Kulturkampf

[Eric Cartman]

We need to stop diagnosing each other with autism and ADHD

One academic study published earlier this month suggested that social media content is “romanticising” ADHD, portraying it as a “cute” disorder and pathologising “normal everyday experiences” as symptoms – bog-standard things like having a messy bedroom, forgetting where your keys are or procrastinating at work. After analysing the 100 most popular ADHD videos on TikTok, psychologists from the University of British Columbia in Canada found that fewer than half the claims about symptoms were “robust” or accurately reflected clinical guidelines and classed two-thirds of the ADHD-related statements as “normal human experiences”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, young adults who watched loads of ADHD content were far more likely to have overestimated the prevalence and severity of “symptoms” in the general population.

Maybe if we normalise calling people autistic as an insult, it will have a certain level of social stigma that would stop this?
Like, when people used retarded as a slur for anything stupid people did, you didn't have teenagers earnestly convincing themselves that maybe they actually are retarded when they did common dumb things like leaving their coffee on the roof of their car before driving off or whatever