It seems to me it's medicine to blame for people treating autistics as a group, since that is literally how they prescribe that they be treated.
They used to have 3 divisions, PDD-NOS, Aspergers, and Autism and thought that they overlapped and overlap was supposedly bad.
The root of the problem hardly seems to be pop culture, which to me has shown a pretty wide spectrum of autistic behaviour and generally portray it far more positively and heterogeneous than medicine does, which treats somebody having a diagnosis of Autism in the same light of them having a diagnosis of cancer. It's pop culture which has eased the stigma, it's high culture which truly looks down upon autistics as poor lambs to be saved.
When I was a kid, doctors were in love with emphasising how I would probabilistically never succeed. Meanwhile, Hollywood put out a bruce willis film about how autistic children are smarter than NSA cryptographers. I listened to Hollywood, and ignored the doctors.
Makes me think of the movie Mercury Rising[1], where a kid "wins" an NSA crypto challenge and is subsequently hunted by them because he cracked their code.
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It seems to me it's medicine to blame for people treating autistics as a group, since that is literally how they prescribe that they be treated.
They used to have 3 divisions, PDD-NOS, Aspergers, and Autism and thought that they overlapped and overlap was supposedly bad.
The root of the problem hardly seems to be pop culture, which to me has shown a pretty wide spectrum of autistic behaviour and generally portray it far more positively and heterogeneous than medicine does, which treats somebody having a diagnosis of Autism in the same light of them having a diagnosis of cancer. It's pop culture which has eased the stigma, it's high culture which truly looks down upon autistics as poor lambs to be saved.
When I was a kid, doctors were in love with emphasising how I would probabilistically never succeed. Meanwhile, Hollywood put out a bruce willis film about how autistic children are smarter than NSA cryptographers. I listened to Hollywood, and ignored the doctors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Rising
Makes me think of the movie Mercury Rising[1], where a kid "wins" an NSA crypto challenge and is subsequently hunted by them because he cracked their code.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Rising