Comment by nwah1
Comment by nwah1 2 days ago
Look into the history of autism research and you'll find a history of fraud. People like Bruno Bettelheim simply lied their way to prominence and now we are on a road of ever-expanding diagnostic criteria and an ever-growing autism industry to the point where it is now trendy to self-diagnose on social media.
Recall that psychology has had a gigantic replication crisis, and that the founders of the field like Freud and Jung were charlatans, and that there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for autism, and that a primary diagnostic tool is a literal questionnaire, and that psychology and psychiatry have been abused for political reasons by every totalitarian government of the 20th century.
Given all this, we should have some humility about this topic. Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
And maybe we can normalize the idea that employees have special emotional needs that can be accounted for on an individual basis without medical permission slips or any need for wielding constructed identities.
When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab that performed research on children with Asperger's syndrome (AS), mainly through fMRI and DTI brain imaging techniques. AS was merged into Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but at the time was considered a high-functioning form of autism. I met dozens of children with AS; they were typically between 9-13 years old. All the children I met were clearly autistic. I'm not going to attempt to describe what that means here, but the nature of their disorder was evident, compared to other disorders and compared to the age-matched controls [1]. Back then I'd confidently tell you I could easily pick out the kids in a classroom with an AS diagnosis. These days, I have no confidence I could do so (mostly due to false negatives).
[1] anecdote: at the end of explaining the fMRI procedure to the participant children and their parents, I'd ask if the child had any questions. Neurotypical children would usually ask about any reward $ for completing the task. AS kids would usually ask something poignant about the experiment.