Autism, do labels and diagnoses help or hinder? - Professor Sami Timimi 

Also, there could be no “it”. Sometimes there are no differences in the child at all but the context the child is in causes him to act differently. Or there are no differences at all, even in context, and the child is just accused of autism by someone who hates them.

@@me-ye6ld I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said. I also think the same way sometimes. It would be nicer not to live in a world of diagnoses. However, the world’s not likely to change anytime soon, and until people are able to respond more flexibly to each other's needs, it can be a helpful qualifier or backup. I’m unsure what you mean by problems it creates for other people, though. I wouldn't choose the word shame either but I had no explainer to say living like this whilst it suits most other people does not suit me and is making me unwell. I’m also not the only person you can find reporting diagnosis to be helpful, So my experience may not be universal, but it’s not uncommon either.

@@me-ye6ld exactly what I spend my time arguing ironically. However I find its much more the other way around with autistic adults being denied access to mental health treatment due to autism. I don’t know about the person you’re describing but yeh I see certain types of people do this with any diagnosis, adopt a sick role and see everything as fixed. I don’t disagree but we need to consider experiences of people who have benefited also, many of whom are not like the person you are describing at all. I’ve not required therapy, I don’t engage in ‘self destructive’ behaviours either, and I’ve met others who are similar. I think we are a long way from binning diagnoses, it will be a hard road in the current social structure to convince people to met needs without labelling them in some way. As I said don’t disagree but wanted to show that the outcome isn’t always a net negative for the person.

​​​​​​​@@ButterflyonStoneThis is a complex matter of discussion but I'm one of those who has been harmed by the psychiatric labels. I'm diagnosed with OCD, my diagnosis was made in a moment in my life were I was very very distressed, and as far as I can remember I even didn't have OC behaviors that were such a big deal/problem, but my psychiatrist for some reason thought that OCD was what was "wrong" in me. At first I didn't care about the label and what it meant (it was not explained to me neither) but I went to psychotherapy because it was what was deemed appropiate for me, that and "medication". So I went to psychotherapy for a couple of years and took my "medication" without knowing exactly why. Two years ago I became interested in my psychiatric diagnosis of OCD because I felt so bad, inside of me, emotionally, again. So I remembered my OCD diagnosis and I said to myself "Aha! This is what is and was wrong with me but I didn't noticed it, and it has treatment options so I can fix it and feel and be "normal" again!". So, recently, because the label didn't help me feel better I researched about psychiatric diagnoses and its validity and found Sami Timimi. My OCD label didn't explained shit about why I had those behaviors, my personal history, social and family circumstances, etc, it just said that I had some OCD behaviors and then said that THOSE were the problem, the cause of my suffering. Because I, as most people, thrusted medicine and doctors, being psychiatrists doctors and psychiatric diagnoses medical diagnoses (false diagnoses, but I didn't knew then), and I, having a psychiatric diagnosis, I thought that explained my suffering and offered me solutions for stopping the suffering or to make me feel better. That did not happen. So, in the end, Sami Timimi is right, I wrongly made a big deal of my OC behaviors that even at the time of my diagnosis weren't that important and what I really was worried about, and I lost lots of time and energy trying to "fix" my problem, because I thought that was my problem. But It is not. The source of my suffering is and was other problems that my diagnosis obscured. Anyway, just telling my history.😅

@@Gonzo-GT yeh a lot of people get into the trap of wanting to ‘feel better’, but whether you have a diagnosis or believe in a diagnosis it’s an aimless goal that seldom results in meaningful improvement. When I started thinking about what I wanted to prioritise, my values and goals things got better, I still had pain, and low mood but I had tangible realistic changes and steps forward. As a therapist I’m straight up front when people ask me to make them feel better. Labels in this context are meaningless and its not my job to make them happy. I also can’t say why a person has specific behaviours I haven’t lived their lives even if I had there’s factors you could never truly get to the bottom off. I do have mixed feelings when it comes to autism though which is slightly different. People seem less in a fight with themselves after the diagnosis, and more accepting of who they are. This from professional and personal experience. The discussion on autism is quite a different space to the one on mental illness.

@@ButterflyonStone Yeah, I think you're right. I should also accept more myself and not trying to fix any part of myself, I just was very distressed and confused and I thought this was the way to go. To my defense, it's also a matter of culture, as Sami says, people think that psychiatric diagnoses explains the source of people's problems and suffering but they really don't in any form. I also researched autism and I identify with a few things but I just don't want any more psychiatric labels in my life, and after what I have learnt I don't believe in them (because they are not medically of scientifically valid anyway). Thanks for your time.

There is no treatment - but luck what parents you get and what skills in parenting they get.

I still don’t understand what a social bias is. Or instinctively social behavior. I would think that societies norms are so arbitrary and non-self evident that nobody would be able to pick up on these without being told, whether they had autism or not.

I also do not believe it they are responding in ways that are unhelpful because they are unaware. Many times, people who throw the autism label around and mistreat their children are just being intentionally obtuse and assumptive.

I don’t know what you mean by instinctive social understanding. Such a concept does not make any sense because there are all different kinds of people in society. You might accuse a child of poor social understanding for not reading someone who is intentionally trying to be unreadable as a way of bullying him. Or for not reading some objectively arbitrary social preference that nobody told him about. To say that a person is poor at reading people socially, there would have to be some sort of monolithic, universal, social reality, that everybody else engages in, AND that social reality would have to be objective, self evident, and not arbitrary.

Interesting that administering oxytocin improves symptoms... also interesting that those with ASD have lower TPJ (temporal parietal junction) activity associated with mentalizing, which is thinking about what others are thinking.

@@hilaryforgie4498 that doesn’t make any sense. How would oxytocin cause you to know information that you don’t know? Such as, inherently arbitrary social rules?

@@blackswan4486 Maybe it's a soporific. Which raises the question that it might be a dangerous thing, as previously you might be sometimes motivated to get-the-hell-out-of-there when subjected to abuse from others - but after the ocytocin you might be less likely to act to escape the situation.

Far from nonsense, it's extremely cogent. Sami Timimi is an excellent thinker and writer.

Grow up.

What Sami Timimi says is true.

Christopher Clark "How do you know different brain wiring exists? Can you see it in a brain scan?" Yes, there is a brain scan called a quantitative EEG (qEEG) which shows up the connections and communication in autism. It shows where there are over-connections and under-connections. I believe also fMRI can show it up, by testing to see which parts of the brain activate and communicate during testing.

Believe what you like, but imaging techniques are NOT that exact. There are NO biological markers that identify autism that are specific to autism. I'm autistic. I'm also a psychologist. I also have a background in applied mathematics and medical physics, as well as teaching (including teaching research methods at university). There is NO identifiable thing we can see as autism - like he says. I also extended my education into ethnopsychology and, as a project to serve as a 'proof of concept' for the idea that what we call 'autism' should be seen as a set of characteristics that say much about how we perceive and respond to the world around us and this set of characteristics should be understood as a paracultural phenomenon. We cannot identify 'autism', per se, in the brain; but we can identify a set of autistic ways of perceiving and responding to events aand objects in our environments. But we cannot claim 'brain wiring' arguments because those arguments are rather poor analogies for what is really happening at the cellular level.

Planet Autism I said _specific_ to autism. Grow up.

Deary me. I'm afraid I don't feed trolls, shame I didn't realise earlier that you are one. Cloud Cuckoo Land cannot be argued with so I won't respond to your posts again. Be off with you.

Actually, the brain CAN be rewired. Study neuroplasticity.