In remarks laced with scientific inaccuracies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Wednesday that autism was preventable while directly contradicting researchers within his own agency on a primary driver behind rising rates of the condition in young children.
People who are different from the norm face people that treat them differently. You are right only giving it a shiny new positive name isn’t gonna solve all of their problems. But at least giving them the respect that other (not different) people get can already make a huge difference in someone’s life. Of course that’s not going to make their disability go away. No matter how well you treat someone who is missing a leg, it is not suddenly going to disappear. But it helps a lot if they don’t also have to deal with stigma. Imagine missing a leg and also being called names, being stared at and never getting an office job because them having a wheelchair would be a nuisance to the company. We need both and it solves precisely a problem, although it is indeed not the main problem.
They should be identified by the rest of society and treated differently.
PREFERENTIALLY every time all day every day. Trying to indicate they are no different goes in the wrong direction on that. Like so many things in this county, the problem is a culture that fails to, from childhood, educate people, in this case educating to seeing a disadvantaged person and going “how can I make their day easier” and not “eww gross and weird.” Same thing we fail to educate Americans on with regards to poverty and homelessness.
I don’t think it’s healthy for them to not consider themselves different fron the mean, as is often pushed. They are different from the mean. Self-delusion is a blight, choosing ignorance is always wrong. It hurts them when reality comes calling, and only those of means can make it from cradle to grave avoiding facing reality.
I would agree if people would experience the things that are different as something good, but that’s often not what happens. Most cases people tend to treat things that are strange and unknown as scary and bad. Also, most people with a disability or mental illness are reminded about that regularly. The guy that misses a leg sees people walking all the time for example. Nobody should delusion themselves, no mater how far or close you are from the norm. That being said, I dont disagree with what you say about American culture and education. Stigma for disabled people, poor people and homeless people is very similar. Let me repeat my point and say that treating these people well is not gonna fix their problem, but it will make it easier to deal with life.
I think we’re mostly on the same page.
I’d just add as someone who was a practicing psychologist that it has been conclusively proven that empathy is learned, it usually needs to be learned young if it is to be learned at all, it is easily tought, and our culture chooses to teach the opposite in glorifying/inflating individual potential with disdain for considering the needs of others.
Which had led us to this collapse as the rugged individual peasants tear eachother down instead of bringing power back down to earth.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/introduction-2/
If it were up go me, this experiment would be required curriculum for all young children, but modern American parents would burn schools down if a teacher DARED to tell half a class that kids with other color eyes were better than them for a single day (and then doing the opposite the next day) to safely instill what it feels like to be deemed less important by others. That’s how anti-empathy, and thus I’d argue antihumanist, Americans are TRAINED to be.
After all, when my kid grows up he needs to COMPETE AGAINST and BEAT your kid so he has MOAR than them. 🇺🇸
Yea I think a lot of valuable traits can be taught, although you probably know more if you actually studied psychology. But unfortunately I think you are right destructive traits can also be learned. Retraining yourself more desirable traits is much harder than learning it when you’re young. A ‘good’ society is a lot more than just a ‘good’ government.
But the traits that come with autism aren’t just a matter of learning (not sure if you imply that), their brains are formed differently before birth already, just like how people are born with other traits (like being more/less athletic than average or more/less intelligent to name something).
I wasn’t implying the empathy deficit was from those with autism, but from most of the US population, and by design.