Comment on Autism disinformation on Telegram soars in Latin America and Caribbean.
boonhet@lemm.ee 1 week agoIdk if it’s still going on but at least at some point, in some corner of the Tok, mental disorders were like little honor badges you could collect. People always showing off their stimming and whatever.
The worst one was always multiple personality disorder though. People referring to themselves as systems, having 100s of alters and getting new ones every now and then.
It sucks because it diminishes the realness of different disorders in people’s heads.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
… do you know how isolating it is being a neurodivergent person who stims? Do you know how many times I’ve had people awkwardly look at me or ask me to stop fidgeting with a pen or whatever, which paradoxically made me more overwhelmed and more want to stim? I’ve literally done it my entire life, and I never once even knew that it was a symptom of adhd. People just told me I was annoying. I had no retort to that. All I could was try my hardest to hyperanalyze everything I did.
Seeing people stimming on TikTok genuinely made me feel less isolated. No one doing so was doing it as a badge of honor. It’s cause stimming is an activity that is so shamed across society it is miserable. For many of us it becomes a cycle of shame and frustration trying to control it. It’s even worse if you have a tendency to vocal stim. I got in so much shit at school when I was a kid for just blurting something out when I felt overwhelmed or overstimulated. I had no idea there were other people out there struggling with the same things. I had no idea other people couldn’t help but fold a piece of paper when it was handed to them or click a pen so incessantly that it started to actually hurt their hands.
The people accusing others of stimming as some kind of social credit were always just shaming people for stimming. That’s all it ever is. FakeDisorderCringe is a bullying subreddit dedicated entirely to shaming neurodivergent people and people with physical or mental disabilities. It’s just a bunch of people pointing at them and baseless speculating on whether or not someone else is suffering from something from their entirely uninformed perspective. You can’t tell if someone is neurodivergent from a video. They don’t gain anything from publicly identifying as such. It actually results in them being bullied and facing intense scrutiny.
Sorry, you probably did not intend this as a big statement it is just exhausting running into this opinion everywhere I look. It’s always women who are “doing it for attention” and you look in the comments and it’s just hundreds of people shaming them for stimming. Usually a few comments about how she doesn’t “look neurodivergent”. Especially if the person in question doesn’t have an official diagnosis yet, ignoring all of the biases and hurdles society places in front of people trying to get diagnosed.
getoffthedrugsdude@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
You expressed this very well. Fighting ableism irl is such a huge, daunting task, especially when fully masked. Know you’re not alone.
boonhet@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Do you make videos like “look I have a cool new stim” or record repeatedly hitting people only to claim it’s a stim when they react?
If not, you’re probably not the target of my statement re: stims
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Why would it be a problem for me to make a video saying “look I have a cool new stim”? Is stimming only permissible if I suffer socially for it? Is it a problem to celebrate stimming itself as something positive and good that helps me regulate my anxiety? I didn’t even know those little pop-it toys existed until like a year ago. I would never have known without TikTok and I now use them all the time.
As for the hitting people, I’m not sure what you mean by that. I’ve never even heard of that accusation before, and it’s certainly not what people mean when they talk about people “pretending to have adhd/autism for attention”. I’ve been in these communities before I know who they’re accusing of faking it. It’s largely women who are conventionally attractive who “dont look autistic at all” and non-binary people who “are crazy and make stuff up all the time for attention”.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I feel for you and I believe you when you say it helps you to see you‘re not alone. However there has been done a lot of observing by journalists and experts and it is largely agreed upon that the majority of information about autism on TikTok is sadly made up or heavily misrepresented.
Seeing other stim may be relieving but it doesn‘t change the fact that it‘s a platform where attention is the currency, virtually no fact checking is done and new, disturbing trends make the rounds all the time as a result.
Please be open minded about it. Because even if what you‘re seeing on there may be emotionally true for you, it‘s often played up or made up for attention.
The TikTok algorithm is also extremely aggressive in that it adapts very quickly to your preferences and creates closed environments. It is possible it simply doesn‘t show you any of those problematic posts. Whenever there‘s a critical article about the app, there are always users defending the platform and their users who genuinely think there is no issue because they can‘t see any of it in their feed. The way you respond to certain topics is completely different to how the average user responds and the algorithm picks up those differences very efficiently. I am sure most users have no idea what the site looks like on average.
aeshna_cyanea@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Now I’m curious how do the journalists get the data to speak authoritatively, does tiktok give them special access or smth
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They investigate reports from users and talk to experts usually.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
No, it isn’t often made up for attention. And the kind of attention directed towards neurodivergent people on social media is overwhelmingly negative. The exception tends to be from other neurodivergent people.
I am neurodivergent. My partner is neurodivergent. The majority of my friends are also neurodivergent. I am aware of what misinformation about neurodivergent people looks like, and it is categorically not coming from neurodivergent people on TikTok. It is coming from communities dedicated to questioning the diagnosis of others. It is coming from neurotypicals who feel the need to gatekeep neurodivergent people and shame them for being neurodivergent.
Not having an official diagnosis doesn’t mean that you aren’t neurodivergent. Ive been diagnosed since I was 4, but I had far fewer barriers to getting that diagnosis than many people do. Particularly, women and girls face gigantic barriers all the time to getting diagnosed.
No expert or journalist can assess whether someone has a disorder over a video. That’s just a statement of fact. Only through performing actual tests and routinely speaking directly with and observing a patient in a controlled setting can you determine if someone meets the criteria for a diagnosis.
This phenomenon of accusing neurodivergent women and nonbinary people of faking it for attention exists in every social media, not just TikTok. TikTok is just the most prominent due largely to its accessibility. Making a TikTok is far less involved than making a YouTube video. It is in many respects easy for average people to create content for.
Ive seen the “problematic posts”. It’s always a conventionally attractive woman or a nonbinary person showing themselves stimming or having a meltdown or talking about any of the ways that being neurodivergent impacts them. The comments questioning them are always all about “xyz isn’t neurodivergent that’s just normal” “they probably make up a new diagnosis to go with every gender” “I’m neurodivergent and I am inferior in every way and want to die, there’s no way anyone, this happy woman offends me by trying to say that she is neurodivergent too”. It’s not scientific, it’s not journalism, it’s not medical. It is shaming people for being themselves. That’s all.
It’s not your business to gatekeep someone else’s neurodivergent status. It’s not your business to determine whether someone else’s symptoms are valid or not. It’s just ableism. That’s all it is.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You‘re focusing too much on one kind of video and one kind alone. An expert might not be able to tell if stimming is authentic but he can absolutely tell when someone spreads misinformation about Autism. That has been a huge issue on the platform and it does not matter what your experience has been with the app in this case for reasons that I have explained previously.
As is often the case with TikTok users you can‘t see the forest for the trees when issues are addressed, I‘m afraid.
Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
My friend always tells me to “find a non-vocal stim” and I’m just really not sure how to respond to that
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I agree with pretty much everything you said.
One issue I have is that people absolutely do claim neurodivergence when they’re not neurodivergent, much like how people claim to be LGBT without actually being LGBT. An unfortunately large subset of the population wants to belong to something, and the more niche that something is, the better, especially if it gets sympathy.
I’m not saying this is happening for stimming specifically, but I’ve seen a lot of people claim to be “on the spectrum” without actually being tested or even manifesting anything commonly understood to be a symptom. It cheapens what it means to be neurodivergent, and throws actual neurodivergent people even more into the spotlight.
Acceptance is cool, appropriation is not. Unfortunately, calling people out on their BS often drags in innocent people who actually have the condition, so I always assume people are being truthful until proven otherwise. It’s dumb, and I wish people would stop it, but I think the existence of fakes largely leads to this issue.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
I said this in another comment, but it is not possible to know who is and isn’t faking it. You can’t diagnose someone over the internet. You just can’t. A proper assessment is done in a clinical setting over a period of time. If we normalize questioning the diagnosis of others inevitably a sizable amount of people accused of faking it will genuinely be neurodivergent. Same goes with being queer. It benefits no one to allow others to decide if someone is gay or trans or not. All that it does is normalize the idea that it’s acceptable or permissible for other people to decide who you are for you.
I resolutely oppose any efforts to label others as faking a disorder. Genuinely. I do not believe in the “watering down the meaning” theory and believe that ableism/queerphobia comes explicitly from hatred and disgust, not from any experiences with real or fake neurodivergent/queer people. Far, far more harm is done by gatekeeping our community.
You remember that guy who pretended to be a trans woman a while ago? Like had socials and did this whole thing for months? If he came out as trans again today I have no reason not to accept him. So what if he is faking? If he exhibits predatory behavior then he should be excluded by those behaviors. I have no reason to question his identity though. It doesn’t benefit me or my community in any way to treat gender as anything other than what someone self identifies.
Much the same with neurodivergency. Unironically millions of neurodivergent people, predominantly women, have never gotten any help whatsoever for their neurodivergency because they have been systematically gatekept from getting a diagnosis by others who do not believe them. It benefits no one to normalize gatekeeping.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
100% agreed. A bit of tolerance goes a long way, and the downsides are minuscule.
My point is that it happens, not that we should do anything about it as a society. Hence my final paragraph:
We shouldn’t just cover our eyes and plug our ears and pretend it doesn’t happen, but instead openly acknowledge it and demonstrate that it’s not something worth trying to distinguish. I’m not saying you do this, but I’ve seen enough of it on Lemmy and elsewhere to feel like it’s a big enough problem to call out.
I’m 99% sure I’m not neurodivergent, but I’ve never been tested and I definitely exhibit a lot of the behaviors that people who claim (w/o any testing or proof) to be neurodivergent exhibit. So I don’t consider myself neurodivergent, but I will occasionally suggest to people that what they call neurodivergence could instead be something else, like social anxiety or introversion. I don’t do it to minimize whatever condition they might have, but instead to try to point them in the right direction to hopefully get more appropriate help, should they see those behaviors as problematic. I’m also highly suspicious of a lot of the testing, since a lot of people expect a certain answer and will shop around until they get the diagnosis they want (also happens w/ medical conditions, not just psychological). But ultimately, whether they do or don’t fit a given group is largely irrelevant to me, so if they push back even slightly, I’ll shut up and accept it, because at the end of the day, acceptance tends to have better outcomes than actually solving whatever the problem is.
At the end of the day, a little love goes a long way. Love and accept those around you, and give the best (appropriate) support you can.