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[meadowlander]

40. No, they're talking about a scenario where people with Aspergers (i.e. autistic people)

are pressured to medicate themselves to present as less autistic to make other people comfortable.

Is the goal to provide therapies that autistic people themselves welcome to make their lives easier or therapies that make everyone else's lives easier by making the autistic person less "weird" and socially awkward? Because a lot of autistic adults are proud of their differences and a lot of autistic teens and kids who are still trying to figure things out don't need a magic pill that makes them "not autistic". They need a society that embraces their differences and see the strengths inherent in neurodiversity.

There is a way to diagnose autism. It's a battery of tests and interviews with a psychologist. Autism isn't extreme introversion. It's a spectrum of neurological differences related to social functioning, executive functioning, repetitive and/or restrictive behaviour and sensory differences.

And many of those differences are actually strengths if society chose to view them as such. For example, a preference for honest and straight-forward communication, logic and order, the ability to hyperfocus and to recognise patterns that other people might not see, happiness doing work that other people might find tedious, responsibility and integrity, persistence etc.

Why medicate those traits away when the only problem is neurotypical people feeling uncomfortable around someone who they perceive as blunt, aloof and unwilling to compromise?