These things happening once in a while is normal.

These things happening all the time is an issue.

For a lot of symptoms of adhd, autism and others it's not what you experience, but the frequency at which you experience and how detrimental it is for you because of the frequency.

Like, everyone needs to piss and shit. But if you're going 10 times every 2 hours, something is wrong.

Social media in general attracts autistic people, because it’s much easier to socialize without being judged or excluded.

By definition Autism and ADHD are disabilities that negatively impact your life relative to other people.

It’s important to have a word to label what the issue is in a neutral way, because if you don’t use the word autism, you get called words like “weird,” “creepy,” “stupid,” or the r-word. When none of those things are true. Your brain just doesn’t intuitively understand things the way other peoples’ does.

The ADA defines a person with a disability as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity. Socialization is a major life activity. Loneliness is a major cause of depression of death, and not being able to socialize well impacts your ability to maintain employment. When these issues aren’t managed, your ability to function in society is significantly impaired.

To me, this post is no different from saying “You’re not dyslexic, you just needed to try harder in spelling class.” When people have an issue, telling them it doesn’t exist isn’t helpful.

autistic people find talking online better than talking in person, it's also not very safe to talk about autism IRL where people will judge you, so it's not talked about as much IRL

Also as a sidenote, ASD has different symptoms for different people. I don't relate to some of the things personally, but my sister (also with ASD) does.

Your daughter does not take "speed". Educate yourself.

These are genetic disorders. Ask yourself, why it might be that you, who gave your daughter large parts of her genetic makeup, perceive her as "normal".

Everybody pees. If you have to run to the loo every 5 minutes, see a doctor.

Could be that everyone identifies with the same things that the group you're referring to experiences. But that group often has it much worse than most people. Or that the vocal minority of that group misrepresents the hole.

What you see as "basically normal" is after they are medicated. Isn't that the point of the medication? Maybe go look at someone who stops taking it for an experiment.

there's definitely a non-zero number of people who self-diagnose as something to feel "special," but for every one of them there are five people who are autistic or ADHD and need accomidations but won't get them because the people around them think they're doing them a favor by insisting they're not "broken." you don't want your kid to be the first thing, sure, but also make sure you aren't causing the second thing- if you're in doubt, the right person to ask is a psychologist or a psychiatrist. however, that can be very expensive, hence the whole self diagnosis to begin with

The same way not everyone who gets sad has depression or not everyone who gets nervous has anxiety

Well you see, I have my diagnosis paperwork

The only thing in this list that I relate to is the masking, so I'll address that

Yes, we all conform and hide parts of ourselves in public, doesn't mean you can't "be yourself".

As I understand it, when a neurotypical person is hiding parts of themselves, it's something like "I don't want anyone to know I'm into Taylor Swift". So just don't talk about it. It's that simple. For me, I have to think about every word I say because no one interprets things literally. If someone asks me whether or not I like Taylor Swift and I want to answer in the affirmative, can I just say yes? Or do I need to take note of the day of the week and say no while gesturing wildly with my left hand when it's a Monday or look 15º to the left from Wednesday to Friday? When we talk about masking, it's that, applied to every single sentence coming out of your mouth. Comparatively, never talking about Taylor Swift is a trivial task.

Edit: a very good starter would be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1AUdaH-EPM

You have a scale of 0 to 100%. Mine is like 200 to 4000%. There is a lot of literature and research on autism. We work differently and the way your post starts made me feel very attacked. And suddenly completely out of energy, although I love informing about it.

I guess that's because exactly that is our daily struggle. To all the damaging things we experience add on top that we're accused of faking and also 'that's how it's for everyone'.

If you want to get into it but not start reading books I can recommend the book 'invisible differences' very much. There's a pdf on the internet floating around.

I know you wanted to ask innocently, however keep in mind asking about something and implicating something is not really a thing to people suffering massively exactly for that reason can be very hurtful.

Some of us are just sitting here nodding along to 90% of the memes and struggling continuously with basic daily function but also past puberty and thus completely unable to even get checked for any kind of diagnosis due to a crumbling and outdated healthcare system.

I'm diagnosed with Asperger's (mild Kanner's, but with low emotional intelligence), and this happens all the time.

I felt like this which is initially why I didn’t get tested. Even tho I can see how medication has helped me, I still worry that I’m imaging it.

Typically the difference is that people with autism and or ADHD experience things more frequently or more intensely than others.

Yes, all these things are normal for most folks, but how often and the severity of these symptoms are diffrent.

For example, I have ADHD, and one of the symptoms of that is I'm easily distracted. For most people, this would sound fairly normal, but even when its something important, or something I want to do, my brain is moving on to a billion other things all at once rather than focusing on the task at hand. Medication helps immensely with this, but it still happens even on my meds at times. That is not normal.

Also the autism spectrum is a spectrum for a reason. Some people appear to cope better than others and some can't cope at all. Masking is normal but for someone with autism it can be exhausting because some people with autism never stop masking. They are constantly aware they aren't "normal" and it stresses them out.

Its hard to understand these kinds of feelings if you're Neurotypical. Our brains work differently from others, which might sound like "I'm special" but honestly, I'd rather not have ADHD. Shit sucks dude. I fucking hate not being able to do things like a normal person. Its a curse.

People ive met with ADHD or autism, its just nice to be seen and feel like were understood which is why these memes are often posted or are popular with those crowds.

Yes to four out of the five serious questions.

Do you know the Barnum Effect? In my country they did a funny test on TV once, they'd do people's astrological charts and then read one chart to them, and every single person was like "Woah, this is so about me! That's totally me!" and then they would be like "Oops, I picked the wrong chart, this one is actually Hitler's"

Are the images AI upscaled or purely AI-generated?