Autism

From what I've seen, here are some of the arguments against self-diagnosing:

• Allistic people using autism as an excuse for their behaviors/difficulties, then denying the difficulties that actually autistic people experience and misrepresenting autistic people.
• Narcissistic and psychopathic people pretending to be autistic to manipulate others, including actually autistic people.
• Misdiagnosing themselves when their difficulties are actually related to other root causes, such as prolonged childhood abuse.

In the first two arguments, the problem with self-diagnosing is the social impact it has on others, including the autistic community. I can see why some people are against self-diagnosing since it could make their lives harder, especially autistic people. The last one is more about helping the individual properly understand them-self and developing a proper course of action to improve their lives, so it's an argument rooted in care.

I am not entirely against self-diagnosis. However, I think it could be re-phrased to "self-identified" since "diagnosis" is a medical term. It would be like a person saying, "I'm self-diagnosed with depression." That person isn't diagnosed with depression, though they very well may be depressed. It's really just a pedantic issue from my perspective. Regardless, I don't really care one way or the other because I understand what they are saying and think that an actually autistic person self-identifying as autistic is valid enough. Still, while I wont invalidate someone for self-identifying by gatekeeping autism, I tend to be a little cautious at first because of my experiences with people pretending to be autistic. In this case, I think the issue is that some jerks just can't let us have nice things.

This is why there is such a trend in misinformation these days, a breakdown of distrust in institutions. I get why there is that distrust.. institutional issues are easy to find in all fields, however that doesn’t stop them from being correct on the whole.

Look at Covid denialism, denying the results of the last election… the loss of peoples ability to believe experts in their fields. Unless people here are actual doctors no one here has the expertise to give a diagnosis. Everyone has become an expert these days and does their own research, reality doesn’t care about your intuitions on this though.

Saying this, you might be right you could be autistic based on your own feelings/observations. That still doesn’t make it a diagnosis.

I saved a pic of an article I was reading, this is a good example of being an expert and being someone that has interest in a subject but not having the training and knowledge to fully understand it, I read this a bunch of times and still don’t actually understand it as I’m sure most people here won’t either.

There is nothing wrong with being sceptical of experts as they can be wrong and wanting second opinions on things however that doesn’t make you an expert because you can google things.

I still don't understand why so many people are against self-diagnosis. Someone is suffering and trying to find help, a lot of people, especially minorities and women, can't find it professionally. What's wrong with those people looking for help themselves? Having a word for what is different with you helps finding this help.

I'm not talking about people claiming to be autistic and demanding attention and accomodations, that's a whole different story but trying to keep people from finding help themselves seems to be very wrong to me.

Who wrote this rubbish? Doctors aren’t willingly recommending abuse, and most of them refer to specialists.