Cake" does a pretty good job describing some of the challenges.
I don't know about any courses, but watching a lot of tv shows especially situational comedies such as Frasier, Seinfeld etc. helped me immensely on reading people.
The facial expressions usually give away the situation. The downside is that you need to constantly read the other parties expressions, and that can get noticed if you're not subtle enough.
It required some energy, but over time you get proficient at it.
Another thing that will help is to find safe topics. Talking about music, girls, sports are the easiest to learn.
My advice would be not to shy away from social interactions. Practice makes perfect.
Some people may inherently be born with an intuition to handle social interactions, but that doesn't mean that you cannot learn it by observing and mimicking.
I guess this is what the article calls as masking. But masking doesn't have to be that painful. i believe people can grow and chance. If you put an honest effort you'll eventually fit into the society.
The way I see it, if it's not something you can just do naturally, you need to apply a more conscious, scientific process to it. There's loads of books on the subject, starting with e.g. Dale Carnegie's classic on what to look for and how to act.
This is interesting. The descriptions in the article also seem to describe what may be identified as social anxiety disorder. I wonder how those two diagnoses differ?
With ASD, social ineptitude doesn't go away when anxiety is sorted out. Autistic people usually have it the other way round: it's their ineptitude that inevitably causes anxiety due to repeated failures.
I’m not a woman but I do this too. It really just came from others’ negative reactions to certain behaviors I would do, which taught me that it’s not acceptable to behave in those ways around “normal” people. (Like some of the women in the article I knew I wasn’t normal but didn’t know why.)
Ironically, I have gotten so good at this that I sometimes get annoyed when a person I am talking to acts “weird”.
I feel “lucky” in that I’m not too far off from normal, whatever that is, on the spectrum. But I still find it exhausting and depressing, like they do. I have also had the feeling that certain friendships and relationships are fake because I act differently to who I am when around those people. I don’t feel that anyone at work really knows me. I don’t think it is worth trying to be yourself at work, even disregarding the spectrum stuff.
The bit about the difficulties with diagnosing autism in women is also interesting. There are many similar situations in regard to mental health, for example women are diagnosed as borderline much more often.
When I was in school I noticed I was off and completely not up to other people's magic sauce - whatever they did that I wasn't able to compete with. As for school it always left me a bit dizzy by cramming in all the subjects and leaving out all the cool details at a pace that just blurred everything for me.
I only got to know fun with people in various subcultures, and the more off people around me were, by looks or by spirits, the less I needed to worry about fitting in and learned to simply enjoy myself.
Until I realized what the actual problem was. Most people tend to make life hard for themselves by needing to fit in and pretending and aspiring. It's okay. Let go and drop your misery and do whatever the hell you happen to think is best.
If you want to build a UFO and take over the world, please go do it. Autism is a terrible name for whatever slight - or not so slight - imbalance of mental traits, and seeing the shit that regular people mutter you're probably better than that anyway - because you wouldn't believe what an autist's mental hygiene is like.
I’m not trying to argue against your premise about fitting in.
I would like to point out that autism is an actual specified condition. Being socially different or feeling inept about social situations does not put you on the autistic spectrum.
In some ways it’s incredibly insulting to imply that any discomfort in social settings is a sign of autism. Not least because is implies that autistic people can’t be capable, extroverted and able in social settings, which they absolutely can be.
A result of articles like this one which describes experiences of people with autism is that many of the readers without autism will attribute some of those adaptation behaviors as an indicator for autism.
It would be nice if the article provided more detail on the actual condition, the tests for it, and how it differs from the common 'i am a human' anxiety. Virtually everyone, men included, has experienced the same things that the article describes as being experienced by women with autism.
I think there is a risk with these sorts of articles that many people will make a lot of unwarranted assumptions about other peoples' abilities and behaviors.
"I do what I want and screw 'em if they don't like it" is great and all, but there are still large parts of life that don't work that way, like workplaces and dating. Having to choose between being oneself and having a career/dating life is still painful and depressing. Casting isolation as a bold act of rebellion and independence in a world full of conformists is just a different shade of camouflage.
Regarding subgroups, I found that they were just as unaccepting, they just have different standards for who/what is in/out.
I think your comment about autism is mistaking the cart for the horse. This happens because people are on the spectrum, not people are autistic because sometimes they don't fit in.
Lastly, I'd just like to mention that I didn't mean to only talk about school or work or situations like that, where there is always going to be some amount of difficulty fitting in. I could also tell that people very close to me, like my parents, thought something was off about me. They later copped to that when I was an adult, as well as their relief that I turned out to live a pretty normal life.
Not necessarily. People with autism tend to score very low in recognizing social expressions for example, lending reason as to why they cannot learn social skills the same as others. Neurotypical people tend to be able to pick this up naturally. From what I remember, an autistic brain has a Lower than normal response when seeing faces.
To some extend. Neurotypical people do this without effort or thinking, it happens "automaticaly". You might even be unaware of the process, you just sorta kinda feel weird or bad after doing whatever caused negative reaction previously. Autistic have to think about situation and memorize it the same way as normal people memorize writers and their books for school.
I've never been diagnosed with autism, and if I am on the spectrum it is only barely, but I'm pretty sure all people experience the "can't fall asleep because thinking about embarrassing social-interaction" phenomenon. What might differentiate neurotypical from autistic people in this regard is the sheer amount of information that they are able to glean from a social interaction. That is, a neurotypical person will remember body language, facial cues, and coded language (e.g. "oh.. that's interesting...") as being significant parts of that social interaction to a greater extent than people on the spectrum.
I don't believe you. Either that or I've never in my life encountered a "neurotypical" child. Figuring out which behaviors are appropriate/inapproriate and changing accordingly, through self awareness and peer feedback, is most of what growing up is. Some people don't outwardly display as much effort, but it requires effort from everyone.
It's not just effort vs no effort. Here's my personal anecdote with autism.
Every conversation I have I run every input someone says through a decision tree to determine what the appropriate response is. I do this in my conscious mind. I didn't realize this wasn't normal until much later in life.
Unless you're displaying a caricature of "happy" or "sad" emotional expressions I have no idea what your emotional state is. I'm completely blind to it. I have to consciously analyze the shape of your mouth, where your eyebrows are, compare it to the context, etc. to try to determine your emotional state.
Not only am I blind to other peoples' nonverbal communication I don't express my own naturally. Every emotion I express through non-verbal means is largely "acting" on my part. I have to consciously make my expressions match my emotional state.
My anecdote may not match exactly what another person's with autism, but that's the kind of difference that's meant by doing things "automatically."
Yes, and I will add the more cumulative result is more one of being judged, unincluded, and isolated, not one of acknowledgement that the communication was impaired. When I have a conversation or a job interview and someone asks me how it went, I never can say. I can speak to practical and obvious fumbles or difficult questions to which I am proud of having known the answer but this seems to not be what is means when I am asked how it went. I literally have no idea how it went and saying I did would be just as well done with a roll of dice. For most of my life, I thought I knew, but I was just working from what I had. Without very explicit novelty displays of preference or emotion, I would just assume things are fine. This is a very bad road to travel.
Yeah, but it doesn't require the same amount of effort from everyone, and neurotypical children will eventually get it. It takes an order of magnitude more effort for children with ASD and in the most extreme cases, they simply can't.
It's like red/green colorblindness - some afflicted eventually manage to tell the difference between the same shade of grey, but for normal sighted people, the number inside the circle of colored dots is blatant and obvious, and requires no studying of the picture.
There are children with ASD that are highly-functioning and if they manage to get good grades, it's possible for them to escape notice. However, there are those for whom social situations simply don't make sense, and no amount of effort, self awareness, or peer feedback can enlighten them.
A more analogous vision example would be the ability of people (especially children) when not wearing glasses to force focus which requires effort and temporarily decreases their ability to keep eyes in alignment (if they have amblyopia or strabismus.)
All the kids I know pick huge amount of behaviours the way I described. Not all of it, not complicated stuff, but definitely a lot. They also tend to like what other kids like - without them trying to imitate interest as strategy. It just happen naturally.
Especially things like smiling or crying to get something (depending on circumstances) etc - they do it before they have logic and before they have ability to plan. Two years old has tendency to do stuff adults around find cute and react to, but it is not conscious plan. Autistic kid won't or will to lesser extend.
It's kinda shitty to imply that someone is lying or delusional because their lived experience doesn't match with yours. There's plenty of literature on how autistic people learn socialization and how it differs from neurotypicals.
Maybe. It just seemed to me as a child that I would rather often do things that other kids wouldn't think to do in the first place, and then get mildly made fun of for it.
I can relate. I think kids are actually much better at grasping when something is "off" with other kids than adults are. They know who the weird ones are, and they'll definitely let you know if it's you... though if you're like me you may be oblivious to a lot of it. The worst was always when they would pretend to be nice so they could get you to make an even bigger fool of yourself when you finally felt safe enough to be yourself :(
I found a googleable meta study about it that concluded that BPD traits were associated with women, but also that women who don’t express gender normal behavior are perceived as BPD by men. Although men scored higher in individual BPD behaviors, they were not perceived as BPD by themselves or others unless they behaved outside of gender normal behavior (acted more “feminine”). There’s a genetic component by a twin study, but it’s unknown it’s causative effect to gender. There’s studies that women score higher in neuroticism(anxiety, depression, etc) as a personality trait. It is also known child trauma has a causative effect, and may be related to how women are sexually assaulted as children at higher rates than men. Basically, a complex mix of social expectations, social bias, how women are treated in society, and biological aspects of women’s personalities may contribute to an overall significantly higher rate of BPD diagnosis being a female diagnosis. Interestingly, a disorder on the same axis (antisocial personality disorder) has an exact opposite gender disparity (3:1 men over women) and that is also investigated in other studies.
How people perceive others is irrelevant to the question. Women are more often clinically diagnosed with BPD, not simply perceived by others to express it. The rest of your post is mostly unsupported speculation. Apart from the parallel you've drawn with APD, which has a lot of similarities to BPD, except with inverse gender distribution.
Nothing I wrote wasn’t a conclusion of a paper or genetic study, as according to the meta paper that attempted to understand all facets of why women make the majority of the BPD diagnosis. I understand that because humans are not formally mathematically provable, some conjectures may be made from surveys, genetic relations, and studying behavior to attempt to reverse engineer the program that produced this societal result.
You've started with a presupposition that all of the clinical evidence is simply a misguided outcome based upon social constructs. How we choose to define BPD is entirely constructed, but the evidence is not, and the evidence very clearly shows that this disorder overwhelmingly affects more women than men. Just as APD and various other disorders overwhelming affect more men than women. If you're going to assert that this is due to anything other than genetics, then you're going to have to come up with something better than a weak meta-data study that barely draws any conclusions. Because to do that, you'll be going against decades of clinical data.
I'm not the authors. I haven't started with anything. Someone asked a question, I googled and returned the first paper I could find which cited several surveys and clinical studies to prove its point, gave a quick TL;DR because the abstract didn't go into detail.
Why are you going so hard on what is essentially the messenger? I don't have beef with you. I don't even have a horse in this race. I just googled a question for someone else. Maybe consider emailing the authors, since you have some serious disagreements with the paper.
I'm not going hard on you at all, only on what you've said. The evidence about BPD is that it affects women far more often than men, the clinical data overwhelmingly supports this, and so does the genetic research on the topic. Instead of considering this evidence, you've tried to find some seperate evidence for gender bias, you found the one paper that examines this, and that paper doesn't even really draw any conclusions.
Any time a question is asked about 'why are men and women different in regards to x', you'll have people lining up (like yourself and other commenters in this thread) to say it's gender bias. When the answer is often just because men and women have differences, which is exactly what the evidence points to in this case.
I literally just returned the first thing I could find that was a study with citations and stuff. Nothing in my post said I was attributing anything. You’re reading into my actions assuming intent that simply isn’t there.
>Basically, a complex mix of social expectations, social bias, how women are treated in society, and biological aspects of women’s personalities may contribute to an overall significantly higher rate of BPD diagnosis being a female diagnosis.
By your own admission, with 5 seconds of googling, and 0 knowledge on the topic, you submitted a comment attributing this to gender bias. If you don’t want your comments to be scrutinized by others, then perhaps don’t post them on public forums...
Discussion is the point of the comment section, and the limit of the discussion you’re willing to participate in is “I posted a random study from Google along with some of my own commentary, that I’m not prepared to defend in any manner whatsoever”.
That comment wasn't even my own commentary. It's from the study's abstract. Nothing about my post was my own commentary beyond "hey I took this off google". I'm not against scrutiny insofar as I'm against having assumptions of intent thrown on me for little more than googling something and returning the first published paper I could find.
That's interesting to read in conjunction with the article. I wonder if it's a similar scenario in a lot of gender-skewed mental disorders. Perhaps many of them only appear to be more prevalent in one gender because symptoms are observed from mostly one gender, when in reality different genders express the same disorder differently (and maybe as a product of social pressures).
Not that I think there's no scientific process in evaluation, but if the only subjects with major expression are primarily one gender, it seems like it would create a kind of confirmation bias?
The same reason why schizophrenia, ADHD and a plethora of others are more likely to be diagnosed in men? We diagnose on symptoms not on biological origins.
Pretty much the chunks of the articles that show that women can at least adapt and have the ability do "fake" social function.
Yes it's very draining in some cases, but at least they can hold down a job, and function as a "normal" adult for the most part. On top of that people and employers are more than willing to make all the required accommodations when asked.
I work in engineering / IT as well as being a geek so I run into ASD guys pretty much daily and they get no accommodations and are usually brute forced into complying with the required norms, or they get fired.
Even the most simple accommodations like a bit of work hour flexibly and working from home are not even entertained in most cases.
They stick them in open plan offices, 8am to 6pm and brute force social interaction on them which is the opposite of what they need.
I do know a few other female ASD people, and they themselves acknowledge that they get way better treatment and help then their ASD male friends.
In a lot of engineering circles, you can get away with hours of having your headphones on, wearing the exact same cut and color of shirt 365 days a year, fidgeting constantly, and not making eye contact. It’s not paradise, but there are much less friendly environments.
As an autistic man, I don't get that impression at all. There are hundreds of articles discussing autism from a mostly male perspective. Pointing out the differences in expression (and diagnosis) in women takes nothing away from me.
> I'm at a loss as to why this article claims being on the autism scale / weird is only hard for women...?
I’m at a loss as to why you would say that the article claims that when it claims nothing of the sort. (In fact, it explicitly notes that the phenomenon that is the central theme of the article—which is not autism being “hard”—is found in both sexes, but more commonly with women than men.)
Seems that the point was that it's especially hard for women to get diagnosed and receive proper support for it. Not that it isn't also difficult for men. Girls and boys are socialized differently, and boys with autism are more likely to behave in outwardly disruptive ways, while girls are more likely to appear shy and anxious. Teachers and parents are more likely to bring up disruptive behavior to a doctor than just shyness and general social ineptitude.
IMO it's a loss for everyone to make mental health / disability a gendered issue. Mental illness is hard for everyone, regardless of what gender they identify as...
Recognizing gender differences in how conditions are expressed and challenges that relate to interaction between conditions and existing gender roles and norms is important. This isn't making mental health and gendered issue, it's recognizing that me talk health is an issue which interacts with other aspects of life, including gender.
I agree that this is a really important and positive step in the right direction, however, I think many may pick up ideas that might not be as beneficial with only a cursory skim of the article.
Totally. But I think this article actually helps with that. By educating parents, teachers, and doctors on the way that symptoms of autism manifest across children without assuming male as the "default" gender (and also educating them about our social biases which affect our interpretation of those symptoms), we're ensuring that more autistic people out there can find each other and support one another and themselves regardless of sex.
Also, I'm certain that there are male autistics who manifest their symptoms in the more stereotypically "female" way (ie, quiet, shy, reserved, good at masking), and by educating people on the different ways that autism presents itself, we can help those people get proper diagnoses and support as well.
My cyncical view is because this is the Atlantic. Less cynically the fact in the article "3-4x more boys have Autism than girls" could justify their contention that it is evenly distributed but girls are only diagnosed in cases with severe autism.
Well maybe. I'd assume it's more boys, I have something vague in memory about autism being linked to testosterone, but also because men are sort of nature's scratchpad and tend to show more extreme traits than women - which is true in much of the animal kingdom, btw. Women tend to be more average and less freakish and are also more cooperative so they can achieve a stable existence and have a family.
A statistically higher percentage of them, anyway, let's not count your crazy ex here.
I've always liked "Aspergirls." (This is the term a friend of mine uses for herself.) As a group, they seem noticeably more attractive to me. I've noted that a lot of them do not like me, and make it more apparent than most women, though often this is done in a rational and polite fashion which I find more intellectually honest and respectful, and so like better. I was also in a relationship with one. That was quite difficult.
Yes and yes. Also, they seem to smell better. I think in part because they tend to have a no-nonsense approach to hygiene, and aren't as afflicted by societal distortions around body odor.
The examples of girls with autism trying to fit in with other girls was sad. I remember in middle school how my nerdy coed friend group got bullied for sitting together at lunch. The guys got called gay and the girls were shunned by other girls. There was a lot of explicit peer group pressure to only associate by gender. Fortunately most people grew out of this by high school.
Personally, I think I tended towards associating with males more often because I enjoyed competitive games (yugioh, magic, etc) and they were more likely to play. I always preferred hobbies with explicit rules to the comparative anarchy of navigating social circles. It's a shame that so many other girls get pressured by family and peers to avoid predominantly male social hobbies. I think they actually help improve self-confidence and create meaningful friendships far more easily for autistic folks than typical sleepovers or gossiping or whatever.