Can anyone relate?
Way too much. I’ve been told so many times in this community that self diagnosis isn’t valid and I don’t get to say I’m autistic until I have an official diagnosis that says so.
Fortunately, there are still some people here who don’t think so and that’s what’s keeping me here.
I’m sorry you had that experience. We specifically have a rule against gatekeeping. If you don’t mind, can you please link in which you saw people saying self-diagnosis isn’t valid?
Well, even under this topic people compare people who self diagnose with people who are antivaxxers.
Otherwise here are two links. The others have already been deleted because you’re doing a really good job here
I’m interested in understanding what the supposed benefits of being diagnosed as autistic are that people would fake misrepresent symptoms to get a diagnosis. Like, what do they think someone is trying to achieve from a diagnosis besides answers/insight, a path, and appropriate health care?
I’ve been told it’s to get attention. I don’t personally see it because as said in the video you either get attacked for being autistic or get attacked for being self diagnosed but apparently there’s positive attention as well.
I didn’t make it through the whole video, I had to stop when the “doctor” started capitulating. In my experience people who hate self-diagnosis don’t listen, period. They don’t care about how much time and effort you’ve put into something, and this is an issue with society in general, people will automatically minimize the effort you’ve put into something if you don’t have a degree in a relevant field. This is an even bigger deal when it comes to anything medical because for the average person doctors = unquestionable gods.
My vaccine denier uncle has and is putting a ton of time reinforcing his conclusions.
A colleague of mine that’s into ‘crystal vibrations’ knows every rock - and how it ‘affects your health’.
And you should see how much of their time qanons are spending in their larping or the religious of every shade in their faith.
Personal effort may be what brought you to the expert but is not and can’t be a sole determinant.
Otherwise you might as well write yourself a script or a diagnosis - and not even docs are allowed to self diagnose.
Those wackadoo folks want that to be real. No one wants autism. People find the descriptions of autism and then get happy that some things in their life start to make sense. Then they get sad because an autism diagnosis can harm your life.
Then they watch some train videos.
Dude, have you seen the model train videos that are filmed from the train’s pov? They’re so cool.
There is a model tank that you can control with pov camera and real tank controls
I get what this video is trying to say but I couldn’t stop thinking about how identical this all is to how antivaxers justify themselves as knowing better than doctors. To be honest if someone agrees with this video I don’t know how they could NOT be an anti vaxer, or broadly anti psychiatry in an antivaxer way.
Same.
The video feels very anti-expert or anti-science, almost. I couldn’t finish it without wanting to hurl my phone in disgust.
There’s a difference between self diagnosing a mental state that is entirely about how you personally perceive and interact with the world, and acting like science is somehow invalid just because it used to have bad ideas. If it wasn’t for science and medical experts constantly self correcting and sharing knowledge, we might still be throwing autistic people in jail or trying to drill holes in their heads to release the demons. What was life like before people invented science to study the world around them?
Just because some things can be self-diagnosed, doesn’t mean everything can.
Just because we don’t have a perfect understanding of the world, doesn’t mean science and medical experts are untrustworthy or clueless.
Just because individual people can be arrogant jerks (like my dentist two days ago), that doesn’t mean the global effort from experts in every field and from every country is bad.
And most importantly, just because a layperson can point out flaws in entrenched institutions, doesn’t mean they are more knowledgeable than the hundreds of thousands of trained experts that spend their lives trying to help others or expand our understanding of the world.
It’s like someone reporting a software bug, and because they found the bug, they think the program is a virus and the developers are somehow less familiar with how it works than they are.
Bug reporting is part of the process that constantly makes software better. Same with medical science. It’s just slower to change due to constant cultural and political pressures, despite the built in mechanisms that try to minimize those things.
The fact that anyone can be anti-science on a phone, using electricity, on the Internet, wearing clothes made of synthetic materials, in an air conditioned building, not starving or dying from a splinter, etc, is mind blowing.
The video actually proposes self diagnosis to be accepted as a step of medical diagnosis. It’s not anti-science at all, it criticizes the current situation regarding medical diagnosis.
It would be a good video about that if it wasn’t trying to undermine doctors’ credibility in the process
It’s reality for a lot of autistic people. Is it bad to point that out?
Because most people use scientifically proven tests to determine whether or not they are autistic? The ones that are actually used during diagnosis by a doctor as well.
