What a strange article. To summarize, a guy is rejecting the current opinion about the autism spectrum, seemingly because they struggle to understand behaviour of their daughter once she entered puberty. Then they read about a specialized personality disorder that seems to fit better in their view, and now they spend their time diagnosing everyone and their dog within their surroundings, including themselves, with schizoid personality disorder.
I have people close to me with actual diagnosed schizoid personality disorder, this disorder is nothing like this person describes it, to the point of being offensive. No wonder why the actual professionals they are talking to so outright dismiss them.
You are saying that the daughter's behavior exhibits characteristics of a female entering puberty? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I read your statement to mean "the author is seeing common female behavior." (since all women enter puberty)
You mention someone with "actual diagnosed" disorder assigned by "actual professionals".
It seems like you think the daughter's behavior should be thought of as more characteristic of behavior of the female sex and less that of a woman expressing a diagnosed disorder. Can you clarify your thoughts?
I read the article and saw more narcissism and anger than autistic behavior, and I'm not too familiar with how much the "professionals" treat narcissism as a subset of autism.
I think you are reading too much into it indeed. I just paraphrased what the author called "My teenage daughter went mad."
I explicitly do not want to make a statement about the normality of the described behaviour, as it is impossible to do something like that on a third-person account, even if you were a "professional".
And I would like to point out that you are doing the same.
What I criticize indeed is the simplistic view of mental disorders put forward in this article, especially personality disorders. Differential diagnosis is very difficult in psychology as many disorders are disruptions of similar underlying cognitive processes, and comorbidities are common. Their view of schizoid personality disorder is not accurate. For example the part where the author dismissed the psychologist who reminded them that those disorders are only diagnosed in adults. This is what struck me as very odd, which is why I mentioned the age of the daughter. This shows a severe deficiency of knowledge what personality disorders actually are. While there is genetic disposition for developing a PD, they are generally considered to be acquired during childhood and adolescent personality development.
In addition, the author seems to get confused by the similarity in name of schizoid PD and schizophrenia (confusingly even though they seem to be aware that the illnesses are different) by assuming a prospensity to having a psychotic world-view.
An outdated view considered it actually to be impossible to get rid of a manifested PD in adulthood, while modern views fortunately see more neuroplasticity in adults. Diagnosing a PD in early adolescence does not make sense, rather one would identify stressors in the environment nurturing dysfunctional patterns and try to resolve those before the behavioural patterns are embedded too deeply.
But it is difficult to tell what the author actually means, as they are somewhat contradictory in their thoughts and seem generally ill-informed about basics.
I hear echos of my friends' stories in that kid. The author exhibits a pattern of somebody doubling down on a wrong idea in the face of increasing attempts to correct them. Eventually it devolves into conspiratorial thinking that writes off everybody else that disagrees with them. In a weird way the author is unconsciously lucid about their own problem.
Also, browsing through the rest of the blog, the author seems to be deep in the "incel" social darwinism rabbit hole, which explains why they have so much difficulty to shoe-horn everything into their world view to the point of contradicting themselves within the same sentence. The entire article (or entire blog even) could be used as a case study of severe cognitive dissonance due being trapped by one's own dogmatic ideology.
A close relative of mine works for a non-profit in Canada to give families with special-needs children access to resources from the government and other organizations.
She pushes for autism diagnoses constantly, well aware that they are often not applicable, because it's basically the only childhood mental disability that gets significant money and attention. If she didn't, she'd have to kick desperate families with severely disabled children out the door with nothing.
I'm skeptical of the medical opinions in blogs like this where parents have to do their own research because the system is ignoring their actual reality, and the use of autism as a bureaucratic catch-all has obvious negative consequences, but given the broken and twisted medical and social services systems in most Western countries, I don't see how anything can change. It's all a symptom of a much broader failure.
What a strange article. To summarize, a guy is rejecting the current opinion about the autism spectrum, seemingly because they struggle to understand behaviour of their daughter once she entered puberty. Then they read about a specialized personality disorder that seems to fit better in their view, and now they spend their time diagnosing everyone and their dog within their surroundings, including themselves, with schizoid personality disorder.
I have people close to me with actual diagnosed schizoid personality disorder, this disorder is nothing like this person describes it, to the point of being offensive. No wonder why the actual professionals they are talking to so outright dismiss them.
You are saying that the daughter's behavior exhibits characteristics of a female entering puberty? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I read your statement to mean "the author is seeing common female behavior." (since all women enter puberty)
You mention someone with "actual diagnosed" disorder assigned by "actual professionals".
It seems like you think the daughter's behavior should be thought of as more characteristic of behavior of the female sex and less that of a woman expressing a diagnosed disorder. Can you clarify your thoughts?
I read the article and saw more narcissism and anger than autistic behavior, and I'm not too familiar with how much the "professionals" treat narcissism as a subset of autism.
I think you are reading too much into it indeed. I just paraphrased what the author called "My teenage daughter went mad."
I explicitly do not want to make a statement about the normality of the described behaviour, as it is impossible to do something like that on a third-person account, even if you were a "professional". And I would like to point out that you are doing the same.
What I criticize indeed is the simplistic view of mental disorders put forward in this article, especially personality disorders. Differential diagnosis is very difficult in psychology as many disorders are disruptions of similar underlying cognitive processes, and comorbidities are common. Their view of schizoid personality disorder is not accurate. For example the part where the author dismissed the psychologist who reminded them that those disorders are only diagnosed in adults. This is what struck me as very odd, which is why I mentioned the age of the daughter. This shows a severe deficiency of knowledge what personality disorders actually are. While there is genetic disposition for developing a PD, they are generally considered to be acquired during childhood and adolescent personality development. In addition, the author seems to get confused by the similarity in name of schizoid PD and schizophrenia (confusingly even though they seem to be aware that the illnesses are different) by assuming a prospensity to having a psychotic world-view.
An outdated view considered it actually to be impossible to get rid of a manifested PD in adulthood, while modern views fortunately see more neuroplasticity in adults. Diagnosing a PD in early adolescence does not make sense, rather one would identify stressors in the environment nurturing dysfunctional patterns and try to resolve those before the behavioural patterns are embedded too deeply.
But it is difficult to tell what the author actually means, as they are somewhat contradictory in their thoughts and seem generally ill-informed about basics.
I hear echos of my friends' stories in that kid. The author exhibits a pattern of somebody doubling down on a wrong idea in the face of increasing attempts to correct them. Eventually it devolves into conspiratorial thinking that writes off everybody else that disagrees with them. In a weird way the author is unconsciously lucid about their own problem.
Also, browsing through the rest of the blog, the author seems to be deep in the "incel" social darwinism rabbit hole, which explains why they have so much difficulty to shoe-horn everything into their world view to the point of contradicting themselves within the same sentence. The entire article (or entire blog even) could be used as a case study of severe cognitive dissonance due being trapped by one's own dogmatic ideology.
A close relative of mine works for a non-profit in Canada to give families with special-needs children access to resources from the government and other organizations.
She pushes for autism diagnoses constantly, well aware that they are often not applicable, because it's basically the only childhood mental disability that gets significant money and attention. If she didn't, she'd have to kick desperate families with severely disabled children out the door with nothing.
I'm skeptical of the medical opinions in blogs like this where parents have to do their own research because the system is ignoring their actual reality, and the use of autism as a bureaucratic catch-all has obvious negative consequences, but given the broken and twisted medical and social services systems in most Western countries, I don't see how anything can change. It's all a symptom of a much broader failure.
...and then the author talks about his autistic son.