I've been reading up on mental disorders lately out of curiosity, and I found some ever so interesting information I'd like to share, but first, I would request humbly that all participants be respectful and thoughtful about their replies to my questions.

You may assume from the beginning that my research is all an elaborate mean joke heavily laden with confirmation bias and other some such bullshit terminology meant to discredit my hard work. To that I say, most of you blooper pedants will incorrectly use any fallacy you think sounds smart in the moment just to spite me regardless, so eat me if it pleases you, but try to resist the urge to downvote and attack me at every turn.

I get it, you're pissed I'm such an asshole, but you're not gonna change that with downvotes and huffery puffery, and besides, I come today in peace. Honest. Based on a post I saw last night, I think there is room for a new aspect of debate that really hasn't been addressed too much yet. I'm here to help and offer what I know, and I wanna hear from serious individuals who like to be entertained while they are entertaining new ideas and offering constructive feedback.

Having said that, I will endeavor to speak on these topics with as little to zero sarcasm or humor in poor taste as possible (It's kinda my thing, though. No promises.), and while I don't like to limit myself in that way for long, I really believe this post may be of some value to the greater context of the overall debates that take place here at PPD, and I think as I go on we'll all begin to see why.

Clearly I'm not a professional psychologist, so I'm not qualified to say anything other than that this will be nothing more than my own speculation, but I think it's all worth considering nonetheless. I have faith you'll see it that way too, because it would appear that I am in good company introducing this topic here, thus I would encourage anyone who knows more than myself about any of the disorders I will be talking about to correct whatever I get wrong.

So enough deliberation about my oddly contradictory and ambivalent intentions. On to my main points.

Here we have a handy chart that shows relatively all the different disorders that are associated with Autism, and what I find most curious about it is how Autism is kinda the latest mental disorder that has been talked about in recent years, but what it really is is a blanket name for all the previous mental disorders that have been identified and researched over time. That isn't what I take issue with, it's just news to me, but if I'm right, what this chart implies is that what makes Autism Autism is that it's not the possession of just one, but multiple or maybe a mixture of known mental disorders at the same time.

I could be entirely wrong about this (because why should that make sense at all), yet all the other resources I go to don't make it clear that this is really the case, but none of them really suggest otherwise either. Assuming I'm in the ballpark, let's proceed.

This link to WebMD gives a pretty decent explanation of what Autism Spectrum Disorder is if you want to read it, but I'm actually going to be quoting something of interest I grabbed off another site because I liked the way it was worded and formatted better.

Social impairment

Most children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) have trouble engaging in everyday social interactions. For example, some children with ASD may:

  • Make little eye contact
  • Tend to look and listen less to people in their environment or fail to respond to other people
  • Rarely seek to share their enjoyment of toys or activities by pointing or showing things to others
  • Respond unusually when others show anger, distress, or affection.

Judging by all the different material I have to go on, it seems rather implied these symptoms are first being taken into account when a child is as young three or four years old, and from one source so far as early as infancy--which I personally think is a new level of insanity we aught to be paying more attention to. Seriously.

Now, by a show of hands, how many of you can clearly remember making solid steady confident deliberately focused eye contact while discussing current events with all the poise and consideration of a fully grown adult news anchor reading the evening news to you on TV, like with other children or even your parents? I'm just saying, there is no way you knew what the hell was going on 100% of the time when you were interacting with others as a toddler. It's not like you were shaking hands and exchanging contact details in the sandbox while playing with other kids who were barely aware of their own existences in an attempt to network for future sandcastle building contracts. You were a child, and it's probably safe to assume you behaved like a child most of the time. I mean, what was your biggest concern at three or four if you can remember being cognizant of the fact that you were a conscious human being and alive on planet Earth at that age? You wanted to play with toys and basically always have fun and explore and stuff, right? If you do remember playing with toys around other children, you probably remember times when you weren't too keen on sharing them either cause you didn't have any concept of ownership yet. This is totally normal behavior for young children that age is what I'm getting at, and just what exactly are the proper responses a child should have to being shown anger, distress, or affection? That part right there is what blows my mind most of all. It only leaves me with one question:

Why exactly are we showing greater concern for the social competence of literal zero year old infants up to the age of toddlers and holding them medically and psychologically more accountable for their actions and behaviors than most grown adult ass women? That's what I wanna know.

The thing that kills me most about almost every single medical description provided for any one of these individual disorders is how vaguely or confusingly the symptoms are described, and how indistinguishable the majority of them are from what I would call normal behavior in children, and even most adults to a lesser extent. I'm willing to bet I'm not alone in my observations, and that's why I want to share more of them with you.

What I'm sensing here is the real issue with at least a good fraction or more of cases of ASD are likely just a severe lack of opportunity for emotional development at key stages in a child's...hood, meaning either the child really does not feel feelings as acutely as otherwise "normal" children, or perhaps there is nothing wrong with the child so much as the parents may simply be equally emotionally inept/distant/negligent/absent during times when they are needed most crucially in that child's development. Granted, I am getting way ahead of myself by introducing all these notions so soon, but I'm going to suck my own dick and put an idea out there now that I will return to after providing further research. I'm very confident in my findings, but I'm also a little touchy towards criticism about it right now, so please restrain the urge to judge before you have considered everything I have to offer.