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Comment by Magodo | Hacker News Reader

> We need to embrace neurodiversity, not stigmatize it.

Or stop needlessly labeling things

Getting diagnosed and therefore getting labeled probably has advantages for the people that get a diagnosis. It will likely provide them with (medical/psychological) support that will make their lives a little easier. I don't know why you think there is no need for this?

Because to people who are neuro typical, these terms suggest that other people are just making things up to not seem stupid, incompetent or lazy, unfortunately.

Well if you're an ignorant cunt, maybe.

Point is, these labels make it easier to be an ignorant cunt because they allow you to classify people as an out-group.

To refuse to identify the issue is to do exactly what the ignorant cunts are doing.

Well, it's the exact opposite.

They allow people qualified to diagnose the condition to identify those of us who have a pervasive developmental disorder with well known brain correlates that give rise to our behavior that appears as lazy, selfish, forgetful and stubborn.

If anyone wants to tell me "nah man, you're just a bad person" I'll tell em right back "Nah man, you're just an ignorant cunt."

Normally when you meet such people they are explicitly trying to reject the label based on a single data point and a piss poor understanding of the condition. It usually goes something like "But you can't have ADHD because you're a successful software engineer, so you must be able to focus right?".

Sorry, but yes, yes I can and if you want to try and comment on whether I do or do not have ADHD then you'll have to go through the full diagnostic assessment and that first entails getting board certified and then gaining significant clinical experience with ADHD or being under the supervision of someone who does.

I agree with you here, but this raises an honest question: for all practical purposes, what is the actual difference between "being neuro atypical" and "being stupid, incompetent or lazy"?

Wow, that's not very nice to read as someone neurodivergent (in my case Autism). I'll use ND further on since it's pretty long to re-read.

ND people are all very different, with their own strengths and needs. A lot of it can be environment based, autistic people struggle very commonly with environmental overstimulation.

Moving from an open place office to my own living room seems to have freed up about 30 IQ points previously dedicated to constantly scanning a busy room for threats, I'm suddenly more productive. My neurodivergency did not change, if I appeared incompetant before I suddenly appear far more competant now.

For all practical purposes, what's the difference between "pain fatigue" and being stupid? "dyslexia" and incompetance? "receiving chemo" and laziness?

My apologies, but I was not trying to imply what you seem to have read. My point was -- how do we define any of these things? Neurodivergency is a scientific term, and it ios reasonably well defined -- but the other set of terms ("lazy", "stupid" etc) are labels that have been used to generalise some, for lack of better term, "traits" perceived -- by some people, in some historic periods -- as undesirable.

Or to put it another way: neurodiversity is a real thing; "laziness" and "stupidity" probably isn't.

The problem with diagnostic labels such as ADHD is the science behind them is rather weak. For example, [1] concludes that the distinction between ASD, ADHD and OCD is not biologically valid–in other words, it is not an accurate distinction in terms of what is actually going on in the brain. (And that's just one paper, I can share plenty more that reach similar conclusions.)

No denying that many people have found diagnostic labels to be very helpful in practice. Gatekeepers make services/support/treatment dependent on receiving a diagnosis (or even a particular diagnosis – some labels get you more help than others – in particular, ASD generally gets much more resources than ADHD, creating pressures for people with ADHD to be diagnosed as having ASD as well in order to get better services [2]) However, they shouldn't do that – people should get services based on their actual need (severity of symptoms, level of dysfunction, etc) not on whether and which diagnostic labels they've been assigned. Limiting services based on diagnostic labels is actually discrimination by diagnosis [3], and surely we can all agree that discrimination is wrong?

Anyway, the fact that people get these kinds of benefits from diagnosis is a social/cultural/political fact, not a scientific one. It is a set of facts about the configuration of mental health systems, insurance systems, education systems, government disability funding, etc – and all those facts are ultimately rooted in policy decisions, and policy is determined by politics, and politics is part of culture. Some critics argue that the entire DSM-5 diagnostic system as a whole is more a product of society/culture/politics than of actual science [4].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-019-0631-2

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/the-phr...

[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1440-1754....

[4] https://cepuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Diagnostic-syst...

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