Comment on insert mental health condition here

• RumorsOfLove@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Maybe ‘Autism’ is a social construct. And ‘neurotypical’ is not based in biological reality, but in expectations for middle-class professionals under a certain social order.

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  • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    upper middle class professionals are the class by which everything else is measured, yes.

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    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      none of these ideas existed in day to day life or conversation. nobody had depression, anxiety, or any of that.

      I think the important distinction is that nobody knew they had depression, anxiety, etc… The whole point of this graph is that people had it and were simply undiagnosed. So the people who had those various neurodivergences were likely unsupported and struggled in their daily lives much more than they would have if they had proper support.

      Look at the graph of left handedness over time:
      Image

      When we stopped trying to beat the demons out of kids and forcing them to write with their non-dominant hand, they were suddenly able to exist openly. And that graph shows that as they were able to exist openly, the rates of left handedness steadily increased until it reached its natural levels. It doesn’t mean more kids were suddenly left handed. It means previous kids (now adults) had been forced to struggle more than their right handed peers, because they got beat if they used their dominant hand. And there were 100% adults at the time (mostly entrenched teachers who still wanted to enforce right handedness in writing classes) who would have been decrying the sudden increase in left handedness as unnatural, simply because it wasn’t being unnaturally suppressed anymore.

      To be clear, I agree that many of the natural rates likely aren’t a flat line over time. Depression and anxiety diagnosis rates both seem to be particularly dependent on external/environmental factors. So as the world becomes more and more depressing, people are naturally diagnosed more. But it’s not really accurate to say “nobody had it” before, because it definitely existed. It’s simply that nobody was diagnosed before.

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      • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        You are being revisionist.

        Lead was completely banned from gasoline in 1996. It’s first phase outs began 1975. It took 20 year to remove it. Was the ‘natural’ state of car use, leaded or unleaded gasoline use? Why didn’t we ban it outright completely in 1975 if it was so horrible?

        Neither. It was just a social change based on the understanding of the negative effects of lead, which had not been previously known and became known and better understood over time.

        There is no ‘natural’ state of things. There are just choices we make. Leaded gasoline persists in many parts of the world still.

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    No.

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  • arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If we want to a biological or evolutionary viewpoint it gets rather interesting. Autism would be fine and even beneficial, but in it’s most severe forms it would be very detrimental to survival and the passage of genes.

    However, we will never know how that presented in the past. Our modern environment almost certainly influences the way what we classify as “mental illness”.

    I would say any behavior, at least from a biological standpoint, that does not impact an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce would be “neurotypical”.

    Of course human culture and socities make this very very difficult to interpret. Especially considering that our ability to survive in the modern day ia directly related to our ability to do labor. Labor that is well outside of the behaviors we evolved for.

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• JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Concentration camp excuses…

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