Autism disinformation on Telegram soars in Latin America and Caribbean.

nobody. its just become popular to label yourself as autistic and blame everything on that.

i've seen posts on social media with something like "omg my autism is goin brrrr hahaha." in relation to something that has nothing to do with being on the spectrum.

"If you like video games, you might be autistic!" and other such nonsense.

makes it rather difficult when people think its "hip" and will attach non-spectrum behavior to autism.

... do you know how isolating it is being a neurodivergent person who stims? Do you know how many times I've had people awkwardly look at me or ask me to stop fidgeting with a pen or whatever, which paradoxically made me more overwhelmed and more want to stim? I've literally done it my entire life, and I never once even knew that it was a symptom of adhd. People just told me I was annoying. I had no retort to that. All I could was try my hardest to hyperanalyze everything I did.

Seeing people stimming on TikTok genuinely made me feel less isolated. No one doing so was doing it as a badge of honor. It's cause stimming is an activity that is so shamed across society it is miserable. For many of us it becomes a cycle of shame and frustration trying to control it. It's even worse if you have a tendency to vocal stim. I got in so much shit at school when I was a kid for just blurting something out when I felt overwhelmed or overstimulated. I had no idea there were other people out there struggling with the same things. I had no idea other people couldn't help but fold a piece of paper when it was handed to them or click a pen so incessantly that it started to actually hurt their hands.

The people accusing others of stimming as some kind of social credit were always just shaming people for stimming. That's all it ever is. FakeDisorderCringe is a bullying subreddit dedicated entirely to shaming neurodivergent people and people with physical or mental disabilities. It's just a bunch of people pointing at them and baseless speculating on whether or not someone else is suffering from something from their entirely uninformed perspective. You can't tell if someone is neurodivergent from a video. They don't gain anything from publicly identifying as such. It actually results in them being bullied and facing intense scrutiny.

Sorry, you probably did not intend this as a big statement it is just exhausting running into this opinion everywhere I look. It's always women who are "doing it for attention" and you look in the comments and it's just hundreds of people shaming them for stimming. Usually a few comments about how she doesn't "look neurodivergent". Especially if the person in question doesn't have an official diagnosis yet, ignoring all of the biases and hurdles society places in front of people trying to get diagnosed.