But we only can know the yellow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the blue line had a positive slope over a ten thousand year scale. We are less and less fit for the environment we make.
insert mental health condition here
Submitted 1 week ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/75b8ff32-3065-442d-b39e-4059ee05a9bd.jpeg
Comments
kopasz7@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
BennyInc@feddit.org 1 week ago
I just read that book about Henry Markram. One of his points is that autism is genetic, but how much and by when it shows depends on the calmness of the upbringing of the child in the first years. Him having grown up in a peaceful African village let his brain grow different from what children nowadays experience with information overflow and just overstimulation in general. So yeah, the environment we create (in general) could lead to more autism in a way.
FireRetardant@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Also upbringing could significantly impact the development, or lack of, coping skills for individuals. A kid with autism growing up in an environment where they can develop skills to help manage their autism may grow up without ever knowing they were autistic. Same coud be on the reverse where stricit restrictions could reduce the coping skills and exacerbate some of the difficulties that come with autism.
notwhoyouthink@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I’ve thought of this so many times and I agree with you.
As we’ve essentially homogenized human society and the roles required to sustain said society, we (neurodivergents) have indeed become less and less fit for the environment we’ve chosen to make.
I once heard this great take on neurodiversity’s role in creating groups of people with ‘specialized’ functions that served the larger group as a whole (I’m taking pre-modern/hunter gatherer tribes). What we call neurodivergence was simply a brain wired to complement or even enhance neurotypical brain functions and vice versa. The brain was evolving to become as diverse as the rest of our bodies, as equity helps ensure survival.
The way I see it, we are like puzzle pieces that fit together to make each other stronger as a unit. We are not simple shapes that one stacks together in an attempt to make structure. I’m sure there’s a much better analogy out there, but this is what my mind has been working on for some time now.
418_im_a_teapot@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Or, there’s just no such thing as “typical” within an organ as complex as the human brain. There is only social contexts in which some brains thrive and others struggle… combined with the innate human instinct to form in groups and out groups.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I was talking to a friend recently. I was telling them that I felt like maybe I was hallucinating my diagnosis because so many people around me also had been diagnosed.
She pointed out that we both like to be around people that understand. They don’t get mad when we interrupt each other because they are struggling with the same thing.
She was so right.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You could also both be hallucinating.
Collective delusion/hallucination is a real thing. Often reinforced when like minded individuals form a tight social group that serves to isolate them from anyone who might challenged the hallucination, and who seek to reinforce it in each other.
RumorsOfLove@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
As a trans, let me warn you about the pathologization of normal human social patterns.
Jako302@feddit.org 1 week ago
Autism and adhd are classified as disorders instead of diseases for a reason. Disorders per definition disrupt normal/expected body functions and don’t necessarily have any underlying cause. Neurological disorders are just a collection of issues that disrupt your ability to take part in society as the majority would expect.
And anyone struggling with it will tell you that, while it may have been normal human behaviour a few hundred years ago, its fucking exhausting to get trough life with it in this age.
I know where you are coning from. With how much shits hitting the fan right now I don’t know if I’d want that lable on me officially. But at the same time does getting diagnosed open up a way to easier help and accommodation for issues that are 100% real.
apotheotic@beehaw.org 1 week ago
That seems disconnected from the point being made here
Eheran@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Can you elaborate? I do not get it.
RumorsOfLove@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week 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.
JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Concentration camp excuses…
Smoogs@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Women who were interested in STEM were also called witches back then too.
FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 week ago
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yes. Just read the story of Job to see how big of a bastard God is in The Bible
minorkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
We can’t know whether the prevalence rates have changed or by how much an dita foolish to assume it’s only because of better awareness. The world we exist tin has changed immensely and we are subject to to the affects of those changes.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 week ago
further than that, our cultural expectations of what is ‘normal’ have shifted drastically over the past two generations.
minorkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
To further that point, it’s guaranteed that what was normal, isn’t, anymore. Some things are, much isn’t. Few men, relatively, know how to hunt anymore or would be willing or able to kill an animal. Becoming a le to do that has wide ranging impacts on who they are. If we accept that the environment shapes us then when it changes, so do we, and with that what is considered normal shifts.
Juice@midwest.social 1 week ago
So, not trying to step on any mines here, and I get this is literally only a 2D representation of a phenomenon.
But what jumps out to me, is how “neurodivergence” is being defined kind of ahistorically. It supposes that neuro divergence is an essential, natural quality in humanity. That has real problems when we try to describe objective reality, especially the parts of us that aren’t tangible.
Did ancient people mostly have 2 arms and legs, 10 fingers and toes at birth? Yeah, by all accounts. Were ancient people as intelligent as modern people? That question gets a little funky, because who and what gets defined as intelligent, is really historically and geographically dependent. European kings sent away to the most far flung monasteries to bring in trusted advisors who spoke multiple languages and could write awesome cursive; at the same time Fibonacci was bringing algebra and the foundations of calculus home from Turkiye and publishing them in Italy as brain teasers. Now cursive is worthless except as a craft, maybe some marketing, and calculus became the intellectual basis for the industrial revolution.
So if “neuro divergence” can be defined historically like intelligence, which in some ways the graph itself supports this claim, then we can’t rely on an idea of human nature to make a point, especially since we are talking about scientific medical detection of a concrete divergence or disorder.
So like, what is divergence? What is being diverged from? The baseline has always been a vibe.
I’ve read studies that show better outcomes, increased happiness, better social integration measured among children and students with autism who spent time working on farms around animals. Structured, satisfying, hands on work, that used to make up most of the population. Now farmers is a micro minority, either owning land and charging people to work it, or working land for not enough money – hard, degrading, difficult work.
Other factors like screen time, social media, increase in dietary simple sugars, all show measurable changes in behaviors of people with ADHD, social anxiety, autism, bipolar, borderline disorders. Academics like Michel Foucault have studied how mental health treatment and psychiatry (additionally schools, and hospitals) are directly descended from the development of mass imprisonment and incarceration during the industrial revolutions in England, Germany, etc.,
Foucault also reviews sources that show more kind and forgiving attitudes in society toward people with severe social dysfunctions and intellectual disabilities. I wouldn’t go nearly as far as saying that people with disorders and divergences were better off – I believe that the medieval monastery was a “safe” place for a lot of people with what might now be described as neuro divergent, but also acknowledge the medieval church exploited poverty and mental illness for official and unofficial purposes.
But it does raise the question of how people, who may be intellectually “equal,” when raised under different conditions develop quite differently. And the way our current system functions, it uses value judgments and certifications, etc., to slot me into a specific place. But once in that place, i have to almost be a certain kind of person in order to succeed. The role isn’t suited to the person filling it, but to the needs of the organization. And usually the org needs to make money.
If there is greater social stigma towards disorder and divergence than there once was, that plays a major factor in whether people even want to be diagnosed. Lots of people have commented on self identification with neuro divergence as being a “tik tok trend” or some such. But a friend of mine, in an unofficial obit she wrote for someone older, made a point to say that previous generations looked at MH like it meant you were off to meet the business end of an ice pick.
For myself, learning I have ADHD and treating it has been holistically helpful. I’m open about it with people, we will see if it bites me in the ass.
I just worry a bit about the framing of “people have always been this way.” While I agree it is true in a way; I think our society is extremely stressful and toxic.
And then to say that the baseline of neuro divergence is unchanged throughout time buys cover for people who are responsible for the environmental changes making people unwell, and getting richer because of it.
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
As a person who’s special interest is calligraphy, what do you mean by cursive? I had always thought that scripts were on a spectrum between gothic and cursive, with more strokes per letter or less strokes respectively. Though I mostly practice ornamental penmanship (fancy spencerian), so I don’t know much about the history of hands in Europe.
Juice@midwest.social 1 week ago
I guess I’m drawing a line between the late medieval period when there was accelerated social development of the EU, but not enough scribes and scholars, and so their work suddenly became very sought after in a new world made of contracts and written agreements. So I’m probably talking about arguably two different things. First when writing in a very formal manner was a literal sign of intelligence, because that kind of intellectual work became a necessary component of late pre-modern statecraft, and hence highly valued by the ruling classes of the time and place. The second connection is to cursive, which is a formalized writing that had real legal and business value just a few generations ago.
So I’m sure I am butchering the history of any actual scripts that were mentioned in this effort post. But as someone who has a pretty lively fascination with handwriting, font and text in general, I’d love any questions, clarifications, resources, criticisms and reprimands that are due!
bonkers54@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I can answer all your questions here. Interested in talking live some time?
obinice@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Does this graph account for the huge lack of available diagnosis?
We’ve been on waiting lists for YEARS that only grow and grow to get a 2 hour appointment with someone who can diagnose us with ADHD.
It’ll never happen, I’m sure. The government would rather not put resources into diagnosis, so they can claim almost nobody has ADHD, and not provide any support or recognition for it.
BarrelAgedBoredom@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Two psychiatrists have told me that I almost certainly have ADHD but “we don’t diagnose controlled substances” so they weren’t going to formally diagnose me. It seems the only place I can get a diagnosis as an adult is private specialty clinics. I’m poor and the two clinics in my area aren’t sliding scale (which I can’t afford for most clinics anyway) so I just get to sit here with a confirmation of what I’ve known for years and no way to get it treated, or at the very least, put down on paper
TotallyWorthLife@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Also the un-taboofication of it… see, the “left-handed epidemic”
flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Also the definition was formalized. Grouping certain human traits and calling it by a common name wasn’t a thing before.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 1 week ago
Is there any consensus on this idea or is it just a nice graphic made by a well meaning person?
HellieSkellie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
I believe this idea is gaining traction based on the historical rates of left-handed people (article).
When being left-handed was a cultural faux-pas there were less left-handed people. When the culture shifted away from beating left-handed people, suddenly the number of left handed people sky-rocketed in the short term before settling at its true natural number in the long-term.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 week ago
there isn’t a clear consensus of any of this. it’s all very fuzzy correlations.
there is the counter-argument too that these diagnoses are overdiagnosed, especially in boys, due to environmental/cultural changes in our expectations of their behaviors.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I was definitely over overdiagnosed or misdiagnosed when I was young and because the adults in my life were and still are very prideful, wont admit any mistakes were made. I wish I was allowed to fail classes and was just left alone.
haxboar@hexbear.net 1 week ago
aqwxcvbnji@hexbear.net 1 week ago
Yes, but also capitalist conditions which make it so that human beings can’t develop normally. For example: look at his clip of snub nose monkeys: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yARtExKaIH8
A baby is born, and eveyone is in competition so they could take care of the new baby. If you look at antropological studies of hunter-gatherers, our natural state of affairs shares some crucial elements with this group. A large group of adults which live together and which help eachother with raising a child. This child, as a result, grows up in an environment in which it learns that adults are to be trusted and adults will help them. The current family structure leads to overworked parents which are not equipped for the task of raising a child, which structurally leads to much more conflicts and thus lack of trust (if not trauma).
If we’d organise our society in a way which would correspond to how our species evolved, we’d have a lot less mental health problems.
Just to be clear: this isn’t meant to minimize mental health issues or disparage medical treatments.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
The people who say that can’t read graphs.
pmk@piefed.ca 1 week ago
Why is the time arrow squiggly?
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Jeremy Bearimy baby.
icelimit@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Because time is squiggly. You know how sometimes a day passes real quick and other times it’s a drag?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
It isn’t but because time moves at the speed of light and we are viewing it from a slow as fuck perspective so it becomes wiggly because we couldn’t see it if it was straight, it is too fast.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Drank too much coffee.
orioler25@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I mean, yes, visibility and legitimacy is a major element in why neurodiversity is more widely recognized. However, STEM folks tend to reassert the authority of science as an institution of capitalism and settler-colonialism by not recognizing that these are not “illnesses” or pathological conditions naturally. Yes, they are behaviours that we have no reason to believe are divergent or new from typical human life, and their status as pathological is conditional on the specific social and material conditions that are facilitated by this system.
We are recognizing it more because it is covered more in scholarship, yes, but also because this system has created the conditions where we are even in the position to construct these behaviors as worthy of identifying to prove that they are real. If neurodiverse people didn’t have to justify their worthiness of human compassion and dignity just because they can’t conform to the expectations and demands of a system that only values human life for its productivity.
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
“However, STEM folks tend to reassert the authority of science as an institution of capitalism and settler-colonialism by not recognizing that these are not “illnesses” or pathological conditions naturally. Yes, they are behaviours that we have no reason to believe are divergent or new from typical human life, and their status as pathological is conditional on the specific social and material conditions that are facilitated by this system.”
There’s a lot in this that I agree with, but in the past, I have been quite irked by people who take a hard line version of this stance, who say that I’m being ableist by referring to myself as disabled. Whilst the majority of things that being autistic and ADHD cause me to struggle with that are better understood as a function of our environment, there are plenty of ways in which I would consider to be independent of societal structure.
For instance, I struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, such that a bright sunny day, or loud sounds cause me physical pain, and also cause me to become fatigued quickly if exposed to them for a while. This sucks, and I think it would even in a society that was structured radically differently
orioler25@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m not sure what you thought my comment was suggesting, but ableism is not related to whether or not you subscribe to the idea that disabilities exist, it refers to the systemic oppression of disabled people and construction of disability as devaluing. Races as they are constructed socially are inherently racist as their existence is entirely contingent on a way of life where groups of colonized people are subordinated, but it would not be racism for a racialized person to correctly identify that race exists because of the world they live in. Structuralism and social construction aren’t terms that we use to prove that a thing doesn’t exist, but how human action as the explanation of why that thing has come to be.
What makes something like AuDHD a disability is that people are systemically oppressed for possessing those traits, not that those traits only exist because we made them up. It’s true that you may have pain or discomfort from those traits even outside of this system, but it wouldn’t necessarily exist in terms of ability when society isn’t orgsnized around commodification and profit maximization (wage labour, and the forces that coerce people into productivity). There isn’t a “natural” rate of neurodiversity or ability as that language and all of our understandings of it are inextricably linked as well as realized through a system that is organised around those imperatives.
We know that human beings have not always valued people by the productivity of their bodies because we have archaeological evidence of early humans caring for others who would not have been able to survive on their own (as though any person would). Even more, there is genuinely no way to tell if these kinds of sensory issues have in fact taken on the form they have because of these conditions. Schizophrenia produces wildly different experiences from the same symptoms depending on cultural contexts, for example. Even if you had the same symptoms, how would you experience them differently if you were not forced to hear loud noises or sun exposure, or with no negative connotation attributed to that intolerance, or with many other members of your community experiencing similar symptoms with your value as human beings left completely intact?
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Oh, and what social system of order and productivity do you think should take over that authority? communism? anarchism?
What is ‘typical human life’?
orioler25@lemmy.world 1 week ago
My eyes rolled so hard that I could hear them.
I do not live under a communist or anarchist authority (as funny as it is to suggest there’d be an authoritarian anarchist system), and so I can only analyze the system I do live under. If you want to accept dehumanization for convenience and comfort, you can keep that to yourself. I do not, and therefore I criticize this system the way it deserves to be and do so to better understand how to build something better, whatever that may be.
Either way, it was truly boring to read this comment. If structuralist and postmodern theory from fifty years ago is shocking to you, I’m afraid you aren’t the right person to be discussing this with me.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Zephorah@discuss.online 1 week ago
I saw the big font item and thought this would be about colon cancer. Then I zoomed in.
wpb@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Am I reading this meme right when I think it’s implying that folks are getting over-diagnosed with mental disorders? Because that’s some RFK jr shit. Shame on you.
Bubs12@lemmy.cafe 1 week ago
Diagnosed rate never crosses actual so this is false
wpb@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t really understand what you’re saying, sorry.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Sphericity of planet Earth ---------------------------------------------- /---------------------------- / / / Fraction of Mankind who believes the Earth is spherical -------------/
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Doctors still haven’t figured out I’m telling the truth about how the military industrial complex is manipulating me as part of a case study to see if doctors are actually listening to their patients. I mean, I told my ROTC cadre that my nonexistent sister got me pregnant. What else would they have me do? Stare at goats? We got enough of those guys, so I hadda go learn how to be an idiot online to be of service to my country, amongst other things.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 1 week ago
Image
StarvingMartist@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I remember my dad would tell me his teachers (mean ass nuns) would make him put his knuckles on the desk and smash that shit with a ruler until he stopped using his left hand
fartographer@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I remember my classmate telling me that they did the same to her in Louisiana public elementary school in the late '90s. The teacher even told her that it was because she was using “the devil’s hand.”
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 1 week ago
i had one like these at school too. i often think about whether i should visit her again … just as an “update” sort of years later …
notwhoyouthink@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Holy shit, I’m so sorry your dad went through that. Like how is smashing a child’s hand less of a problem than that child using their ‘other’ hand to write?
Honestly, I’d really like to know what people were so concerned with. All I ever heard was ‘it’s not the correct way’, and the only evidence my mind can stretch to support this is based on the fact that sure, it’s a right handed world and certain things are more efficiently and even safely used with a right hand. I’ve also heard a few cultural reasons regarding cleanliness but these are from cultures far removed from mine and obv never given as an actual reason (to me directly) why using one’s right hand over their left is preferred.
Idk shit like this and many other examples just remind me of how quickly others turn to control and rigidity when faced with something they don’t understand/doesn’t ‘fit’ into their mental presets. This post officially has me in my feelings this morning.
mx_smith@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yep my mother and grandfather both went through that shit. It made my grandfather very ambidextrous.
notwhoyouthink@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
share.google/ZIV41eaL04Agou1zB
Ah since some of us are sharing our childhood experiences with being left handed:
I am ambidextrous, like many lefties. While learning to write my letters in Kindergarten (age 5 for non-US peeps), my teacher noticed that I’d switch hands when the one writing got tired. She didn’t like this at all and kept telling me that I needed to choose one. She actually made quite a stink about it so I chose my left, idk why the left specifically.
I still write with my left, despite trying to retrain back to writing with both at different times in my life. I feel like a mini superpower was taken from me.
Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed that my large motor skills are best used with my right side (arm, leg, hand), and my small motor skills with the left. I think it’s a leftover from being truly ambidextrous, or it may be common amongst left handed people. Idk…the very few others I’ve asked seem to be left handed/sided exclusively.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 week ago
nobody is really wired to me one hand or the other, we can all learn to be ambidextrous. your are that way because you just feel more comfortable/experienced doing certain things with one hand than the other, it’s a formation of neuromuscular habit.
it’s just a matter of practice, but yes, as children the adults around us often DEMAND we be one or the other. just like they demand gendered behaviors, etc. And children conform because adults like conformity.
it’s interesting as an adult, like getting coaching and having to re-learn basic bio mechanics you ‘assume’ are some sort of default, because well, nobody ever told/taught you you could/should be doing things differently. like there are different way to hold pens for different styles of writing…
callyral@pawb.social 1 week ago
i hate it when someone sees something cool and unusual and immediately feels the need to correct it… as if it were a negative thing.
oh - a kindergartner is so good at writing that they can write with either hand, and you see a problem in that?? it’s such a sad way to think! it’s counterproductive pedantry
binarytobis@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think if I had to choose a hand I would choose the right, just because we write left to right and I wouldn’t want to track my hand through fresh pencil and pen marks.
My friend in highschool was left handed and his left hand was always completely covered in graphite.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
While your teacher most likely acted out for entirely wrong reasons, there’s some logic to picking a preferred side and sticking with it, especially while. It allows you to devote more resources to develop better fine motors skills than you could get if you trained both hands
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Looks like another victim of leaded gas. /s
glibg10b@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Was this survey taken among alive people? If so, it might be subject to survivorship bias. Left-handed people might die earlier on average.
walden@wetshav.ing 1 week ago
They asked the deceased, too.