Ten, fifteen years ago, when I started spending a lot of time in autistic-focused online spaces

[conuly]

You could reliably find, on any given day, a post by somebody or other lamenting how some NT habit or idea was stupid. Small talk, amirite? We are so much better than that silly thing! Complete waste of breath!

I am mature enough to acknowledge that this sort of talk, in large doses, can be extremely tiresome. And yet, I still think it's better than this:

I wonder if couples ever step back and realize it's crazy they each found someone who loves them for them. I'll never experience this because I'm a piece of shit with a ton of mental issues like anxiety, adhd, autism, and aspergers. While I'm drowning under the knowledge that while I still try to be funny and social and make movies, my mental health is fucked to hell. You couples have fun and hold each other close. Sorry my therapist wasn't available and I just really want to be with somebody. Okay bye.

This comment, I'll point out, was in response to this listicle of bad date horror stories in which one blind date involved a man asking a woman if she'd pee in a funnel into his mouth. Which has got to be, at a minimum, a second date request. So we'll just add basic reading comprehension to the list of things "fucked to hell" with this guy, and I certainly hope his therapist can help with everything else.

I don't spend as much time hanging around in that sort of space right now, but when I do, it seems like the ratio of "We're so superior" to "God, I'm scum" posts is badly skewed.

And I remember, years ago, there were plenty of miserable posts - autistics have a particularly high rate of depression for reasons - but I just don't recall them being so uniformly self-hating. But now it seems like all the "life sucks" posts... they don't pin the blame on society, or autism, or even depression - it boils down to how they, personally, are terrible people. (Terrible because of autism or whatever, but still.)

Am I misremembering? Or did something... did something happen to this group of autistics to make them especially miserable? Seriously, what is going on?

Comments

[brokenallbroken]

ABA, probably.

I am so grateful diagnosis was primitive when I was a kid, and that I managed to come out verbal. "Gifted kids are just weird" is so much less destructive to sense of self.

[conuly]

Your link doesn't work, but that's okay, I know enough about ABA to grasp what it likely says.

[oracleofdoom]

To me, self-hate is my main symptom of depression. Nothing to do with autism, other than the fact that my interactions with people can contribute and exacerbate my depression. I separate them anyway.

I try to keep the self-hate stuff to myself, though, because I know people find it off-putting. Or at least, I do when I hear it from other people. I have like one person who also deals with major depression among other things, and I know we can be very candid with each other without judgment, so I still have an outlet.

[siderea]

I work every day with people who have astronomical levels of self-loathing, and it doesn't sound like that passage quoted above. Usually it doesn't sound like anything, because severely depressed self-loathing people usually do keep it to themselves, not least because they feel unworthy of taking up someone else's time to talk about it.

But also because they often don't want to be argued with.

The natural response most people have to hearing someone say "I'm a piece of shit" is to automatically reply, "No, you're not". While one might imagine it feels nice for other people to explain why one isn't as awful as one thinks, in practice it just feels like their not getting it ("If you only knew"), or lying ("You're just saying that to be nice"), or even validation of how terrible one is ("You're just saying that to shut me up because you don't like me or want me around and see I really do suck that bad".)

That's why a lot of people who feel self-loathing don't talk about it. They anticipate those responses, and don't want to experience them.

Brandishing one's self-loathing publically like in the quoted passage seems to me to be... something slightly different than two people who experience self-loathing supporting one another and candidly sharing their feelings. Maybe it's related. But it seems to be courting such responses as depressed people often avoid. Fishing for them. Possibly compulsively.

I associate that fishing-for-contradiction behavior with personality disorder, rather than depression or autism. Not as a hard-and-fast rule or anything, but it's the first thing that pops to mind for me.

So I think likely there's a difference in what is going on when two people with depression are able to be candid with one another about their self-loathing, and when someone is flagrant like that in public.

Additionally, one client of mine who in fact did post things like that on the internet, compulsively, routinely got very cruel responses. As you say, people find it off-putting. And she posted in places where (I notice) she's maximally likely to get verbally abusive responses. So it looked to me like she was in some sense fishing for that verbal abuse. I wondered if it was a form of emotional self-harm – like the emotional equivalent of cutting. Or possibly a reenactment of past abuse, where she kept compulsively giving abusers a chance not to abuse her.

[oracleofdoom]

This makes so much sense. The first half of your comment sounds very much like the way I think. (And one of the new meds I started seems to cause me bladder problems, which is not a side effect I can live with. Boo.)

The rest, I'm still trying to parse out. I see that you're right that it's not the same. Histrionics maybe? An addiction to martyrdom? Really bad at reading people and expecting reassurance?

[siderea]

Seriously, what is going on?

This might be a product of how MRAs are flooding the internet with encouragement for (hetero) men to feel aggrieved over not getting female attention and providing justification for feeling entitled.

Straight white autistic men are not exempt from the seduction of this grudge wet-nursing when they accidentally encounter it.

You ever read Star Mother?

[conuly]

No, I haven't.

(And yes, that particular comment did sound toxicly MRA-esque - lots of them do! - but they don't all sound that way.)

[jesse_the_k]

I would have been a "cousin" back in the day. I do know that as autism has been increasingly diagnosed, its presence in popular culture has also increased.

The psychs used words like "obnoxious" freely back then; those attitudes are more widely spread now, and NTs shaped by popular culture are confronting autistics with those stereotypes?

[conuly]

Maybe?

All I know is it's simultaneously dismaying and super obnoxious to read. Not that I'd say the latter part to any of their online faces, that's mean, but.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Well... what specifically is 'this group of autistics'? Are they a particular demographic, such as the young and uneducated, or the physically disabled, that would have good reason to be depressed in these times even if they weren't autistic?

Even in his brief post, young Mr. Fucked-as-hell sounds whiny, sulky and self-absorbed. Maybe he's only 17; maybe he's 27 (or even 37) but still thinks like a 17-year-old boy - in either case, it doesn't seem like he's got anything but neediness to bring to a relationship. But there have always been people like that, both on and off the spectrum.

[conuly]

Most of them either state they're young or, as you observed, simply sound young. But I don't remember young aspies being so much of this when I was that age. (Maybe that's the nostalgia talking?)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... neither the Internet nor Asperger's Syndrome existed when I was that age, so it's hard to say. Almost all of my friends were geeks like me (https://youtu.be/J1-4LcmE538), though, and - yeah - prone to depression and self-defeating rumination, especially about relationships.

Things are harder for young people now. We only had the jerks and Mean Girls of our own schools to deal with; they've got the whole Internet full of trolls, bullies, and impossibly-gorgeous Instagram queens. Bad enough for the ordinary kids who aren't notably beautiful, brilliant, talented, wealthy or well-connected.... in a society where 'ordinary' isn't good enough, the 'special' kids, the ones who can't even pass as ordinary, are pretty-well doomed.

On the other hand, it didn't use to be so easy to withdraw from in-person socialization into a 'bubble' that just echoes back whatever you already think. I stopped hanging out in autistic-focused online spaces because I disagreed with the 'party line' being repeated in them, and thus kept getting into futile arguments. Mr. Fucked-as-hell seems to subscribe to that 'party line': diagnoses are destiny, and also serve as convenient excuses for not addressing one's character issues.

[conuly]

Huh. I mostly stopped because I outgrew "autistics are so superior" and got tired of seeing it all the time.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Every marginalized group does that, though; right back to the Israelite slaves in Egypt who considered themselves God's Chosen People (and whose descendants are still using that argument in support of their 'right' to the 'Promised Land'.)

Haven't got time to look it up this morning, but some while back I ran across a scientific article that basically said that, yes, autism does seem to confer intellectual superiority, right up to the point where the glitches it also confers start to interfere with that. I don't recall that it made any mention of environmental factors, but obviously they make a huge difference in whether the glitches or the super-powers prevail. Autistics whose super-powers prevail are called 'geniuses', not 'autistics' (unless they've also got so many glitches that they can't manage their lives, in which case they get called 'savants'.)

I haven't ever really known any neurotypical people very well - I've had to work with a lot of them, of course, and as a result I'm pretty good at 'passing', but the people with whom I become friends are the geeks and weirdlings. "Everybody is unique, but some are more unique than others": sorry to say, but I find mundane people, 'the mainstream', fairly boring, shallow, complacent, conformist, without passion or originality. On the other hand ("this is my country; these are my people") the geeks and weirdlings are passionate and original all right, but their lives tend to be a chaotic mess because they can't (or refuse to) learn to manage the ten thousand details of 'adulting'. I would not call that evidence of superiority.

[conuly]

Every marginalized group does that, though; right back to the Israelite slaves in Egypt who considered themselves God's Chosen People (and whose descendants are still using that argument in support of their 'right' to the 'Promised Land'.)

Indeed, especially when they're young or newbies, and in small amounts it's probably healthy. But that doesn't mean it doesn't get damn old.

Haven't got time to look it up this morning, but some while back I ran across a scientific article that basically said that, yes, autism does seem to confer intellectual superiority, right up to the point where the glitches it also confers start to interfere with that.

Oh, yeah. There's been a few of those lately, and I'm not even a little surprised. But I'm also mature enough, finally, to grasp that intelligence isn't the be all and end all of human value. (I had to fight against the stream to realize that one. Our whole society is saturated with it.)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I was in MENSA for a while in college, and it pretty-well cured me of thinking that intelligence=superiority, because the people I met there were so obviously not 'superior'. High IQ doesn't make up for lack of good manners and personal hygiene, and expertise in one field doesn't mean one is an authority on everything. Also, high IQ doesn't count for anything unless one does something with it.

Not that I think it's a bad thing to have high IQ or academic credentials, but neither do I think that either of those are all that valuable in and of themselves. I'd put a higher value on kindness, courtesy, integrity and adaptability - which, note, are all qualities that can be cultivated regardless of one's genetic heritage or socio-economic class.