I do believe there is some truth to it. The reason we have had an upswing in diagnosed people is that society's demands have gotten higher and what was previously considered normal is no longer within the normality corridor.

the same can be said about things like mild intellectual disability. With increasing demands, not just in the jib market but in society as a whole, is has become much harder to find a place for them. Not only are they poorer than the average person, they are a lot sicker - both physically and mentally - with a lot less resources to manage.

This is going to become a larger societal problem if we wait longer.

This is certainly how I feel. My desire to get a diagnosis and to start medication was entirely driven by the need to perform at work. After becoming self-employed and setting my own schedule, I lost the need entirely.

It popped up again after 5+ years, when AI started wrecking my industry.

Both times, I stopped medication because while it made me economically productive, it hollowed out the parts of me that I cared most about.

> I do believe there is some truth to it. The reason we have had an upswing in diagnosed people is that society's demands have gotten higher and what was previously considered normal is no longer within the normality corridor.

Related quote from the Jargon file [1]:

"1994-95's fad behavioral disease was a syndrome called Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), supposedly characterized by (among other things) a combination of short attention span with an ability to ‘hyperfocus’ imaginatively on interesting tasks. In 1998-1999 another syndrome that is said to overlap with many hacker traits entered popular awareness: Asperger's syndrome (AS). This disorder is also sometimes called ‘high-function autism’, though researchers are divided on whether AS is in fact a mild form of autism or a distinct syndrome with a different etiology. AS patients exhibit mild to severe deficits in interpreting facial and body-language cues and in modeling or empathizing with others' emotions. Though some AS patients exhibit mild retardation, others compensate for their deficits with high intelligence and analytical ability, and frequently seek out technical fields where problem-solving abilities are at a premium and people skills are relatively unimportant. Both syndromes are thought to relate to abnormalities in neurotransmitter chemistry, especially the brain's processing of serotonin.

Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really ‘diseases’ rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’.

So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about clinical explanations of the hacker personality. That being said, most would also concede that some hacker traits coincide with indicators for non-hyperactive ADD and AS — the status of caffeine as a hacker beverage of choice may be connected to the fact that it bonds to the same neural receptors as Ritalin, the drug most commonly prescribed for ADD. It is probably true that boosters of both would find a rather higher rate of clinical ADD among hackers than the supposedly mainstream-normal 3-5% (AS is rarer at 0.4-0.5%)."

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[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html