It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients.

Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.

> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.

Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.

> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.

You are grossly over-diagnosing.

When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.

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growingkittens a day ago | parent | next [-]

A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.

Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.

People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.

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Aurornis a day ago | parent [-]

> A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.

Speaking in cryptic aphorisms doesn't help anything.

Psychiatry isn't a field where everyone has a single perspective. There is a lot of debate within psychiatry and much research exploring different perspectives.

However, I don't think it's appropriate for a non-psychiatrist to start diagnosing half of the population with a disorder or 1 in 8 people they meet with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

An untrained perspective is not on the same level as the professionals and researchers.

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growingkittens a day ago | parent [-]

This boils down to "I think you are wrong because you are not an authority figure."

	▲	Aurornis a day ago \| parent [-]
		I trust trained professionals with years of experience across thousands of patients to be better equipped to diagnose people with mental health conditions than someone online who diagnoses literally half of the people they meet with disorders, yes. Repeating “psychiatry is in its infancy” over and over again does not elevate your opinion to the same level of trained professionals and academic research.

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mjburgess a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem.

Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher

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Aurornis a day ago | parent [-]

> You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population.

I'm not assuming anything. I literally explained that the only way it's possible is for someone to avoid the general population and only socialize in environments with extreme bias.

The more important point is that diagnosing autism is not something you can do by simply meeting people in social situations. It's something that takes training and experience by professionals, not an untrained person who sizes people up as they meet them in a social capacity.

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growingkittens a day ago | parent [-]

Again, psychiatry is in its infancy. Many professionals use outdated models or stereotypes in practice. Living as an autistic individual can make it easier to clock other autistic people, because it's rare to meet someone who functions or thinks the same way you do and sticks out like a sore thumb. For example, "thinking in pictures" is not a universal autistic trait, but it's a pretty well known one.

	▲	Dylan16807 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Being easy to clock won't bring the ratio of something up to 1/8 or 1/4 or 1/2.