I said this in another comment, but it is not possible to know who is and isn’t faking it. You can’t diagnose someone over the internet. You just can’t. A proper assessment is done in a clinical setting over a period of time. If we normalize questioning the diagnosis of others inevitably a sizable amount of people accused of faking it will genuinely be neurodivergent. Same goes with being queer. It benefits no one to allow others to decide if someone is gay or trans or not. All that it does is normalize the idea that it’s acceptable or permissible for other people to decide who you are for you.

I resolutely oppose any efforts to label others as faking a disorder. Genuinely. I do not believe in the “watering down the meaning” theory and believe that ableism/queerphobia comes explicitly from hatred and disgust, not from any experiences with real or fake neurodivergent/queer people. Far, far more harm is done by gatekeeping our community.

You remember that guy who pretended to be a trans woman a while ago? Like had socials and did this whole thing for months? If he came out as trans again today I have no reason not to accept him. So what if he is faking? If he exhibits predatory behavior then he should be excluded by those behaviors. I have no reason to question his identity though. It doesn’t benefit me or my community in any way to treat gender as anything other than what someone self identifies.

Much the same with neurodivergency. Unironically millions of neurodivergent people, predominantly women, have never gotten any help whatsoever for their neurodivergency because they have been systematically gatekept from getting a diagnosis by others who do not believe them. It benefits no one to normalize gatekeeping.

You didn’t get into addressing any of the other things I said. I’m not into repeating myself over and over. I’d encourage you to read the rest of what I said, I addressed the things you’ve said here as well.

No, it isn’t often made up for attention. And the kind of attention directed towards neurodivergent people on social media is overwhelmingly negative. The exception tends to be from other neurodivergent people.

I am neurodivergent. My partner is neurodivergent. The majority of my friends are also neurodivergent. I am aware of what misinformation about neurodivergent people looks like, and it is categorically not coming from neurodivergent people on TikTok. It is coming from communities dedicated to questioning the diagnosis of others. It is coming from neurotypicals who feel the need to gatekeep neurodivergent people and shame them for being neurodivergent.

Not having an official diagnosis doesn’t mean that you aren’t neurodivergent. Ive been diagnosed since I was 4, but I had far fewer barriers to getting that diagnosis than many people do. Particularly, women and girls face gigantic barriers all the time to getting diagnosed.

No expert or journalist can assess whether someone has a disorder over a video. That’s just a statement of fact. Only through performing actual tests and routinely speaking directly with and observing a patient in a controlled setting can you determine if someone meets the criteria for a diagnosis.

This phenomenon of accusing neurodivergent women and nonbinary people of faking it for attention exists in every social media, not just TikTok. TikTok is just the most prominent due largely to its accessibility. Making a TikTok is far less involved than making a YouTube video. It is in many respects easy for average people to create content for.

Ive seen the “problematic posts”. It’s always a conventionally attractive woman or a nonbinary person showing themselves stimming or having a meltdown or talking about any of the ways that being neurodivergent impacts them. The comments questioning them are always all about “xyz isn’t neurodivergent that’s just normal” “they probably make up a new diagnosis to go with every gender” “I’m neurodivergent and I am inferior in every way and want to die, there’s no way anyone could ever be proud of being neurodivergent, this happy woman offends me by trying to say that she is neurodivergent too”. It’s not scientific, it’s not journalism, it’s not medical. It is shaming people for being themselves. That’s all.

It’s not your business to gatekeep someone else’s neurodivergent status. It’s not your business to determine whether someone else’s symptoms are valid or not. It’s just ableism. That’s all it is.

Why would it be a problem for me to make a video saying “look I have a cool new stim”? Is stimming only permissible if I suffer socially for it? Is it a problem to celebrate stimming itself as something positive and good that helps me regulate my anxiety? I didn’t even know those little pop-it toys existed until like a year ago. I would never have known without TikTok and I now use them all the time.

As for the hitting people, I’m not sure what you mean by that. I’ve never even heard of that accusation before, and it’s certainly not what people mean when they talk about people “pretending to have adhd/autism for attention”. I’ve been in these communities before I know who they’re accusing of faking it. It’s largely women who are conventionally attractive who “dont look autistic at all” and non-binary people who “are crazy and make stuff up all the time for attention”.

… 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.

Luigi Mangione did more for the class struggle in 5 minutes than most of us have done in our entire lives.

Bullets. That’s how. Homeland Security is the SA. ICE is the SS. When people start to fight back, they will shoot.

A very solvable problem with window tiling managers. There’s unironically thousands of them.

Linux just honestly might not be for you if a terminal is an insurmountable obstacle 🤷‍♀️ it’s how you interact with the basics of your computer. It’s worth ripping that bandaid off and getting over your fear of term imo. I honestly prefer software I can just run from the terminal.