Regular reminder that being an asshole is not a symptom of any form of neurodivergence. (You can replace “neurodivergent” with depressed, anxious, bipolar, etc. and the diagram works equally well)
ETA: social faux pas, awkwardness, and genuine symptoms of neurodivergence don’t make you an asshole. I shouldn’t have to say this? An “asshole” is someone who enacts a pattern of abusive, controlling, harassing, and/or harmful behavior with no remorse or concern for how other people are affected.
Neurodivergent people: Trying their best to fit into society
You: Fuck those assholes.
As someone who is neurodivergent and operates at an engineering level, when I’m under pressure I can sometimes be an asshole unintentionally. I try my best to recognize when I do this and apologize when I can. It’s not something I can help. It’s impulsive which means it’s hard to control.
Here you are telling everyone that I am not deserving of compassion or understanding and should be written off as an asshole.
Do you know what it’s like being neurodivergent? How people treat you when they find out? I now have to be on my best behavior at all times or I could get labeled an asshole and therefore deserve nothing according to you.
Sometimes mental illness is like having a stab wound in your gut and you have to act like everything is fine. It’s not always possible in all situations.
To say this post lacks awareness is an understatement.
I think a lot of people here found it a bit caustic. But I don’t necessarily disagree with the point I think you might have been trying to make.
There’s a line that’s pretty easy to draw involving intent and behavior. However the actuality is the world isn’t made for us and this is as much an accessibility issue as it is anything else.
This is pretty clearly demonstrated in the show House. There’s at least one episode where House is in a wheel chair and he illustrates how he can use that wheel chair to get away with a lot of intentional behavior masked as accidental or otherwise unintentional. At one point I believe he even makes it clear it was intention and able bodied people give him a pass because “you wouldn’t hit a guy in a wheel chair”.
When people think each incident is unintentional they are more likely to be willing to compromise their irritation or boundaries. When they feel the incidents are intentional they feel righteously angry and are less likely to fall back on social norms. However they still generally default (for people with physical disabilities) to compromising their boundaries in order to be socially accepted or not look like the bad guy. This is part of the problem with the whole thing.
This is part of the problem with this discussion. The main assumption here is that each party is operating on the social norms laid down by NT people and nobody in the thread seems to be readily able to agree on what specific behaviors make you an “asshole” because it’s subjective and ND do not generally have the same reference baseline for what is acceptable.
This is not making excuses. It’s laying out facts.
There’s a lot of anecdotes here in this comment thread. There’s a lot of personal experience that is valid but does not necessarily equal the experiences of even a marginally reasonable subset of the population to make an analysis of what constitutes an “asshole”, or what behaviors specifically are NT or ND.
But it seems we can mostly agree that deliberately using the condition of being neurodivergent as a shield for behavior we know is not acceptable is wrong.
The scale by which we measure that isn’t decided by ND people though. It’s decided by a society of mostly NT people. And because society by and large doesn’t even necessarily acknowledge those differences and make boundaries based on facts and education rather than feelings we end up with this hodgepodge of badly enforced boundaries, unhealthy masking that does real damage, and under/overreaction.
But people still deserve empathy. That empathy doesn’t mean you should abandon or alter your boundaries to accept unacceptable behavior.
Everyone is trying their best, even neurotypicals.
Doesn’t give you a free pass.
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Man I got NPD and even I would find it weird for people to like me just because they know I have NPD like you don’t gonna deal with the shit, if they can’t help being assholes then step it up
Sorry but I don’t understand what you are saying with your first point. Is your second point literally “you need to step up your mental illness game?”
Neurodivergence is not metal illness. You can not “cure” what is not broken. Trying to do so is what causes serious childhood trama. Neurodivergence is tied to communication differences and a differences in how the brain works.
For more information look up the double empathy problem.
Neurodivergence comes part and parcel with mental illness for some people. Depression is a mental illness that a lot of ND people suffer from. It has a direct effect on how we communicate especially when compounded by other ND traits like hyper focus or anxiety (the latter of which is also considred a mental disorder).
It’s reasonable for someone who is ND to be experiencing mental illness that may compound behaviors that society as a whole doesn’t condone.