LGBT+ hitching their cause to autism and neurodiversity

[PostingForTheFirstTime]

Sorry, I don't know how to provide a token.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lgbt-and-autism-project-postponed-after-ad-included-10-year-olds-hv68kkwgz

"The youth consultation project — called “Exploring Intersectionality” — was organised by Galway Autism Partnership and a volunteer group called Amach! LGBT Galway. It was funded under the LGBTI+ capacity building initiative by Tusla and the Department of Children and Youth Affairs.

The project documentation said it was aimed at promoting awareness within family support services of the issues faced by young people aged 10-24 who were autistic or neurodivergent and gay or trans."

The Times is reporting on it because the promotional literature advertised an age range 10 - 24, when the Galway Autism Partnership agreed to 16 - 24. It is being spun as a genuine mistake.

@Franca123

Can anyone enlighten me on ADHD? A friend recently told me he had been diagnosed with it. He's around 40years old. I've always felt he was mildly depressed. I looked up ADHD but it didn't describe him at all. I'm confused and a lost as to how to support him?

Sorry it’s not much help, but in the first lockdown I did lots of online training and a fair chunk of that was on ADHD- one of the courses features a woman who was diagnosed with ADHD in her 30s after years of ineffective medication for depression and anxiety so there’s possible a link there, or that the way ADHD presents is often mistaken for depression.

I would imagine there’s academic papers out there backing this up, but I’m in education not health so I don’t want to point you to some random paper I’ve found and don’t understand.

Deliriumoftheendless Thanks! Something for me to look into

There seems to be a higher proportion of autistic people with what might be considered gender dysphoria but which may a sensory thing particularly around adolescence when their bodies are changing. There can also be a sense of alienation or isolation from same sex peers, particularly if they don't share the same kind of interests or if they find it hard to be accepted socially. Nowadays for a girl, for example, who feels they don't fit in with other girls and who may for sensory reasons find physical changes very challenging, they may believe that actually they are not a girl at all. I really struggled with being female as a teenager. I hated it and wanted to be a boy but at that time there was no-one encouraging that view, telling me it was possible or even desirable. But i understand the feelings of distress at changing bodies and social alienation and also being less concerned with societal norms which can seem illogical eg gender stereotypes.

LGBTQ is part of neuro-diversity, unless of course you think people are LGBTQ as a lifestyle choice. What else does anyone think it can be?

I always laugh when people claim LGBTQ has nothing to do with lesbians gays and bisexuals when LGB Alliance is mainly striaght people... sorry, Super Straight people

I actually now write out the whole LGBTQIA because otherwise the A gets lost in + or not mentioned at all. That is pretty rubbish for the A people, whatever your views on LGB and T connections or separations.

Why on earth would I (intersex - disorder of sexual development and therefore differences in reproductive organs) be neuro diverse?

So far there hasn't been shown to be any differences in brains of transgender individuals not linked to drug treatment so that cannot be neurodiverse either

The attitudes to parents from some of those self-iding autistic 'advocates' just appall me. But maybe that is a discussion for the other thread.

Yes definitely as I said earlier in the thread I received a barrage of abuse for not saying anything controversial they even picked on the fact I said my daughter and tried to say I was talking about her like a possession all I said was my daughter is vunerable, easily manipulated and at risk of abuse (she's already had small events where people have manipulated her).

You've nailed my thought process around this area to Tibtom Just reading Pookah's post. I think it is an interesting argument. Certainly there is a link between autism and mental illness which I am not convinced can be easily dismiss by 'the world not being accommodating enough'. But statements like Alfonso's whether they mean them that way or not, shut down conversations and discussions and dismiss other people's 'lived experience'.

Those who are seriously impacted by autism have very clear and disabling symptoms. Nothing to do with mental health.

That really needs to be stressed.

The spectrum thing gets imo a bit tricky. The language thrown around to dismiss/excuse certain behaviour 'oh don't worry about him he's a bit autistic'. Happens a lot in my work. Or maybe he's just not very nice? Easier to say oh a bit autistic which is frankly meaningless.

A thread on here about it I recognised a fair bit that resonated and explained some stuff. But then. Who is to say what a 'normal' brain is?

I think we know very very little about how different people think, experience the world etc. Everything seems to be based against some standard decided how?

Eg I have aphantasia. Only found out what it was on here a couple years back. I was. Wow! I had no idea. How can anyone have any idea that things like that are different? You have zero idea how it is in anyone else's head.

But apparently 1 in 20 have aphantasia. So really it's normal isn't it. Doesn't need a special name while the 19 in 20 are seen as the norm. Why are they the norm?

See also synesthesia. 'disorder'. Why a disorder? Who decides? How common is it? If mild then people won't even notice they have it.

My point is that autism is most definitely not a metal health condition. The earliness of showing symptoms and the severity of those symptoms from a young age that occur make this obvious.

The spectrum stuff is s bit iffier. The 'traits' are so broad that probably most people will find something that relates to them.

And who is to say that it's not a normal way of being? At which point on this spectrum?

And that's the bit that is open to this. Identifying as, being used to explain things which are seen as 'different' etc.

Tbh I have trouble seeing how even the online quiz type stuff is related to mental health issues anyway. I might have a look.

When people say link between autism and mental illness.

Sorry just checking.

Is it about those with autism having MH issues due to their experiences in society etc?

Or is there a suggestion that autism can be caused by mental illness?

Or what exactly?

NHS:

'Main signs of autism
Common signs of autism in adults include:

finding it hard to understand what others are thinking or feeling
getting very anxious about social situations
finding it hard to make friends or preferring to be on your own
seeming blunt, rude or not interested in others without meaning to
finding it hard to say how you feel
taking things very literally – for example, you may not understand sarcasm or phrases like "break a leg"
having the same routine every day and getting very anxious if it changes'

I tick plenty of them.

'Other signs of autism
You may also have other signs, like:

not understanding social "rules", such as not talking over people
avoiding eye contact
getting too close to other people, or getting very upset if someone touches or gets too close to you
noticing small details, patterns, smells or sounds that others do not
having a very keen interest in certain subjects or activities
liking to plan things carefully before doing them'

5 of those.

It's so so broad. And I would dispute that some of those things in fact a lot of them are not essentially a part of the diversity of humans.

I also think this really trivialises the issues for those who are seriously impacted (and their families).

@DisgustedofManchester

LGBTQ is part of neuro-diversity, unless of course you think people are LGBTQ as a lifestyle choice. What else does anyone think it can be?

I always laugh when people claim LGBTQ has nothing to do with lesbians gays and bisexuals when LGB Alliance is mainly striaght people... sorry, Super Straight people

???? Wtf?

Sexual orientation is something that is a basic human characteristic.

Are you framing being hetrosexualiy as being 'normal' and being homosexual or bisexual as 'other'?

Neurodiversity started as a neutral term related to differences in how people think experience the world etc. Now it's generally suggestive of neurodiversity that comes with challenges around interacting socially. Sorry if not put that well.

If homosexuality/ bisexuality are neurodiversities then so is heterosexuality.

In many mammals different sexual behaviour is seen in terms of preferring same sex, opposite sex partners or showing no preference. Sexual orientation is accepted to come from the brain and so this is an example of neurodiversity.

???

Another example would be. Neurodiversity in humans gives rise to the majority of people having one dominated 'hand'. Favouring their left or right side.

@Franca123 Can anyone enlighten me on ADHD? A friend recently told me he had been diagnosed with it. He's around 40years old. I've always felt he was mildly depressed.

Could he have been diagnosed with PI (primarily inattentive) type? (As opposed to PH - primarily hyperactive type).

one of the courses features a woman who was diagnosed with ADHD in her 30s after years of ineffective medication for depression and anxiety so there’s possible a link there

So this is probably not so much a link and more that a person with depression or anxiety can look a lot like a person struggling to keep their adhd symptoms under control. They will both go to the doctor with the same symptoms, and doctors can't diagnose ADHD so they attempt to treat the depression. But it's really common to find that with ADHD, the symptoms which look like depression or anxiety will disappear completely (often on day 1 of finding the right type of medication).

To understand it in the simplest terms, it helps if you forget what the letters mean because they're misleading. There's not a deficit in attention - there is an inability to regulate it.

The PH and PI (or combined) types are there to signify how that inability 'presents' itself.

It's still quite misunderstood but at the root it is caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain. We rely on these chemicals for 'standard' functioning like working memory, controlling impulses and urges, or planning and organising.

How that actually impacts an individual's life varies with how severe it is and how well you (or the systems in place) can control it.

For me (PH) when I'm unmedicated it's like having too many thoughts to keep them straight. Like having 400 tabs open on Safari that you definitely want to come back to but holy shit this looks interesting. It's having intense but fleeting obsessions with everything from Viking invasions to personal finance to quantum mechanics to the guy who works three floors up. It's feeling like boredom would be worse than death, and showering is boring, and going to bed is especially boring, and keeping that £80 I need to pay for [really important thing next week] is stupidly boring when I could definitely go blonde like that Pinterest model or get dangerously drunk in a field (teen me). As an adult it's more like redecorating the living room 30 seconds after the thought popped into your head, or ditching the kids bedtime because doesn't a Dominos and a movie sound way more fun than washing the school clothes you need for the morning.

Despite all of that, there are ways you learn to hide it or force yourself to control it (and again this varies by person). Urgent things help. Important things help. Interesting things help. Getting a job where things are urgent and interesting (like... a paramedic, or a manager where your constantly fighting fires) is a good example of how you can sort of trick yourself into thriving.

But the reason this can end up looking like depression or anxiety is because... despite the above thoughts and actions sounding reckless, stupid, uninformed, irrational, immature -- I am not actually any of those things. People know it's fucking them up but without the controls (which medication usually helps with massively) they do it anyway.

It can be extremely overwhelming, which can present like anxiety, and the shame of not being able to control your thoughts and behaviours can spiral into self-loathing, which can look and feel a lot like depression.

That's just my two cents, hope it helps in some way

@NiceGerbil

When people say link between autism and mental illness.

Sorry just checking.

Is it about those with autism having MH issues due to their experiences in society etc?

Or is there a suggestion that autism can be caused by mental illness?

Or what exactly?

A link means a corrolation: autism and mental illness are highly correlated. I think dismissing it as 'due to their experiences in society' is as unhelpful. For a start I don't think it is 'just' about society. To what extent does autism itself lead to poorer mental health? Is the frequency of ocd with autism due to the differences in the autistic brain? What about anxiety? Do the same differences that cause communication challenges also mean anxiety is inherently more likely? Do those difference mean treatments (including drugs) have different impacts in the same way stimulants impact an 'adhd brain' differently? Also where society does impact how much of that 'fixable'?

I have also seen frequent proclamations that autism and learning disability are not linked too. They are - approx 40% of people with learning disabilities are autistic.

As for who decides the norm? This is the mean and standard deviation. 95% of the population fall within 2 standard deviations either side of the mean where there is a normal distribution. So someone who falls outwith this range would be considered to fall outwith the norm.

People latch on to them, or start wanting to spend the money on not so useful ways, in some cases they become a political tool, people start to self diagnose.

I've been noticing this rapid onset of self-diagnosis and self-identifying with ADHD and "the community" (rightly or wrongly) blames tiktok.

I feel like it's a culmination of different factors creating an environment that is ripe for [whatever it is we're calling this phenomenon].

On one hand, you have the people who actually have 'the thing' who are being lured (or dragged) into these activist groups. Wether it's girls with ASD who don't fit in and are being told this is the answer, or lesbians who said they don't like certain genitals being aggressively re-educated until 'they do'.

On the other, you have the ones who've realised that self-identifying as demigender with a pinch of masc-femme isn't really unique enough or special enough these days, and they need more, so they throw in another label. Another 'issue' for them to lecture their followers on. To fight for. To police. And once everyone has been 'educated' on the tics, or the adhd, or the PTSD, or the ASD, it will be added to this all encompassing 'identifying and expressing as' community, and now it's a tool you can pull out when you need to feel validated.

It's actually quite fascinating to watch it play out (or it would be if it wasn't so concerning).

OSDD is one I've seen people explaining to the great uneducated (in a 30 second clip, naturally). I'm not a psychiatrist, but their explanations (which justify either the behaviours they present on social media or a new change of identity) don't seem to be DMV criteria type stuff. It looks like... cosplay to me?

And all of this is happening against a backdrop of identity politics, extreme left and right wings, and the invisible ones pulling the strings who know exactly how to use all of this for money and power.

Women and girls are commonly diagnosed with and treated for depression when they have any number of issues. It's a massive feminist issue.

'As for who decides the norm? This is the mean and standard deviation. 95% of the population fall within 2 standard deviations either side of the mean where there is a normal distribution. So someone who falls outwith this range would be considered to fall outwith the norm.'

Well that's all well and good but in real life not how things work.

When it comes to things that are easy to measure across the population eg height then it's fairly straightforward.

When it comes to things that have many different factors, are not well understood, and are not generally measured across the population. And the things to be measured are very difficult to measure in any consistent/ reliable way. Then that falls apart a bit.

There's also bias. Eg

Aphantasia is they think experienced by 1 in 20 people. Little is known about it at all. Maybe it's more people. Maybe there's a spectrum or even other ways that people's brains work in that area. We don't know.

And yet the 1 in 20 get a word that means something is missing.

What they don't know is how those people process things without the visuals. Maybe it's something more efficient. Maybe they have something the other people don't.

Much of our teaching methods are unsuitable for people with this. 1 in 20.

But there are probably other things too. Who knows? Who knows what it's like inside anyone else's head? Each person's individual experience is their 'norm'.

There's the fact that male has been default, the 'norm' in so many things for so long with big consequences for women.

Bias and who decides the norm should never be dismissed.

Trying to function in a world that is not designed for you, in whatever way. Ranges from a sense of not being quite comfy to a real inability to negotiate some or lots of it.

Which can lead to MH problems. Obviously.

Wtf a statement that a person has a disability (and yes it's often autism) on social media is often deployed when a person is losing an argument...

@Tibtom

People latch on to them, or start wanting to spend the money on not so useful ways, in some cases they become a political tool, people start to self diagnose.

Funding is always a political tool. A good example is the funding of women's organisations in Scotland being conditional on the supporting the governments antiwomen agenda. But even where if is less obvious than that it is still a mechanism to achieve political ends. And groups change their direction to access those funds. Large organisations do so in a corporate way to tender for large grants in areas they have no prior experience. But grassroots groups change too - indeed it can take relatively small amounts of funding to capture a grassroots groups and suddenly you have people proclaiming a lived experience narrative which matches your goals and silencing of those who don't.

Yes, it's true, and difficult to guard against.

But the link between the charitable sector and state funding being routed through them has created a lot of problems. A similar problem can come from having a very wealthy patron that an organisation becomes dependent on.

And the professionalization of the charitable sector has not really been good for it either.

With grassroots orgs, I think size becomes a factor. Smaller community based organisations can change direction, but aren't as likely to be of interest from those outside, or outsiders are recognized. Change from within the community isn't always negative, if it reflects the needs of the community. Although - small community politics can be brutal, so there's that.

Agree with all that lobster.

Would add-

Small local orgs are very vulnerable to fluctuations in income

The contracts from various sources esp govt and in the past Europe acted to dictate what should be delivered and to who, and how to measure results and meet targets and the funding was reliant on those things being met and results proved in a certain format.

While obv if you're giving funding it makes sense to understand what will be done with and and make sure it delivers change on the ground.

In practice this can mean changes in focus or even parts of the orgs core beliefs.

And I have experience with the resource spent on getting the paperwork done, a small org. 3 people full time calling those who had received assistance to follow up and find outcomes and if positive get paperwork filled in that many people can't be arsed with obviously. Outcomes 3 6 and 12 months.

The evidence was wanted from those who had got a job but of course they had moved on and getting a long form filled in by them was like getting blood from a stone understandably. But to get the higher levels of funding for that person the paperwork had to be done and with nothing missing etc.

Incentives like vouchers were used to try and encourage obv money spent on order to get the funding money. And not spent on the service.

It's good to be really clear about the science and what psychologists understand.

They do not know that depression, for example, is caused by a chemical imbalance, or some sort of biodiversity. To some extent the chemical imbalance idea as the origin has been discredited.

We don't know what causes homosexuality, from a purely biological POV, nor whether it's inborn or inherent in some way. People have theories on this, but none have won the day. It's not at all clear that it's the same in every individual and some good reasons to think it's not. It's also not clear that the way we define these categories is really the way that best reflects their structure, in any case our way of thinking of them as types of people is unusual historically.

Psychologically, it's not at all clear or even all that likely that a sexual orientation toward men, women, or both, is part of the same psychological structures or biological capacities or spectrum as any other categories that get added on like demisexual or asexual etc. These probably represent completely different phenomena with different causes.

People tend to assume that we know a lot more definite information about these things than science really has.

@NiceGerbil

Agree with all that lobster.

Would add-

Small local orgs are very vulnerable to fluctuations in income

The contracts from various sources esp govt and in the past Europe acted to dictate what should be delivered and to who, and how to measure results and meet targets and the funding was reliant on those things being met and results proved in a certain format.

While obv if you're giving funding it makes sense to understand what will be done with and and make sure it delivers change on the ground.

In practice this can mean changes in focus or even parts of the orgs core beliefs.

And I have experience with the resource spent on getting the paperwork done, a small org. 3 people full time calling those who had received assistance to follow up and find outcomes and if positive get paperwork filled in that many people can't be arsed with obviously. Outcomes 3 6 and 12 months.

The evidence was wanted from those who had got a job but of course they had moved on and getting a long form filled in by them was like getting blood from a stone understandably. But to get the higher levels of funding for that person the paperwork had to be done and with nothing missing etc.

Incentives like vouchers were used to try and encourage obv money spent on order to get the funding money. And not spent on the service.

I'm involved in an organisation that runs a soup kitchen, though I'm not directly involved in that facet. But it's very clear how this desire to be able to measure things causes problems.

It's exactally what you think of in terms of a grass roots org, a church that provides food for in an underprivileged urban community. A lot of what makes it possible is the buildings and the volunteers who give their time. But to get the big food donors involves, like supermarkes, the ones that can reliably provide large amounts, you have to follow their donation policies. And they want to know they are getting results for their charitable dollars.

Which means the one part time paid worker has to spend a lot of time following up with paperwork. And also meeting their standards for other things which means telling the grass roots volunteers that they can't prepare food in their home kitchens any more.

And then the national body regulating soup kitchens wants us to offer mindfulness meditation.

Sexuality and heteornormativity / changes in orientation during life most commonly older women starting to date women. It's a really interesting discussion. To do with social pressures, are more people bisexual but behave and see themselves as straight. If it was a totally equal society with no risks/ social stuff around pregnancy, same sex sexual activity, sexual violence etc etc what would things look like.

That's by the by though.

For an awful lot of people their sexuality is clear to them and is from a young age.

There is no suggestion that homosexuality is a medical condition. And so it's a poor parallel to draw to autism.

@Sickoffamilydrama

You've nailed my thought process around this area to Tibtom Just reading Pookah's post. I think it is an interesting argument. Certainly there is a link between autism and mental illness which I am not convinced can be easily dismiss by 'the world not being accommodating enough'. But statements like Alfonso's whether they mean them that way or not, shut down conversations and discussions and dismiss other people's 'lived experience'.

Have any of the posters who take this view got a disability that they have had from birth, and that has had a significant impact on their ability to easily navigate normal everyday life?

Not being nosy but would like to understand whether those posters have experience of that situation themselves.