• cynar@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    The term “neurodiverse” (or as a friend calls it “neurospicy”) came about because of this. It turns out that ASD blurs into a lot of other “conditions”. They also tend to blur into each other.

    Rather than deal with explaining the details of how your weird, neurodiverse is used to indicate your weird, but not broken. E.g. high functioning autism isn’t naturally a disorder. Instead it makes you better at some things, but worse at others. Unfortunately, one of those happens to be social skills.

    Neurodiverse people tend to have a lot more in common than average. It’s both from social conditioning, and commonality of interests. We also often find “normal” to be uninteresting, if not boring. We seem to naturally gather and seek out like minded people. It also runs in families. This makes it seem that it’s disproportionately common. We’re not actually that common, we just tend to just concentrate into a few areas.

    ASD etc have there uses, but as clinical terms, for problem management. It’s annoying when it’s overused in media, as a catch all term.

    • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I mean we ARE a lot more common than uneducated people think. They have the “autism = unable to speak or walk normally” mentality instead of that one kid who likes to draw and listen to music.

      • cynar@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        We are more common than many thing. However, we also tend to self select our groupings. We are a lot less common than WE feel we are.

        Basically, about 50% of my local makerspace are ND. That is way higher than the general populous. However, even within family, work, or random friend groups, I still see an abnormally high percentage. I basically self select for weird people and have done all my life. This seems to be common for many of us.