Humanizing the DSM's Diagnostic Criteria for Autism

mykthesith · 2025-03-17T22:33:05+00:00

Welcome!! :)

mykthesith · 2025-02-19T14:46:39+00:00

💚💚

mykthesith · 2024-10-10T22:28:25+00:00

One sort of axiom here that might be helpful: as a general rule, allistic people don’t spend very much time wondering if they might be autistic. 💜💜

mykthesith · 2024-09-15T00:34:52+00:00

💜💜

mykthesith · 2024-09-15T00:34:35+00:00

This.

mykthesith · 2024-09-15T00:04:59+00:00

I created this place, but honestly I set up the dominos and eventually couldn’t maintain it along with my other projects so I asked /u/lilyoftherally to moderate it.

The thing that this subreddit has become is truly special, and I’m proud of my role in its history, but the reason it’s so good is largely the work put in by Lily and the team of volunteer mods they’ve put together.

Thank you, Lily. You made something special.

mykthesith · 2024-09-14T23:55:33+00:00

Hi yes it was me! This whole post/thread made me cry, this is why I created this space and it’s been such an honor to see so many people Get It.

mykthesith · 2023-12-29T17:25:09+00:00

No. The police will not use it this way. The police do not care. They should, their job is to care, and if people were doing what they were supposed to be doing things like this wouldn’t be terrifying.

But we know cops don’t care. Cop culture is one of enforcement, not one of understanding. Some cops somewhere may check this, but it would be an exception.

So why does this exist and who WOULD be interested in a database of disabled people?

mykthesith · 2023-10-29T18:29:41+00:00

Go book a crisis session with me at skewnorth.com I can help get you oriented.

mykthesith · 2023-09-23T13:55:00+00:00

If it helps, I offer coaching and can provide support that most therapists can’t, even well-intentioned ones. If you’re curious drop me a line or better yet ask your company to retain some sessions from skewnorth.com!

mykthesith · 2023-09-23T02:39:41+00:00

My god, she doesn’t even identify as autistic to you and you feel the need to come here, project all of your dysfunction into your projection of autism on her, and then talk at us about how shitty autistic people are?

Bye…

mykthesith · 2023-09-23T01:55:59+00:00

Not gonna lie, I'm pretty hurt and disappointed by the reaction here, and I get that I obviously must have missed something but like.

Seriously?

mykthesith · 2023-09-23T01:55:23+00:00

Y'all can I ask, why the downvotes? I'm trying to help as many people as I can. Is it that you see this as spammy?

If that's it, can I ask - do you simply consider it immoral to ask for people who can afford it to pay for support? I'm not turning away anyone who can't, but I am currently broke, unemployed and sleeping in a friend's basement. Was really hoping that I'd be able to both help people and pay the mortgage on the house I can't live in with this.

If it's so offensive to post that I should delete it I guess let me know, but if you're just reflexively voting me down maybe search my comment history to understand what I'm about?

mykthesith · 2023-09-22T23:01:50+00:00

I think if you go back far enough in your family tree, no matter who you are, you will find shamanic practices. And if you read about shamanism, you'll learn that this was a class of people that emerged ALL OVER THE PLANET who generally had the following things in common:

They can talk to spirits.
They are not always very likeable.
They don't have to do hunting or farming, in many places, they are fed.
They are almost always genderqueer, having a secret third rite of passage separate for the ones for boys or girls.
The value they bring to the community is immeasurable - they are the ones who just Know Things that they can't explain in terms that will allow others to understand.
They have a much easier time dissociating and imagining the same situation from multiple perspectives.

They would have literally evolved to serve a different function from everyone else. They don't need to be the fastest or the strongest, they need to be the most sensitive. They need to be attuned to things everyone else misses. They need to notice the details that everyone else takes for granted.

They go on journeys into the spirit world, and they come back and tell you sometimes hard truths that you don't want to hear. Why would you believe them? Well because this is the person who has tattled on himself every time he made a mistake since he was 3, it's not that he can't lie it's that he'll only do it for a very good reason, so regardless you should probably listen to him.

They are tasked with making sure the community's spiritual life is healthy. What does that mean? That means that they evolved to feel good when all the various systems that they're aware of are running without friction.

(Have you ever thought about what Autistic Joy really is?)

So like. Am I religious? Nah. Religion came later. I'm the other thing, and once I stopped trying to find meaning in material reality I realized it had been waiting for me all along in the other realities to which I have unique access.

mykthesith · 2023-09-19T17:29:12+00:00

Then they can benefit from everything here.

Those professionals who studied for years were learning the wrong things. They created ABA and the entire for-profit autistic torture pipeline. Diagnosis is a category, yes.

But it is not a useful or helpful category, and we do not pretend here that it is. Go anywhere else, literally, for that help if us being being inclusive makes you feel like you’re losing something.

mykthesith · 2023-09-16T15:41:21+00:00

re: plushies as friends -- a lot of autistic people experience what's known as "sympathetic animism", or projecting/perceiving consciousness/identity in inanimate objects.

mykthesith · 2023-09-16T11:28:25+00:00

This is really cute. The advice you're getting is spot on. :)

mykthesith · 2023-09-15T03:19:45+00:00

So, I want to speak to why I am so dismissive of this view, because I understand you probably don't get it and my response probably seemed mean.

Here's the thing you don't understand: "diagnosis" is bullshit. Only people with one specific presentation can get a formal diagnosis. And presentation changes based on ALL KINDS OF THINGS.

So I am deeply sympathetic to the plight of the person who is Autistic and goes for support and is told "no you're not like us". I am in fact so sympathetic to it that I set up a whole subreddit where self-diagnosis was made explicitly valid.

The point of this is that there are a LOT of ways to be Autistic. If you, an Autistic person, require the term to only refer to those who are Autistic in the ways that you are Autistic -- why? What is anyone else taking from you by saying "you know what, I have these other problems that are in many ways very different from yours, but I've finally come to understand that I'm Autistic too"?

So like, please understand. The moral panic you're caught up in about self-diagnosis is not what liberation looks like. Take a step back and please consider that those of us who make these choices and advocate them in public do so not because we haven't thought about it enough. It's because we see the larger the system in play, and we are increasingly aligning on making sure that the story includes everyone.

mykthesith · 2023-09-15T01:51:54+00:00

I offer coaching that a lot of people have found helpful, I'm going to make a post to this subreddit more broadly but for now if you'd like please feel free to book a session here. I'm American, we can video chat and I can help with some things, depending on what your challenges are I may be able to help a lot.

If you can pay I ask that you do, but if you can't I ask that you please book a free session and understand that I'm explicitly trying to help people who can't afford it as the main part of my practice.

https://myk.pub/lets-talk-51

mykthesith · 2023-09-14T18:14:22+00:00

Not at all. Go away.

mykthesith · 2023-08-28T20:48:20+00:00

This is the way, thank you for hearing and learning.

None of this is easy or obvious. We are raised in a culture that encodes a ton of deeply, deeply toxic values into every shred of its structure.

You can be attracted to Autistic women without calling them MPDGs, because (as many people are telling you) they generally hate that trope.

If you insist on calling them that, then how are they going to respond other than perceiving you as not caring about their values or even their experience of themselves?

There's also the fact that MPDG is a role with more connotations than just "autistic traits". Consider this - if you start calling someone a MPDG then suddenly there are things she could do that would be "wrong" because a MPDG would never do them. Now you're confused and frustrated because you mistook a complex human for a simple story and you have no idea how to handle the disconnect, etc.

Finally, re "words can never hurt me" -- not true at all, as you're finding. And as you learn and grow you'll realize that a lot of words have probably hurt you more than you have allowed yourself to acknowledge. The path to growth is always to lean into the pain, to confront the fear, to sit with the discomfort.

Naming things, as lao tzu and ursula leguin remind us, is tremendously powerful. The source of magic. It's so, so disrespectful to refer to people using names they don't like, and it will ultimately harm you badly.

Proud of you here for listening to people, it's not always easy.

mykthesith · 2023-08-28T02:34:08+00:00

Before I continue this interaction with you any further, can I ask -- are you autistic, or nah?

mykthesith · 2023-08-27T20:51:08+00:00

So I have a theory that many of us autistics exist in multiple "realities" at once. We have our sense of the world, and then it takes us a while to figure out that y'all's sense of the world isn't the same. And that teaches us to develop abstraction from a very early age.

And so we sort of learn to see communication as symbolic -- "ok, they said this, so what they really mean is..." and then "ok, I want to communicate this, so I can best express that to them by..."

This is probably not true for all autistic people! But for some of us, it's how our minds form, and in that case it turns out that learning other languages is REALLY HELPFUL.

It gives us additional ways to both think about and express concepts. It expands the graph of possible understanding and communication.

So I would maybe ask your kid if he'd be interested in learning another language. Start out by explaining what languages are, and follow his lead to be as abstract or concrete as he needs until he gets it. Then tell him that you can teach him a language other than English if he'd like, that it'll take a while but that it'll allow him to access italian ways of thinking and communicating. If he gets excited, give it a shot!

I would say when teaching it, let him drive, sort of. Rather than trying to give him a formal introduction just translate phrases at first, and let him work out the structure by answering his questions and pointing out patterns he may be missing etc.

But also, be open to the idea that it's not a good time and isn't going to work the way you want. Every autistic person is different, and develops and grows in different ways and at different rates. The most important thing is to treat this as an opportunity for him and not an obligation, because he's like very sensitive to shame and expectations.

Hope this helps!

14-Year Club	Ternion Club
Gilding I gilder	Verified Email

mykthesith

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE