Talk:Autism

Osmosis video

Osmosis video

I have removed the video File:Autism spectrum disorder video.webm. The video is not sourced per WP:MEDRS or WP:V.

Per WP:V "any material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, must include an inline citation that directly supports the material." This video does not contain any sources, nor any means to tie sources to specific facts and claims made. Per WP:V, "The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material" and "Any material lacking a reliable source directly supporting it may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source"

This video is not exempt from citations or sources per WP:LEAD because it is not a lead, and it does not summarise the article. You can tell this from the first minute or so of the video -- totally different base material.

This material must not be restored as-is. Editors who repeatedly restore material that fails WP:V may be blocked. -- Colin°^Talk — Preceding unsigned comment added by Colin (talk • contribs) time, day month year (UTC)

Proposed outline

After discussion over the draft and ideas for the lead section (@Oolong and Sideswipe9th), I thought I'd start a section specifically for outlining the article as a whole. Please feel free to edit this outline directly - hopefully we can refine the rough structure here and then it will be easier to start fixing up the article itself.

I think we should aim for roughly one bullet point per intended paragraph, to summarise the content. I'm going to start by just putting in section headings, based on the sections that are already in autism and autism spectrum. When I can I'll come back to them and start summarising the combined content for each topic - but anyone can feel free to do that first. Please go ahead and add, remove, combine, or rearrange sections too. Averixus (talk) 16:09, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

@Oolong: I was thinking of adding autistic sexuality and gender expression to this list, as it is a rather substantial difference when compared to the neurotypical population, however I couldn't figure out which section to put it under. It might fit better under Characteristics than associated conditions, though that might also open a can of worms from folk who disagree that either sexuality or gender identity are characteristics. The other section it might fit in is Society and culture Sideswipe9th (talk) 19:11, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

Maybe the associated things (including gender and sexuality) could be in a subsection under Characteristics, titled something like Commonly co-occurring? And it could start with an explanation that these are all things not included in the diagnostic criteria but that are disproportionately common in autistic people. It can also link to Conditions comorbid to autism spectrum disorders which contains a lot more detail. Averixus (talk) 19:41, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

Yeah that seems like a decent idea. We just need to be careful to make clear the difference between medical co-morbidities, and non-medical traits that are disproportionately expressed by autistic people. Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:02, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

Meta-suggestion, to keep SineBot from overboard with signing non-comment additions below, see User:SineBot#Single_edit. That said, if we were to do this work in someone's sandbox, or as a Wikiproject subpage we could use User:SineBot#Entire_talk_page instead. Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:00, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

@Averixus: I've been putting some comments below inline next to the suggested paragraph sections. If you want to move them elsewhere, like up here, to keep the sections below clear for more overview than commentary feel free to move em. Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:12, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

@Oolong and Averixus: while the outline below is helpful to give an oversight of what the new article will contain, is anyone working on the actual text of this in a sandbox or subpage somewhere yet? It might make collaboration easier for drafting the specifics of the new version if that could be linked here. Sideswipe9th (talk) 16:57, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

I've only started on the text of the lead in my sandbox so far. Speaking of which, I've significantly rewritten that from the draft I shared here, to make it a more plausible summary of what's likely to be in the final entry. I take the argument about not trying to write the lead before the rest of it's ready, but in four paragraphs I think it's unrealistic to summarise the entire contents of an article of this breadth anyway, right? In these circumstances, and with the existing lead having so much wrong with it, I wonder if it would be worth editing the actual article lead. Any thoughts?

I also wanted to suggest that it might be worth having a short section about terminology after the lead, or a slightly longer section that also brings in the history, since those are inextricably linked. I'm thinking it could perhaps dispel a couple of key misconceptions, and help the reader to make sense of the rest of the article. Oolong (talk) 08:32, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

I see that now. Here's the link for anyone else interested. The text in the sandbox seems overly long for the lead, MOS:LEADLENGTH suggests we should keep the lead of an article of this size to around three or four paragraphs. While it is guidance, and we have some flexibility with that, I don't think we should stray too much beyond that, and certainly not to fourteen paragraphs. The current lead of this article is already very long at seven long paragraphs. We may also want to have a discussion on Summary style versus News style leads. I'd also point out that the suggested content below only has four points for the lead, which could easily be analogous to four paragraphs.

Unfortunately I don't think we can update the lead until after we've updated the body. While the lead is unquestionably important, as for some readers it is all they will read in an article, it still has to be supported by the body text. Though I take the point about the lead being out of date with respect to current research and clinical guidance, we cannot assert content matter in the lead that is unsupported by the body. Accordingly I think we should focus on updating the body first, as that will take up the bulk of the editing work ahead, and then once we have the body content updated we can look at re-writing the lead.

A terminology section after the lead could make sense, although that is again something we might want to tackle towards the end of the drafting. That way we can make it more consistent with terms in the various sections that need an explainer, rather than trying to guess at the outset what terms we will need to explain. "History of autism", or "history of autism spectrum" is very likely to be a sufficiently wide and notable enough topic to be its own stand-alone article, if isn't already. It is also a section already mentioned in the proposed structure below. If it is already a stand-alone article, then we should have a stub summary paragraph or two and a Template:See also note pointing to the main article. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:29, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I forgot that I hadn't clearly marked where I was intending the lead to end. It is the first four paragraphs (marked now). Oolong (talk) 07:52, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

My biggest priorities here are concision and clarity - both sorely lacking from the existing lead! I'm certainly not proposing we replace the current seven-giant-paragraph monstrosity with fourteen paragraphs.

And I'm almost sure nothing in the lead is unsupported by the body as it stands, or in danger of not being supported when the rest is rewritten. The weighting is a bit different, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem, is it?

@Xurizuri I noticed you've been going ahead with some changes to the article - have you been following this discussion? Oolong (talk) 11:11, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Yes-ish, I'm not actively monitoring it but I typically check the discussion each time before I start a bout of editing the page, unless I'm doing something very minor as part of another project. Obviously I'm happy for you to revert and ping me if I do mess up, this discussion page is more than a little bit difficult to follow. --Xurizuri (talk) 09:15, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Overall, I think we need to take a structured and methodical approach to this. While right now our focus is rightly on updating the article content so that it is in step with current research, clinical guidance, and diagnostic criteria, as a "stretch goal" I would suggest that we should be striving towards a nomination for this set of articles at the Good article or maybe even Featured article content level. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:36, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Just wanted to let you all (@Oolong, Xurizuri, and Averixus: that the text from the DSM-5-TR is available in WP:LIBRARY. There's some good text present, beyond the diagnostic codes, under the following headings that we may wish to check for updating our own content:

• Associated Features
• Prevalence
• Development and Course
• Risk and Prognostic Factors
  • Environmental
  • Genetic and physiological
• Culture-Related Diagnostic Issues
• Sex- and Gender-Related Diagnostic Issues
• Association With Suicidal Thoughts or Behavior
• Functional Consequences of Autism Spectrum Disorder

I've not got the time right now to do a comparison and start updating text, but wanted to let you all know. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:30, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

That's what I came here today to start doing! Alongside including more from the ICD-11. I didn't even realise the notification was this. Thank you for pinging me, and apologies for the slow response. My plan to start with is just to check any time the DSM-5 is referenced or mentioned in the article, check whether the article content still aligns with the TR, update it if it doesn't, and switch the reference to the text revision. --Xurizuri (talk) 09:37, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

(Lead)

• Define as a range of neurodevelopmental differences - developmental (lifelong), spectrum (variation). Briefly summarise traits/symptoms.
• Describe current diagnostic categories, summarise significant historic diagnoses and changes.
• Summarise (lack of) solid conclusions about causes, mechanism, treatments.
• Summarise social/cultural aspects, neurodiversity movement etc.

Characteristics

• More thorough explanation of the spectrum concept, variation between and within individuals.
• Early childhood signs.
• Communication differences in body language, eye contact, facial expressions, etc.
• Differences in language use, pragmatic communication, echolalia, nonspeaking, etc.
• Social differences in forming relationships, loneliness, double empathy problem.
• Preference for sameness, rigidity, intense interests, monotropism.
• Sensory differences, sensitivity, stimming behaviour.

  Note: Stimming exists as its own article, with a subsection titled Stimming and autism. That said that subsection seems rather short, given how prevalent stimming is amongst the autistic population. While we're getting into scope-creep territory, we may also need to look at related articles and how we link to them in order to ensure the links provide the context we can't put in this article due to length and direct relevance. Sideswipe9th (talk) 19:25, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

Associated conditions

(should this be a subsection or a section of its own?)

• (Link to Conditions comorbid to autism spectrum disorders)
• Intellectual disability, learning disorders, ADHD, other neurodevelopmental things.
• Transgender and non-heterosexual identities (I know these aren't "conditions" - suggestions for a better section title welcome) (maybe just "differences"? "Co-occurring differences"?)
• Depression, anxiety, trauma, other mental health things.
• Hypermobility/EDS, epilepsy, allergies, other physical things.

Comments:

• I would prefer to have a separate subsection for "LGBT identities", and leave this subsection as "associated conditions". --Xurizuri (talk) 13:10, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I wonder if it would make sense to have a subsection for identity intersections more broadly, or just 'Gender and sexuality', dealing with the statistically different presentations in people socialised as male or female as well as topics around transness and attraction? Or is that covered somewhere else? Oolong (talk) 09:02, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Classification and diagnosis

• (Link to, and probably rename, Diagnosis of Asperger syndrome)
• ICD diagnostic classification.
• DSM diagnostic classification.
• Mention that there's history of lots of different categories and changes to the classification (don't elaborate in this section).

Causes

• (Link to, and possibly combine, Causes of autism, Heritability of autism, and Epigenetics of autism)
• Genetics.
• Pre- and peri-natal factors.
• Disproved vaccine conspiracy (link to, and possibly combine Vaccines and autism, and MMR vaccine and autism).

Mechanism and pathophysiology

I think that this should do very little more than direct people to the Mechanism of autism page, to be honest. As far as research in the natural sciences goes, it's all highly inconclusive and subject to change. We can say a bit about neuroscience, but it's really hard to draw firm conclusions at this point. I'm not sure this is something a general reader necessarily needs to know about at all. As for psychological mechanisms, most of the theories have huge problems, but probably ought to get at least a couple of hundred words between them all the same! Even if it's largely about explaining the problems with them, they can still act as handles to get to grips with some genuinely important ideas. --Oolong (talk) 19:12, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. This is a rather large subtopic, as evidenced by its stand-alone article. Having a paragraph summary of the keypoints, with a Template:See also hatnote makes sense here. Sideswipe9th (talk) 19:22, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

Yeah I think a lot of these sections will end up being short summaries that link to standalone articles, per Wikipedia:Summary style. Averixus (talk) 20:07, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

• (Link to Mechanism of autism)
• Summarise neurological and biological theories.
• Summarise psychological theories.

Management

• (Link to, and improve, Autism therapies)
• There is no cure, explain possible goals of treatments.
• ABA and other behaviourism for children.

  Comment: ABA is going to be a controversial section. It might even deserve its own spinoff article, covering both historic and current practices, as well as why it is so controversial. Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:09, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

• Medications.
• Unsupported alternative therapies.

Question: is 'management' the right framing for this at all? It's not actually a medical condition to be managed, at least not in the normal sense; autistic people need support, but do they need to be managed? If not the people, then what exactly is being managed? Autistic traits?

It has its own problems, but perhaps 'interventions' is a better word here? --Oolong (talk) 19:16, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

"Interventions" is used in clinical psychology (maybe also elsewhere, but that's the one I know), so its still medical unfortunately. Perhaps "Supports"? Either on its own, or in addition to one of the others, e.g. "Supports and interventions" or "Management and supports". --Xurizuri (talk) 11:32, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Epidemiology and occurrence

• (Link to Epidemiology of autism)
• % of the population, and how it has changed as diagnosis changed.
  • how many people have been diagnosed vs differences in how many people actually have autism - and how that relates to e.g. Australia having more diagnoses than Indonesia.
• If it isn't mentioned under the characteristics section, then frequency of the "severity" levels, and potentially for subclinical autism (I can't think of a non-medical term for subclinical right now, if someone else can then please replace it)
• Sex and age differences.

Comments:

I've added 2 points. I do also wonder if we should use a term other than "epidemiology" because of the pathologising. Perhaps we commit to occurrence? Maybe demography or frequency, if statistical terms are better? I'm leaning towards demography, although it does have some implication that it will discuss, e.g., the percentage of autistic people who live in one-story buildings (as a flippant example). As a final note, the epidemiology article also discusses genetics/causes and comorbidities, in line with the scope of epidemiology itself, which may be an issue because of how summary style works - although I suppose that's a problem for later. --Xurizuri (talk) 12:02, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

History

• (Link to, rename, and improve, History of Asperger syndrome)
• Summarise early history - Asperger, Kanner, origin of the term autism.

  Query: For early history, do we want to include information pre-DSM-III when children who would later meet the diagnosistic criteria for autism were instead diagnosed with childhood onset schizophrenia? See introduction by Cite 16. Or will we only consider history from the point where it became a formalised diagnosis in DSM-III? Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:06, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

• Summarise recent history - move away from separate diagnostic categories, spectrum concept.

Society and culture

• (Link to Societal and cultural aspects of autism)

Positive aspects

I feel like there really ought to be something about positive aspects, probably in its own section. Strengths, joys, that kind of thing. Any thoughts? Oolong (talk) 15:29, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes. Though reliable sourcing for it may be difficult, a lot of the autistic positivity stuff I see comes primarily from autistic advocates (that is advocates who are autistic) on social media, and not from researchers. Though this observation could be self selection bias on my part. Sideswipe9th (talk) 16:42, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Right, but there has been a decent amount of research on the advantages of positive autistic identity, as well as quite a few studies which found things that would be interpreted positively in almost any other context (increased honesty and resistance to cognitive biases, for example) and occasionally ones that find positive things and describe them as such (e.g. a couple of things out of Mottron's lab).

Certainly a few newspaper articles, too, if we're allowing that autistic experiences are not always inherently biomedical. Oolong (talk) 16:53, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Yeah that sounds good. We'll just have to be careful when interpreting the biomedical information not to insert WP:SYNTH or WP:OR interpretations. It's a fine line to walk, but this is definitely important content we should add if possible. Sideswipe9th (talk) 17:00, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

I think that it could reasonably be woven into the characteristics and society sections, and it's probably better to, following the same basic logic from the WP:CRITICISM#Approaches to presenting criticism essay section. Either way, another thing to keep in mind is that we should be using secondary sources (i.e., no experiments) because of how controversial everything about autism is, and in the case of experiments, how unreliable primary research is. --Xurizuri (talk) 12:15, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Closure of the merge discussion

I cannot find where the merge discussion was closed. The closest I've found is the main proponent of not merging stating that they will no longer participate, but someone leaving doesn't mean that their objections become moot. Is there a specific point where consensus was determined? If not, we need to request that an uninvolved editor close the discussion. I'll also state that the merge should not be performed prior to an appropriate closure, so it can't be performed until after then. Which, I'll be honest, will take a long time, but it's not like there aren't many other issues to address anyway. --Xurizuri (talk) 13:27, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

@Xurizuri: Hi, Wretchskull's objections were answered pretty thoroughly. I'm all for getting an uninvolved editor involved though. Oolong (talk) 18:12, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

I think the only major outstanding issue specifically relating to the merge proposal is how to deal with the fact that to the extent we can believe the lead to autism at all, most of its content should probably be moved to classic autism rather than this article, or else trimmed down as excessive detail in an article about an obsolete diagnostic category. Oolong (talk) 18:15, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't think a formal request for closure is really necessary. As Oolong pointed out, Wretchskull's objections were addressed thoroughly and they are no longer opposing consensus. There have been no other editors clearly disagreeing with the merge, and it has been posted on many relevant projects and noticeboards to solicit input. I'd be comfortable saying an informal consensus is clear here. But if you think a formal request for closure is important then feel free to go ahead of course, it won't do any harm. Averixus (talk) 11:46, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Okay, no formal closure at this point. Given the amount of time that went by (I meant to come back sooner but life etc) without anyone protesting the current informal consensus despite this section being an obvious avenue for doing so, I'm happy without a formal closure now too. --Xurizuri (talk) 09:20, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

@Xurizuri: No need to be happy without a closure, as I had closed the discussion back in April (see the corresponding section above). Felix QW (talk) 09:18, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I missed that! Thank you for telling me. -- Xurizuri (talk) 13:28, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

I think this page has become increasingly used by partisan editors to wage a culture war against each other

I just had to get that off my chest, I have been watching this page for a while and I am increasingly worrying that this page due to the political and cultural warfare of how society views the condition, the page in my view is becoming less of a article based on giving first and foremost the scientific mainstream consensus of the condition agreed on by most autism researchers and its understanding by such people, and is instead, now more of a battle ground for people of niche vocal minorities of a clear political bias, who are trying to control the narrative and to input their own slant over others they oppose regarding their understandings of autism. For example I have noticed big edits by people such as Oolong (with no ill intent to him and as I see as a genuinely well meaning individual) who has a clear conflict of interest (no matter how well intended) due to their clear dedication to their political worldview of the ARM regarding said condition as one of their means of their main means of self-identity. And wanting to input the movement to such a large extent in the article rather than as the niche, and relatively recent group that it really is. To me, this seems like it risks a slippery slope to just becoming a slanted essay by ARM advocates (or opponents of them) and their ideology as being a significant aspect of modern autism science as opposed to the common consensus from most autism professionals. With the ARM for example actually being more so a scientifically unpopular group of various individuals such as those with high-functioning autism trying to oppose many "mainstream" autism doctors and researchers often being identified as being apart of the "pathology" paradigm. I don't know what we can do to fix or if my argument was even coherent or productive to this page, but I still think it has to be said if we want to improve the quality of this page and prevent the problems I already stated and clearly it needs change if we want to protect the reliability of our efforts to be as unbiased and to be as honest as possible by not falling into fallacies such as the false-equivalence bias.

User:72.53.87.239 (talk) 10:05, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Oh hi, anonymous user 72.53.87.239 - or should I call you Mr. 239? It's actually quite difficult to discuss with someone who doesn't have a registered account (it means we don't get a reply button, or easy access to the visual editor; and I'm assuming you won't get any notifications). If you want to engage with talk pages or make substantial edits, can I request that you do so under a named account? It's quite easy to do. Thanks! Oolong (talk) 07:17, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @AverageWikiEditingEnjoyer. The Reply button is not appearing on your follow-up comment below either, so I'm just going to type here. I'm sure folks will figure it out.

So there's a lot to unpack here! Realistically addressing your concerns will take far more space than the concerns themselves. There are a number of assumptions that I think warrant challenging: about Wikipedia, about autism, about autism discourse, about science, about objectivity...

I guess before I launch into it, the first question to ask is whether you've paid much attention to the discussion on the Talk page? I might be just one person, but there's been a lot of talk here, and a lot of opportunity for more people to feed in. Not all of this has been constructive, but we have been working by consensus on an outline plan of how to structure this page and bring it up to date - I don't think there's any realistic dispute about the fact that it needs to be brought up to date. You are welcome to input into these discussions, to address the arguments and suggestions made rather than just questioning the legitimacy of those involved in general terms.

On to your specific points. Perhaps we should start with the phrase the scientific mainstream consensus of the condition. That consensus, such as it is, is largely represented by the diagnostic manuals. Even there, there is in fact considerable disagreement among scientists, autistic people, clinicians and others knowledgeable about autism; but they are agreed by committees through substantial deliberation processes, involving many perspectives, and in practical terms they 'define' autism for the purposes of formally determining whether people are autistic. In my view they provide a fairly sensible starting point, but note that they are not entirely scientific in nature - the DSM revision process involved consulting with psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals[1]; the Autistic Self Advocacy Network somewhat influenced its content.[2]

Diagnostic mauals aside, much of the science of autism is remarkably contentious. There is nothing close to a generally accepted psychological theory of autism; the evidence on neurological differences is extensive, but contradictory and inconclusive; the evidence on what is actually helpful for autistic people is frustratingly scant, outside of one or two areas where there is a mountain of weak and frequently biased evidence.[3]

But Wikipedia is not a scientific or medical encyclopaedia. In general, it should written for a general audience, and what a general audience wants or needs to know is not well represented in the scientific literature. It has been shown time and again that there is little relation between what gets researched and what autistic people, our families and those working with us think is important.[4][5][6] I would suggest that what Wikipedia covers about autism should be geared towards the needs of those groups, as the ones most likely to be looking it up.

Autism science has also frequently suffered from a failure to listen to the needs and priorities of the people being studied, leading to outcome measures that have little to do with well-being, and interpretations that are at odds with the experiences of those being studied. Fortunately, many scientists are waking up to this, and taking seriously the need to take on board autistic perspectives on autism - and the advantages of doing so.[7][8][9][10]

It is important to remember that there are other kinds of evidence, which is how Wikipedia manages to be a general encyclopaedia, taking in many types of human difference, culture, politics, history and so on. I suggested elsewhere on this Talk page that one way of resolving the conflicting priorities and perspectives of different people and groups would be to have this page mostly reserved for a biomedical type of framing, through the lens of the diagnostic category of ASD, with Autism covering the broader concept, in the style of gender dysphoria vs. transgender. I am still not sure this would be the best approach, but perhaps it's worth talking about?

Anyway, like I said: a lot to unpack here. Eight parargaphs down and I've barely even got past your first sentence, and it's about time for my breakfast. I'm afraid there's still a lot more to be said! I think everyone would prefer for this page not to be 'a battle ground', but objectively, this is highly contested subject matter; there are complex philosophical, political, scientific and meta-scientific questions at stake, and the way that we collectively talk about all of this can make a huge difference to people's lives. It's no wonder people get invested. Oolong (talk) 08:13, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

@Oolong: the issue with the reply tool not working was due to a non-UTC timestamp in the signatures of AverageWikiEditingEnjoyer. This can cause a bunch of issues on Wiki, including breaking a bunch of the talk page archiving bots. I've fixed that with the timestamps from the edit history, and the reply button should now be visible to all again. Only thing I haven't touched is indentation level, as I'm not quite sure which messages are replies to each other. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:10, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks @Sideswipe9th, and well done! Oolong (talk) 18:33, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks should also go to Izno who helped diagnose the issue! Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:34, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

My apologies, that post was mine, which was made when I forgot my account password and didn't understand how to format my IP properly to that post. That aside, I do think though that despite my difficulties with proper signature on one of my first times using the wiki, I personally feel my points are largely still are, if not valid at least has some merit to it, and should be considered when editing accounts in the future to prevent such a significant risk of imputing clear biases such as the false-equivalence bias and dedicate a giant portion of the page to explain the condition from the perspective of a statical minority regarding how we understand autism having such a great impact onto the article whether or not you agree with the movement in particular. Especially when you factor that many of the most recent and significant of edits is mainly just one individual with their own emotional involvement and alignment with that group in particular as opposed to the mainstream scientific views on the condition. User:AverageWikiEditingEnjoyer (talk) 22:00, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

@AverageWikiEditingEnjoyer: please check the message I've left at your talk page for how to automatically sign your posts :) Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:12, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

If you would allow to comment on the observation in general, I have the impression there is some sort of trend among people self-diagnosing autism, often combined with traits not autistic or contrary to autism (and calling everyone out who points this out to be "close-minded"), and these people seem to genuinly think, they are in fact autistic, not able to distinguish the "autstic-trend-diagnosis" and actual forms of autism. Maybe this goes over into the article. We should watch out for this.--VenusFeuerFalle (talk) 18:24, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

A couple of things about this: one, it looks like a majority of people who say they are autistic on Twitter, for example, have a formal diagnosis: 72.5% of 332 respondents in this poll.

Two, it is not at all clear that the 'self-diagnosed' people are saying anything substantially different from those of us who have been formally assessed. Most people who are willing to declare in public that they're autistic have thought long and hard about it - often they have officially-autistic family members or close friends, and having done a significant amount of research, are confident that the parallels with their own experiences are close enough for them to qualify.

Of course, a lot of people have wrong ideas about autism, whether they're diagnosed or not, autistic or not!

There just are quite a lot of autistic people: almost certainly more than 1% of the population. Huge numbers with formal diagnoses, and very clearly large numbers of autistic adults, especially, who don't know it yet or haven't had a formal assessment. Oolong (talk) 18:51, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I was more thinking about TikTok and the proposed ideaof hyper empathy, usually based on the "double empathy problem", which in turn doesn't imply anything about hyper empathy. Rather it seems, empathy (or theory of mind) isn't necessary to engage in an empathic way. These people I mentioned are, often attributing to autism things which are often contrarely to autism, like no-lack of empathy at all, lot of social connection but only with the "right people", low AQ-score, all criteria for withdrawing a formal diagnosis. But I am more relying on experience with a TikTok trend, not on formal analysis. I thought it might be helpful to be aware of this, but maybe it is not. Sorry if this rather caused confusion. VenusFeuerFalle (talk) 10:36, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Venus! I worry a bit about TikTok as well, to be honest, but I don't know much about it.

The double empathy problem obviously doesn't imply 'hyper-empathy', but it does demonstrate - with a good deal of empirical backing by now - that the way many scientists thought about empathy in autistic people has fundamentally been very badly flawed.[11]

That tends to suggest that a significant degree of empathy, especially with other autistic people, should be seen as compatible with autism. I'm not sure any of the things you listed are really criteria for withdrawing a formal diagnosis anyway, are they? DSM-5, for example, doesn't actually mention empathy - I think the closest it comes is "Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions." It's not obvious that's incompatible with any of the things you mentioned. Oolong (talk) 10:57, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

@AverageWikiEditingEnjoyer I wish it was feasible to address your points short of writing essays here, but I don't think it is, and I do think it's important they're addressed. Perhaps we can work out ways towards the common goal of Wikipedia having good, up-to-date autism coverage; or perhaps that's a fool's errand. Either way, here's part 2...

Moving on from questions of scientific consensus, the other big aspects of your comment are around the idea that the movement for autistic rights is a 'scientifically unpopular' 'niche, and relatively recent group'; and that membership of this group should therefore be presumed to deligitimise an editor's input on autism.

I made a few observations in my previous comment about scientists increasingly taking on board the views of autistic people on autism; I'll add that I don't think neurodiversity is the niche perspective it once was when Google Scholar shows 14,500 hits for the term, several scholarly books have been published in recent years by mainstream and/or academic publishers [12][13][14] and you see bodies like the General Teaching Council of Scotland producing professional guides on the topic.[15]

I'm curious what 'autistic rights movement' means to you. To me it means something like 'people who believe that autistics are fully human, deserve full human rights, and don't always get them; and who are willing to put any effort into changing that.' I like to think this is not such a niche position, but perhaps your experiences lead you to believe otherwise?

As for 'relatively recent' - sure, in the grand scheme of human rights history, 30-odd years of history[16] is relatively recent. That's about how long it took between the Stonewall riots and states starting to pass civil union laws, for example; it's fair to say that the movement for autistic rights has a long way to go yet.

Still: we have come a long way.

But I distrust the framing of my perspective as the 'political worldview of the ARM'. My perspective is one of a person embedded in a community, more than a civil rights movement. The two can't entirely be separated, of course, in the same way that the history of the struggle for LGBT+ rights is not really separable from the history of LGBT+ communities, but I spend rather more of my time in what I'd consider community activities than political ones, which I suspect is true of the vast majority of people who form part of the (or an) autistic community, and many of these ideas are widespread, well beyond a few highly politically engaged people. If you look at the history of the autistic community, you'll find that mutual support and connection has often preceded anything explicitly political. Framing 'the ARM' like it's a separate group feels like an attempt to portray it as something other, as opposed to a direct result of lots of autistic people talking to each other.

There are of course autistic people who disagree with some of the basic assumptions often made within the autistic rights movements: who would enthusiastically embrace a 'cure' if such a thing could ever exist, who would support measures to prevent more autistic people being born, who see their autism as something separate from themselves, something along the lines of a disease. The evidence available seems to suggest that these are niche views amongst autistic people, and not altogether dominant among families and relevant professionals, either.[17][18] How should we weight the views of autistic people about autism (including autistic academics, practitioners, parents etc.) compared with those of non-autistic professionals and others? I don't think there's an easy answer to that for Wikipedia, but I think it's fair to say it's a question that needs to be addressed. I expect it will need to keep on being addressed, on an ongoing basis.

For me, being part of the autistic community as much as I am means that I talk to multiple autistic people on a daily basis, on a wide variety of topics, both online and offline; many of my friends, and some of my family members, are also autistic; and many of the kids I teach are autistic, too. I have worked with - and spent time socially with - people with a very wide range of support needs. I don't think any of this gives me a 'clear conflict of interest' with respect to autism, any more than someone who lives in a country and cares about it automatically has a 'clear conflict of interest'. Should we ban Americans from editing articles about America? Ban people who believe in gay rights from editing articles about sexuality? Probably not, right?

Everyone who has any reason to care about autism at all has some kind of position on it, and some kind of angle they're coming at it from. Anyone who is familiar with the area knows that nearly all of those positions are controversial. As you've no doubt noticed, Wikipedia is not always great at dealing with controversial topics! So our job is to weigh up whatever evidence is available; to consider the needs of our readers, first and foremost, but also those who are affected by what those readers think they know; and to put forward material which takes something as close as possible to a Neutral Point of View. The goal here, as I understand it, is to make Wikipedia as useful as possible to its readers, using reliable sources to back up contentious points and give fair weighting to different sides of arguments when necessary.

Does that sound about right to you? Oolong (talk) 09:43, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

As someone who knew literally nothing about the topic, I am very glad Asperger was a separate entry. That was the only term I had ever heard, and the current article setup led me to the "autism spectrum" article. Please don't change a thing... 47.146.10.47 (talk) 18:48, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Nobody is arguing that Asperger shouldn't have a separate entry, but there is a broad consensus that there are a lot of things about these articles that still need changing, I'm afraid! Oolong (talk) 09:04, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Autism in females

Differences in females with autism, the expanding growth of autism with realisation of the different manifestations between afab and amab. 180.150.36.62 (talk) 05:45, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

Do you mean that the article should discuss that? Because yes absolutely. I personally despise writing, so I shan't be doing it, so if you (or anyone else) would be willing to write something on it, that would be great. If you'd rather not add it to the article directly, you could post a draft onto the talk page here, and other editors could take a look at it before it goes up. --Xurizuri (talk) 13:36, 21 June 2022 (UTC)