I did a poll here for a week. 141 people responded. I was interested in #mastodon users' preferred categorization of the term "neurodiverse." The results generally confirmed my a priori predictions but had some surprises. Some takeaways for me, right now:

• Autism was in a tie for top position, unsurprising as, in my experience, autism was the first condition to be labeled "neurodiverse" or "neuroatypical", and is, I suspect, something of a prototype for the category.
• ADHD was tied (given the sample) with autism. I was mildly surprised. I think a few years ago this would not have been the case; ADHD awareness, activism, and acceptance have increased dramatically over the past few years.
• Schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and #bipolar disorders were the next group. The inclusion of anxiety disorders surprised me; I suspected it would be tied with depression disorders.
• Personality disorders being endorsed at the same rate as depression and intellectual disability was a mild surprise.
• Psychopathy being tied with depression and intellectual disability was a pretty big surprise for me. This poll was largely about opinions and preferences, so stigma is (IMO) a big part of it. "Being a psychohpath" seems to be less stigmatized (in a specific way) than I thought... it's also possible the results would change if I'd used the word "psychopath" instead of "psychopathy."
• Intellectual disabiity (until pretty recently labeled "mental retardation" but, you know, the euphemism treadmill) was a wild card for me; I didn't know where it would end up. I would like to do a different survey sometime, with a different response format, so I could see the variability in responses. I suspect this condition (and a few others) would result in a lot of variability.
• Pedophilia was of particular interest to me. The results confirmed my strong a priori hypothesis, and this (plus psychopathy) was a major reason for wording the poll as I did, prompoting for preferences instead of a more objective assessment of the research-based fitness of each condition for the "neurodiverse" category.

More about #pedophilia: a nice, big mountain of research strongly suggests that it is a condition of altered brain development; in fact, it is probably a sexual orientation. A better survey than this simple poll might assess participants' understanding of pedophilia in addition to the question I did ask. I suspect many people confuse pedophilia with child molestation/abuse (nb: pedophilia is a pattern of attraction, not a set of behaviors, though many pedophiles have also abused children).

Both the left and right political meta-groups in the USA have latched onto "pedophile" as a label for child molestation--usually of post-pubescent children, where pedophilia is very specifically a pattern of attraction to prepubescent children. There was flirtation during Trump's first term with the more correct(ish) labels "hebephilia" and "ephebephilia", but I think the need for a stronger, more dehumanizing label won in the end, and "pedophile" packs a bigger cultural/emotional punch than "child molester."

Anyway, thanks to everyone who participated. This is fascinating enough for me that I might even do a real survey sometime. If I can get my dean to stop giving me extra classes for calling him out on his anti-labor nonsense.

Notes:

1. I phrased the question as *Which of the following conditions do you personally think should be included under the #neurodiversity umbrella? * instead of asking which conditions would be classified as neurodiverse, etc. for reasons noted above.
2. I chose "neurodiverse" instead of "neuroatypical", believing that the latter would produce more restricted categorization.
3. This is not (I hope) research according to federal definitions. It's a demonstration of a concept and I won't be trying to disseminate these results in scientific journals or at science conferences.

#neurodiverse #neuroatypical #poll #adhd #autism #schizophrenia #anxiety #bipolar #PersonalityDisorder #psychopathy #depression #IntellectualDisability

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This is a graph, so it is difficult to summarize. The main findings are noted in the post, and here are the data as (I hope) a readable table. The first numerical column is the percentage of respondents who endorsed the condition in that row. The next two numerical columns are the lower and upper limits of the 95% confidence interval for that value. condition Percent I_lower CI_upper --------------------------------------------------- Pedophilia 3.7 0.6 6.8 Intellectual_Disability 40.7 32.6 48.8 Depression 40.7 32.6 48.8 Psychopath 40.7 32.6 48.8 Personality_Disorders 44.4 36.2 52.6 Bipolar_Disorders 51.9 43.7 60.1 Anxiety 55.6 47.4 63.8 Schizophrenia_Psychosis 55.6 47.4 63.8 Autism 92.6 88.3 96.9 ADHD 96.3 93.2 99.4

as someone with #ADHD I’m very resistant to the idea of “turning over a new leaf” or “starting something new” with the new year. People with ADHD do this sort of stuff *all the time* (not just on the new year) and it rarely if ever sticks

I’ve found the best thing I can do for myself to get something to stick is to figure out how to make it automatic, part of a routine. And even then, routines are fragile! I can have a routine I’ve been doing solidly for *years* broken by traveling for a few days

If what I’ve written above speaks to you, I invite you to follow my new year’s path not of starting something new, but of figuruing out how to strengthen and reinforce your routines, how to *keep doing* something that isn’t entirely automatic for you yet and make it more so

*Baywatch title music intensifies*
#adhd #adhdmeme #adhs #tdah

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A social media post from the account "@adhdoers": "ADHD people staring at the consequences of ignoring one tiny task for three weeks". Below the text is an image of a person standing on a sandy beach, facing a large, curling ocean wave. The person wears a white cap and a light-colored dress, with hands on their hips. The wave is blue-green with white foam, and the beach has shallow water at the shore.

I don't currently have the attention span to fix the #CSS on my website but at least I got my #Mastodon #verification done. When you have #ADHD and struggle with #ExecutiveDysfunction, sometimes adding a few letters into a bit of #HTML is really a feat worth being proud of.

Website update: none, yet. My #ADHD is refusing to cooperate on that front. It insists I focus on #TTRPG nerdery and my latest attempt at finally beating #BaldursGate3 instead.

I need some autistic adult insight—particularly if you have adhd/autism and also have OCD.
Where do you find sensory/support needs end and OCD thoughts/compulsions begin? Seems really tricky to sort out.

For example, some cute hand motions a child I support was using looked like stimming, but it turned out to be a symmetry thing. Then some mouthing turned out to be a contamination ritual. This child could tell me which is how I learned after asking the right questions.

#autism #adhd #ocd

Server admin and my ADHD brain: I wanted both Apache and Nginx running together on the same server. So I put Haproxy, a load balancer, in front of them, which passed on the request to either depending on the domain name.
It was running fine, but then I started wondering why I was using Nginx anyway, just for reverse proxying. So, I decided to swap Nginx for Caddy. Something I had heard of, but I hadn't known how easy and efficient it was for that exact use.
Once I had Caddy running, I then started to wonder why I was bothering to have Haproxy in front, when I could just have Caddy in front as a reverse proxy, and pass php sites to Apache.
Since Caddy has auto https, I figured I could just let Apache serve the http files to Caddy, and let Caddy handle the SSL/TLS termination.
So I did that, and had to edit each virtualhost file - also removing all of the https stuff, then the mod rewrite stuff also, so that it didn't get stuck in a loop.
It did work, but there were some issue. I could have put my mind to working those out, but instead I wondered if I even really needed Apache. So I tried setting up serving static files with Caddy using php-fpm - but really unsure if it would be able to handle the complexities without directives. But it worked just fine without any messing around. So I removed Apache as well, somehow ending up with just Caddy.
Well that was a journey....

#webdev #adhd #server #webserver #serveradmin #caddy #apache #nginx

I’ve been trying to explain two autistic / AuDHD experiences that I have to a non-autistic loved one for a couple of years now, but I’m finding it really hard!

1. The first: difficulty with uncertainty.

I explain this like it is an anxiety that diminishes the more information I gain that reduces the levels of uncertainty. But the word “anxiety” makes my loved one interpret it as always being about fear, just like anxiety usually means more generally. E.g. fear, on any level, even minor, of a potential negative event happening in the future. But I am not always afraid or worried, so this interpretation doesn’t work. It’s purely the uncertainty itself I find hard to deal with, and I can experience this around things I enjoy and when know there will be no negative outcomes at all. It relates strongly to disliking surprises. E.g. if I am walking from A to B and someone suddenly bumps into me, I HATE that! But if I choose to walk in a busy crowd, I expect people to bump into me and it’s totally fine. I hate being uncertain whether someone will bump into me or not, too.

2. The second topic can be totally separate or experienced together with the first: anticipation!

I have also tried to explain this as like a form of anxiety, but I have frequently felt this anticipation before hugely and purely positive events! It relates to something coming up soon that I am not familiar with. Familiarity in this sense usually only happens when I have either done things so frequently in my life that I can’t forget it, or I’ve experienced it about 3 or so times in the last month. This means revisiting a favourite restaurant that I haven’t been to for a year would cause this type of anticipation. The anticipation often stops me from being able to sleep the night before and my mind is often running through how the event might unfold, planning and so on, even if all the plans are already made and all preparation already done. As I said before, this often happens with purely positive events, so it’s so strange to explain it!

I suspect that these two experiences are very common for autistic people, and the latter, anticipation, probably affects lots of neurodivergent people. I wondered if my ADHD is influencing the anticipation, for example, and maybe I’m just wanting to remember what I need to do for the event since I likely can’t use a routine for something unfamiliar to me? I don’t know! In this case, perhaps anticipation WOULD be classic anxiety since it relates to fear of forgetting something important or losing track of time. But sometimes it’s just an impatient feeling.

What do you think?

Does anyone else experience these two things? Perhaps in a different way to me? If so, how would you describe it to someone who has never experienced it?

@autistics

#AskingAutistics #ADHD #AuDHD #ActuallyAutistic

@actuallyadhd does any of you take the Elvanse BEFORE going to bed at night?

Doesn't it alter your sleep at all?

#ADHD #Elvanse

This happens to me more times than I would like to admit. 😊
#adhd

Too many blogs full of too many tips on managing To Do lists are unhelpful and overwhelming.

They make me To Don’t.

What’s a good tip you actually use for task management?

@autistics @actuallyadhd

#adhd #audhd #neurodivergent

Yep.
#adhd #adhs #tdah

Nur Leute mit #adhs: seid ihr oder wart ihr jemals süchtig nach Methylphenidat?

Only people with #adhd: are you or have you ever been addicted to methylphenidate?

I think I'm close to giving up on #ProtonMail's email "application" for Linux since it's not responding to clicks of various kinds, and it's just a webapp anyway. I really should have checked how little Linux support they actually have before paying for a year of their service.

And I just realized this is yet another #ADHD thing I do sometimes. Ugh.

#FOSS #FLOSS #OpenSource #Debian #Gnome

This is your reminder to cancel all those subscriptions you signed up for on sale at the end of 2024 that are about to renew at full price next week.

#adhd

Trying to talk myself into the idea of buying a #PassionPlanner for 2026, even though I have my Passion Planner from 2017 sitting on the shelf, 5% filled. XD

#ADHD #ThisNextThingWillBeTheThingThatFixesMeForSure

Kids who grew up around narcissistic parents or domestic violence, I know how you feel. I relate to how you perceive the world and I acknowledge that our views/thoughts/personalities have been completely molded by our childhood. We are not weird or strange, we are just different. Stay strong, whatever stage of life you're in 🧡

#mentalhealth #quotes #domesticviolence #depression #selflove #love #weekend #anxiety #adhd

Being the funny one has been working for me since elementary school

#adhd #trauma #comic #mentalhealth

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In this six-panel comic, a small purple character confronts a large, stoic figure labeled "Trauma." Initially, the purple character grapples with how to handle "Trauma," but an idea sparks, visualized by a lightbulb. The purple character then attempts to cover "Trauma" with a sheet, which doesn't fully conceal it, leading to a moment of realization and an exclamation mark. Finally, with a scribbled effort on the sheet, the purple character transforms the imposing figure into a much smaller, softer shape labeled "Humour," declaring it "Perfect" as "Trauma" is still present but now adorned with "Humour." The comic uses a simple, clean style with a lavender background and stark, bold outlines for the characters and text, creating a lighthearted yet insightful commentary on coping mechanisms.