Maeotian wrote:
Society has a way of taking things and blowing them out of proportion.
I do agree: when there's more awareness of something, they take it to mean that it is a MAJOR EPIDEMIC!! !! !
Growing up in the 90's and early 2000's, I was surrounded by the ADHD hype and now, as an adult, I'm surrounded by the autism hype. What I have learned from ADHD is that the media is run by idiots who want to sensationalise everything. You look at a newspaper rack (albeit, a rack covered with yellow journalism such as The Sun or The Daily Mail) and they make up absolutle crap about how all doctors want to cram pills into your child by misdiagnosing them with ADHD (which might happen in some cases, but if they want to keep their job and ever go near children ever again, I'm sure most doctors wouldn't even consider something so careless). There's also a lot of victim blaming towards disabled people. For instance, with ADHD, people were bitching about bad parenting causing the symptoms and that ADDers were just misbehaved and stupid.
The same thing is pretty much happening to us and I suppose you can still say that ADHD still gets a lot of crap. I'm wondering if awareness is enough anymore? I can forgive naivety and I can forgive ignorance in some cases. I just can't forgive and can't forget willful ignorance. Of course, that blog meant well, but how many times do we have to hear in our lifetime s**t about how supposedly there is this epidemic of misdiagnosis and that a HUGE amount of people now look at autism as fashionable? Heard it before - been there - done that - got the t-shirt and mug - yawn...... Can we, as a society, for freaking ONCE just shut the hell up and stop assuming that we know what people have to go through and stop judging them based on our PERSONAL criteria for autism? It's getting kind of pathetic.....
However, I think that I might indulge in mocking the sheer ignorance society seems to have towards mental disorders. Fair enough, it's a little pathetic of me to do so, but it's so much fun (just like mocking creationists). I say, do what you can to teach others, but if they refuse to learn, just ignore them, or if you are like me, enjoy the fact that you are smarter than them (at least in that respect).
20 Oct 2010, 9:57 pm
