My mother thinks autistic people are “dangerous”.

Like what. the. fuck.

My parents came from some rural village in People’s Republic of China, a very conservative upbringing, modern psychaitry is still new, older people have trouble accepting that, and sometimes their views even get passed on to their offsprings. Because PRC is still filled with conservatives, people still get kicked out of university over an Autism diagnosis that the faculty later found out about, there is no “ADA” like there is in the US. (Imagine you have a country, but instead of half of them being US-MAGAs, its 90% of the entire country) Conservatives view any deviation from the “normal” as bad, they think people with any slight mental health issues as “brain damaged” or “useless”, the nazi germany’s concept of “useless eater” comes to mind.

TLDR: Sometimes ignorance, but mostly the conservative mindset.