Autism has become a culturally dominant force that's displaced other kinds of neurodiversity almost completely. All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family.

The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.

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tpmoney 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family. The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.

Why do you feel this way? Do you not think having to do those things is tiring and exhausting for the affected people? Do you think the simulator’s author would disagree? If someone wrote a simulator for trying to code switch as a Black person or an Asian person and didn’t include all the ways that autistic people have to mask, would you feel they were also not promoting empathy?

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true_religion a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What other kinds of neurodivergence is it masking?

You did give examples, but only for ways it perhaps fails in promoting empathy for groups with similar problems.

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Aurornis a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think masking is necessarily the right word, but when people start self-diagnosing themselves they often miss the correct problem in favor of what's popular on their social media feeds.

Right now, Autism and/or ADHD are the two that are most prevalent on social media. Many people, especially younger people who spend a lot of time on Reddit, TikTok, or other sites, see these diagnoses trend with vague descriptions about what they entail. When they encounter struggles, they recall those vague descriptions, make a connection, and assume their life problems are due to the diagnosis.

It's not uncommon to read accounts of people who describe their symptoms as textbook social anxiety or depression who will nevertheless insist they have "AuDHD" as self-diagnosed via their social media consumption.

It can actually be hard to break them out of one preferred diagnosis and get them going down the right path to address the problem.

An example: Someone develops an eating disorder, but they read on Reddit that forgetting to eat and having low energy for schoolwork can be a symptoms of ADHD. They self-diagnose as ADHD and avoid addressing their very obvious eating disorder problem. They might even get insulted when someone suggests they have an eating disorder, insisting that the other person must not understand ADHD.

This pattern isn't unique to autism or ADHD. It's common to all trending internet diagnoses. You will find communities where everyone convinces themselves they have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. Doctors who treat those two conditions are currently rejecting referrals at a high rate due to extreme self-diagnosis via TikTok. The people self-diagnosing with those conditions usually do have something wrong, but they've latched on to one explanation that doesn't fit and they won't let go because they think it explains everything about them.

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exmadscientist a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I, personally, just really really hate how many people use "neurodiverse" as a synonym for "autistic". I am not neurotypical but am very much not autistic, and I'm far from the only one.

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aleph_minus_one 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Indeed using the term "neurodiverse" only makes sense if you also want to include, for example, psychopaths (another form of neurodiversity) in the group that you want to describe.

	▲	true_religion 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t see any reason not to include psychopathy. It’s not a synonym for evil: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...

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pfannkuchen 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It almost sounds like you’re implying that a culturally and ethnically homogenous society would be easier for people to handle…

	▲	Dylan16807 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It would be, at an objective level. If you're trying to imply some accusation, please be explicit about it. No vague deniable hinting.

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wizzwizz4 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I understand where you're coming from, and I would even agree with the denotation of every sentence in your first paragraph, but I think you're missing a lot.

Being "culturally dominant" is not a good thing for autistic people: it's not autistic voices that dominate, but mostly eugenics groups, with the occasional well-meaning (but usually uninformed) activist group trying to oppose the narrative. If you're familiar with the kind of "anti-racist" corporate training that's mostly just white guilt with a few racial stereotypes thrown in, then you know how far "well-meaning" can take you.

While we can draw many analogies to autistic masking, autistic masking is qualitatively different to the examples you've listed. We have other words for the other things (e.g. "talking white" is a special-case of "situational code-switching", and "staying closeted" is a special-case of something that I don't know a name for). You're skirting (and, I think, crossing) the line between analogy and appropriation in your first paragraph. (See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440873, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45441925)

I'm not really sure what you mean by your "actually does the opposite" remark in the second paragraph, unless you're automatically treating this interactive description of autism made with care, by someone with personal experience of being autistic, as the kind of rubbish that's made by "well-meaning" ignorants for low-quality corporate training.

People with other flavours of neurodivergence have produced similar "simulators" (a kind of RPG, really). You might be familiar with Spoon Theory, originally devised to describe the psychological burden of living with lupus? That simulator is a TTRPG. I suspect that this simulator was made by someone who'd be classified as neurodivergent in respects not classified as autism.