Absolutely. People want there to be a fair trade-off, but life just doesn’t work that way. I’ve seen similar romanticization of autism too, especially with the “savants”.
Sorry. Most of that shit has been my fault, and people like me.
In recent times, there’s been a push to reclassify certain disabilities from … disabilities, into “neurodivergence.” in an attempt to destigmatize certain disorders, and cast them in a new light as part of human evolution.
The idea that life is a min-maxing situation comes from the “just world fallacy”, the fallacious belief that all good and evils “must balance out”. Someone born with some profound disability might have no overarching heartwarming lesson for society to learn, and life might just be about abject cruelty.
I don’t know if the community appreciates or hates that change, but, I’ve seen autism go from being called something quite hateful (/r) in the 1990s, to becoming a spectrum, to people working with autistic people and just calling them “different”.
The romanticization might come from movies like Rain Man, and the few high profile savant cases (on ASD), e.g: I recall speculation that Bill Gates and Elon Musk both had Asperger’s Syndrome.
I think it’s definitely had the positive effects that you mention. People are far less cruel, more understanding, and also WAY more willing to go seek help with these types of problems than they used to be.
The negative effect is that anytime something becomes romanticized, it’s human nature for people to adopt it as an identity, which introduces a lot of noise to the conversation, and we lose some of our objectivity toward it, as now there’s an emotional attachment to the label itself. For example:
Back in the day (early 2010s?) of tumblr, when people first started collecting mental health labels like personal trading cards.
Or now, with the plethora of pseudoscientific misinformation about mental health on tiktok: random people are just making up terms or symptoms and pitching them in a nearly universally relatable way like horoscopes.
If you offer people a label that makes them feel part of a group, supported, and potentially explain why a bunch of things in their life are hard, it’s in our nature to gravitate toward that.
All that being said, I still think it’s a net-positive effect. This is just what happens anytime something clinical enters the mainstream conversation.
Absolutely. People want there to be a fair trade-off, but life just doesn’t work that way. I’ve seen similar romanticization of autism too, especially with the “savants”.
Life is 3d6, not point buy.
Sorry. Most of that shit has been my fault, and people like me.
In recent times, there’s been a push to reclassify certain disabilities from … disabilities, into “neurodivergence.” in an attempt to destigmatize certain disorders, and cast them in a new light as part of human evolution.
The idea that life is a min-maxing situation comes from the “just world fallacy”, the fallacious belief that all good and evils “must balance out”. Someone born with some profound disability might have no overarching heartwarming lesson for society to learn, and life might just be about abject cruelty.
I don’t know if the community appreciates or hates that change, but, I’ve seen autism go from being called something quite hateful (/r) in the 1990s, to becoming a spectrum, to people working with autistic people and just calling them “different”.
The romanticization might come from movies like Rain Man, and the few high profile savant cases (on ASD), e.g: I recall speculation that Bill Gates and Elon Musk both had Asperger’s Syndrome.
What’s your take on this?
I think it’s definitely had the positive effects that you mention. People are far less cruel, more understanding, and also WAY more willing to go seek help with these types of problems than they used to be.
The negative effect is that anytime something becomes romanticized, it’s human nature for people to adopt it as an identity, which introduces a lot of noise to the conversation, and we lose some of our objectivity toward it, as now there’s an emotional attachment to the label itself. For example:
All that being said, I still think it’s a net-positive effect. This is just what happens anytime something clinical enters the mainstream conversation.