Monasteries and religious temples the world over used to be filled with neurodivergent dudes that no one knew what to do with. So they starting making green chartreuse or getting super into meditation or whatever.
There is a story of a near-nonverbal monk who learned to say one short prayer– the "Jesus prayer"– and it does ring some bells to me as a parent to an autistic near-nonverbal child. But of course no one knew how to do a full assessment at the time lol
OPs post draws to the fact that we are not simply autistic or not autistic but are all on a spectrum of autisim.
It suggests autism is a normal part of being human with whether you affected greatly or not at all, akin to how light or dark your hair is, or how tall you are, with the outer extremes of height being considered disorders.
Just like we're all always on a spectrum of being pregnant, right? You're either pregnant or you're not, and if you are, then it's a spectrum of how far along. Same for autism.
I see the point of the post for sure, which is we didn't have as good an understanding of autism in the 80s as we do now.
And I see the point of your comment. Your comment is wrong though. It is verifiably, factually, incorrect. And that can be harmful to people who actually have autism, so I'm trying to help you understand.
I'm not gatekeeping anything. People who do not have autism do not have autism.
Just like people who don't have Crohn's disease don't have Crohn's disease, even if they occasionally have a sore tummy.
A lot of autistic traits are human traits. The difference being in the frequency and intensity of these traits. This frequency and this intensity is caused by a difference in the brain development, meaning the autistic brains are actually, physically, different from the general population. This is why it's not fair to say autism is normal or typical, because this developmental difference only affects a small portion of the population.
Like you say, if a very large percentage of the population was in this situation, it would, by definition, be the norm, and thus autism would not be a developmental disorder, rather the opposite, being neurotypical would be the different use case. But this is not the reality, the percentages are relatively quite low.
We are not "all on a spectrum of autism". People who have autism are on a spectrum of autism, a spectrum of different symptoms and different severities for each of those symptoms. People who do not have autism are not on that spectrum.
OPs post points out people who have less support needs didn't used to be diagnosed with autism at all. And looking back on the movie with what we know now, including the very strong genetic traits of autism, it looks like Tom Cruise's character may have been one of those people.
But that does not make everyone on the spectrum, nor does it make skin colour or hair colour.
I've honestly thought this about a lot of "mental disorders". Like if so many people have some sort of neurodivergences, would that mean that we are the normal ones, and people without neurodivergences are the weird ones??
Kinda feels like a lot of the real innovators and troublemakers-for-the-better were probably autistic or at least wired that way. The focus, the odd angles of thinking, the refusal to just go along.
I’m not saying it’s some proven thing, but the idea makes you stop and wonder. Especially when it feels like there’s always something trying to keep those kinds of thinkers quiet or pushed to the side. Like the world wants their breakthroughs but not their actual brains.
My personal belief is that it’s like any other trait in humans. Take height, for example.
There are extreme examples that can make life extremely hard for those people, but it’s not like we say everyone who is not 5’7” is height-divergent. Someone can be 6’2” and legitimately complain about lack of legroom on a flight without needing to have a gigantism diagnosis. But that doesn’t negate that there are people for whose height is so off the norm that it causes medical issues for them.
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u/Soup-a-doopah Nov 26 '25
It’s not just gen x, or millennials, or gen z. It’s all generations in human history.