cosmic-kemet:

anditwaspun:

tumblr was founded in 2007
facebook was founded in 2004
twitter was founded in 2006

All of these websites have been up for around 10 years, yet none of them have the option for closed captioning. Deaf/hard of hearing people’s enjoyment of media is hugely dependent on CC so make your websites accessible goddamnit.

Wow. Plz BOOST.

withasmoothroundstone:

wheeliewifee:

princekilioferebor:

i guarantee there are a lot more neurodivergent ppl pretending to be neurotypical than the other way around 

YES. 1,000% fact.

Also there’s lots of neurodivergent people pretending to be different types of neurodivergent people.  And that is considered some kind of horrible pathology instead of a survival tactic.  I used that to survive situations where I would never have been able to pass for nondisabled, but where passing for various kinds of crazy or intellectually disabled, whether deliberately or accidentally, was necessary for survival reasons.  And I get treated as some kind of monster for having done that.  Whereas if I’d been able to go on feigning normality (which, if it can be said to have happened at all – which I have doubts about – would have lasted my 11th year (6th grade) and no more, not before, not since) that would have been praised.  There’s a double standard here:  Pretend to be other-type-of-neurodivergent and you must have some horrible disease that makes you pretend things for attention (um, no, it’s SURVIVAL, trust me).  Pretend to be neurotypical and you’re doing the world a wonderful favor.

Most autistic people I’ve met who were misdiagnosed or unofficially misidentified in various contexts as intellectually disabled or crazy, have at some point or another deliberately lived up to those expectations because it was the safest thing to do at the time.  (I actually ran a panel discussion on this for a conference once.  This is something that people admitted to doing whether they were considered “low functioning” or “high functioning” at the time they were doing it.   One guy said he even still used people’s expectations of him as incapable of understanding things, to get away with doing stuff he couldn’t otherwise do.  Which isn’t just a survival thing, it’s a person thing.)

geekhyena:

jumpingjacktrash:

vastderp:

barbaricyip:

solipsistful:

lifeofaseamonster:

friendly reminder that many disorders and diagnoses under the umbrella of neurodivergence overlap with other disorders and diagnoses, so the often parodied “laundry list of problems” isn’t far-fetched

it’s very possible and even likely that your neurodivergent friend doesn’t just have one thing and one thing only as a neuroatypical identifier 

i love the statistics on this

the average number of diagnoses for those who have any neurodivergent diagnosis is 2, sometimes approaching 3 in some studies we’ve seen.

especially with something like major depressive disorder, you’ve got like an 80% chance to have some other diagnosis as well. it’s actually sorta unusual to have just depression.

then you’ve got the personality disorders, which are basically all hugely comorbid with each other to the point where some psychologists say that it’s much more useful to think of them as specific traits rather than discrete disorders (e.g. someone might be personality disordered with borderline, avoidant, and schizotypal traits, rather than “having” separate borderline, avoidant, and schizotypal PDs. this is basically what the proposed dimensional-categorical model in the DSM-V is trying to do.) and then on top of that you’ve got the hella ways that personality disorders are comorbid with non-personality disorders.

and then you’ve got more and more research about how so many disorders can be caused by trauma. so, folks who have experienced trauma, especially childhood trauma, might have a lot of comorbid traumagenic neurodiversities: PTSD, borderline, schizophrenia, DID, eating disorders, etc. etc. etc. (some folks profess that recognizing the traumagenic nature of so many mental illnesses is the “solution to the problem of comorbidity”).

– Ace

this does a really good job of illuminating why ‘diagnosis’ itself is such a fluid term. clinicians ‘diagnose’ ppl using the once-medical/technical, now-deliberately-vague language of the dsm bc it’s supposed to be useful in helping the clinician (and other clinicians) help that person figure themselves out and reach some sort of wellness equilibrium. diagnosis in mental health simply does not parallel diagnosis in physiological health. 

although, i suppose you could make a case for a comparison using encephalitis, i.e. brain fever, when your brain swells up and your body starts shutting down–there are two main manifestations of encephalitis, with one being ‘viral’ and the other being ‘your immune system is up to shenanigans’, but within those two domains there are a NUMBER of causes and it’s in fact not really common for the physician to identify what the cause actually was. all they know is that YOUR BRAIN IS ON FIRE and also you’re probably dying. this is what happened to me! they tested me for the twenty most common causes of the symptoms i was showing (i.e. encephalitis) and everything came up negative. on my records, in the space where doctors were supposed to write my diagnosis, they just wrote ‘encephalitis.’ a couple enterprising ones wrote ‘meningitis,’ but 1) i’d had the vaccine recently enough that this would be an anomaly in itself and 2) they were still just guessing.

takeaway lesson: diagnosis isn’t about pinning down specific Things That Are Happening to a person. it’s about describing the symptoms well enough that treatment becomes possible. if ppl have more than one diagnosis, it’s a symptom of our diagnostic system, and our attempts to best outline what’s going on so that (IDEALLY) a person’s general well-being can be attended using structured methods.

this is another reason why self-diagnosis and self-treatment are incredibly difficult things to pull off.

i have had people call me a liar and a faker because having multiple actual diagnoses must mean i’m collecting disorders for attention.

i kicked those people out of my life because fuck ‘em. but the point is, no, autism and adhd are very frequently comorbid, and living with those undiagnosed until i was in my 30′s is the reason for the ptsd and social anxiety, and possibly the depression.

nobody thinks i’m making shit up when i explain that having arthritis in my lower back is the ultimate cause of this bursitis in my hip. but when i say adhd causes my insomnia, or childhood trauma from ableist bullying for my autism has made me hypervigilant, people think i’m trying to be a snowflake.

the human body is super complicated, and the brain is the most complicated part. quit thinking like you’re an expert on my medical issues. my doctor’s frequently stumped, and you’re just some schmoe. knock it off.

My therapist causes anxiety/migraines/OCD a neurologic trio because they have such high comorbidity – there’s either some sort of genetic link, or an underlying physiological link, or both, but there’s a pretty big correlation in her experience. She also sees a lot of comorbidity between the above and PTSD, as well as a lot of overlap between the above trio and autism. She’s not sure why, but she’s certainly seen a lot of it (some of that could be sampling bias though, as she specializes in autistic adults and people with complex PTSD)