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I’m sorry but, what the actual fuck is wrong with allistics?
a fucking revelation?! shape better therapy strategies?! how about shaping a more holistic approach to understanding people and interacting socially and allowing neurodivergent people to be themselves? how about spend an hour talking to an autistic person while actually considering how they react to things rather than assuming we’re emotionless computers just because we don’t use the same social cueing criteria as allistics?
jesus fucking christ this headline got me riled.
study author in article:
“We spend all this time problematizing autism, rather than doing the work to understand what it’s like to be autistic,” he said. “The popular idea that autistic people don’t have rich, emotional lives is simply not true.”
[…]
Instead of urging changes to how autistic people communicate, he said, anyone who has an autistic person in their life should work instead to improve mutual understanding between those who have diverse modes of experiencing the world.
as always, ignore headlines
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the fact that the article takes a more sympathetic tone is nice, but does not negate the fact that the headline is both offensive and just downright awful.
also kinda absurd to think we should go to the effort of finding and reading the article when it’s not linked in the OP or the linked tweet and the headline is this fucking hurtful already.
you should be aware that headlines are often written by an editor, not the author. This is why I don’t pay much attention to them, especially in science journalism. You’ll get a paper published like “In vivo effect of XYZ on telomeres” that says XYZ extended rat lifespans by 1%, an interview with a scientist that says “nobody has tested this on primates yet, but helpful molecules in XYZ class could conceivably be discovered within a few decades”, and a headline that says “XYZ PROMISES ETERNAL LIFE WITHIN THE DECADE”. Whatever gets clicks and/or outrage gets published.
I think that hurtful and inflammatory posts are the ones we need to double-check before sharing more widely. Especially screenshots like this that have a reaction built-in.
Editors get the wall
I am well aware that headlines are shit and written by an editor rather than the author, but I disagree that reacting to them is wrong. the headline is what the publication chose to lead with, and shows the tone they wanted people to be led into the article with. the headline is arguably more in tune with what the general populace would read and identify with than the content of the article, since its entire purpose is to grab potential readers’ attention.
I think if allistics want autistics to not react to their shit takes, they should stop publishing headlines that alienate and demonize us.
idk seems backwards. scientist is publishing a good study. in a vacuum we’re happy about this. it’s a good development. But the headline centers the bad worldview of the editors and maybe laymen. (I certainly wouldn’t say that autistic adults don’t “experience complex emotions”, and most allistic people probably wouldn’t either if asked. Idk maybe there are polls showing differently.) And we react to the headline. So now, in response to good news, we are more upset than before. I don’t like that. What’s more, this manufactured outrage reinforces exactly the wrong ideas about the state of the world. What will you remember more from looking at this screenshot, that allistic culture is as bad as the editors think or that scientists are in fact working to “[shape] a more holistic approach to understanding people and interacting socially and allowing neurodivergent people to be themselves” and getting at least some acceptance from other scientists since they’re getting published?
I want everybody to stop headline reacting. It’s not unique to autistic users. Often on hexbear I encounter obviously misleading or false posts that fall apart after a cursory search and/or skim. Memes posted as fact (ukraine ryan gosling kill list, turkish shooter dude), outright fakery (twitter whitelisted slurs), bad science journalism (Small Penises and Fast Cars: Evidence for a Psychological Link, this was posted because a jpg of a different graph went big on twitter and there were a bunch of garbage articles about it). I find this frustrating. We shouldn’t recreate
. Maybe this is inherent to all social media that prioritizes most-interacted-with posts.scientist is publishing a good study. in a vacuum we’re happy about this. it’s a good development. But the headline centers the bad worldview of the editors and maybe laymen.
well yeah, the scientist is an autist, and the editor may or may not be. I’d argue the dichotomy is shown perfectly in this example, actually – autistic scientist publishes research about how autistic people have deep emotional lives, newspaper editor interprets it as “omg autistic people have emotions?!”
I want everybody to stop headline reacting.
then headlines should stop having shitty takes. the fault is not on those reacting to something shitty, it’s on the person doing the shitty thing.
how do you know he’s autistic? I didn’t find anything about it when looking him up. Couldn’t find a social media bio.
I’m not placing moral blame. Doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is. If Marxists are to be effective, we need to understand the world around us, so we should do some investigation. Editors could write better headlines but the bourgeois press was not built to educate leftists.
The current “therapy strategies” is ABA which is literally abuse. They didn’t even bury the lede. They just flatout omitted that part. “[…]shape better therapy strategies” implies making the current ones better, but the current ones are abysmal. So it’s pretty obvious that they think anyone on the spectrum that isn’t passing as a “normal human” is subhuman trash. I just can’t fucking believe that this title basically reads like “It turns out dumb autistic kids are pretty close to functioning humans, please disregard how fascist this sounds. Have a good day.” Who fucking let this get published?
I was lucky and suffered my entire 41 years of existing going undiagnosed and never experiencing ABA but a lot have. And Autism moms/parents remain willfully ignorant about it.
This reminds me of that story here a while back about the autistic man who didn’t react appropriately to someone’s death and being convicted of murder.
It’s fucking bleak out here that we have to make Oscar- winning emotional performances to convince people we have feelings.
I think masking as a concept gets mistaken as just concealing ND traits, when there is this element of forced emoting involved as well. You’re actively masking when you force a smile to convince a person that you’re actually happy. God forbid you can’t cry on command to align with the pain you’re feeling.
If someone tells you they’re feeling a certain way, just believe them. You have nothing to lose.
god i love it when people tell me how they are feeling out loud and i don’t have to puzzle over it anxiously
Oh my god I’d love a world where ‘how are you’ can be answered honestly or never asked at all.
I just answer with some variation of “still alive” it’s the only appropriate I can say that wouldn’t just be bull shit.
I do the, ‘I’m here’ and let my circumstances speak for themselves.
I’m not even angry
I’m being so sincere right now
Even though you broke my heart and killed me
Did those ableist dipshits just assume that people not playing along with (or even picking up) allistic social cues lacked emotions?
Sorry it took me a bit to process 800 times more information than what allistic people process, but yep, my current emotion is pure unadulterated rage.
If you’re not constantly vying for position in invisible pissing contests, you don’t have emotions that allistic bros can detect.
There’s that meme about being a woman who is trip-sitting a man in his 30s who has just come to the realisation that other people have feelings.
This is like the allistic researcher version of that meme.
Do you have a source for the trip-sitting story, I want context lol
I’m trying to find it. It popped up on my Tiktok feed a couple of times from different accounts but apparently it’s pretty niche because I can’t find it on searching. Tiktok’s search is pretty shitty though.
I’ll keep an eye out for it. Hopefully it will appear again soon so I can post it for you.
Sometimes I get so mad that it’s been so long, and my family has been like this possibly for generations and generations, and only NOW are they just figuring us out. For so long, nobody fucking gave a shit, nobody fucking bothered to even understand us. Just locked us up, lobotomized us, shamed us for being different, and left us to go homeless and die. And only NOW do they realize: “Wow, it looks like they’re actual people with feelings!” Fuck everything. Monstrous society. 
A few months ago my grandmother got incredibly angry at me over some perceived slight due to not responding correctly in some interaction, and I tried to explain to her that as an autistic person I often do not pick up on or understand social expectations in social situations, and her response was “So what you’re saying is that you don’t have emotions?” and I just ???
I do not understand why this assumption is made.
Alltistics: If you dont have emotions “correctly” you dont have emotions.
Emotions are the face movements you do when situation 2 happens.
There is this mindset “If I can’t see it it doesn’t exist”. I saw a discussion on lemmy.world where an anti-vegan claimed that animals don’t have emotions since they can’t speak, so it’s ok to kill them if it can be done painlessl. They stopped arguing that point when I pointed out that by his logic I could eat my newborn.
Not too long ago the mentality was that babies can’t feel pain and so they underwent surgery without anesthetic, in general there is a lot of horrible child abuse that was seen as normal child rearing since the baby/child couldn’t articulate themselves in a way they were used to.
therapist moment
so many bad therapists
I’ve been touching grass and looking for a place to get tested that takes my shitty insurance and this just… makes me all kinds of anxious about what I’m about to go through.
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That’s what I’m hoping for. Unmasking for a doctor feels like roulette sometimes
Grim, man
Oh shit, oh fuck, this is a huge development. I would be feeling feelings right now if I were aware of such a thing. But I am not, for emotions are a mystery to one such as I.
I get my emotions by draining them from allistics as I feed upon their blood, and I will never stop
Alltistics get the wall
I find this so baffling because pretty much everyone I know in research (generally, but also specifically psychology) is autistic. Pretty much everyone I know going into therapy, or teaching, or counselling, is also autistic.
Did the populations going into these fields massively change recently? Do I only know ND people? I know a lot of people!
