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I remember my dad would tell me his teachers (mean ass nuns) would make him put his knuckles on the desk and smash that shit with a ruler until he stopped using his left hand
I remember my classmate telling me that they did the same to her in Louisiana public elementary school in the late '90s. The teacher even told her that it was because she was using “the devil’s hand.”
80s I was told I was holding it wrong. Don’t known if I would have been left handed as penmanship from both hands sucks.
Can confirm. My kindergarted teacher in the early ‘90s slapped my hand with a ruler. Not sure if it was for religious reasons (there was no indication) or she just thought it was wrong. I write with my right hand now and my penmanship is shit.
Holy shit, I’m so sorry your dad went through that. Like how is smashing a child’s hand less of a problem than that child using their ‘other’ hand to write?
Honestly, I’d really like to know what people were so concerned with. All I ever heard was ‘it’s not the correct way’, and the only evidence my mind can stretch to support this is based on the fact that sure, it’s a right handed world and certain things are more efficiently and even safely used with a right hand. I’ve also heard a few cultural reasons regarding cleanliness but these are from cultures far removed from mine and obv never given as an actual reason (to me directly) why using one’s right hand over their left is preferred.
Idk shit like this and many other examples just remind me of how quickly others turn to control and rigidity when faced with something they don’t understand/doesn’t ‘fit’ into their mental presets. This post officially has me in my feelings this morning.
I mean it was jersey in the 70s, he’s never been too broken up about it
Yep my mother and grandfather both went through that shit. It made my grandfather very ambidextrous.
i had one like these at school too. i often think about whether i should visit her again … just as an “update” sort of years later … due to her age, she’s probably dead by now
Ah since some of us are sharing our childhood experiences with being left handed:
I am ambidextrous, like many lefties. While learning to write my letters in Kindergarten (age 5 for non-US peeps), my teacher noticed that I’d switch hands when the one writing got tired. She didn’t like this at all and kept telling me that I needed to choose one. She actually made quite a stink about it so I chose my left, idk why the left specifically.
I still write with my left, despite trying to retrain back to writing with both at different times in my life. I feel like a mini superpower was taken from me.
Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed that my large motor skills are best used with my right side (arm, leg, hand), and my small motor skills with the left. I think it’s a leftover from being truly ambidextrous, or it may be common amongst left handed people. Idk…the very few others I’ve asked seem to be left handed/sided exclusively.
She didn’t like this at all and kept telling me that I needed to choose one.
i hate it when someone sees something cool and unusual and immediately feels the need to correct it… as if it were a negative thing.
oh - a kindergartner is so good at writing that they can write with either hand, and you see a problem in that?? it’s such a sad way to think! it’s counterproductive pedantry
I think if I had to choose a hand I would choose the right, just because we write left to right and I wouldn’t want to track my hand through fresh pencil and pen marks.
My friend in highschool was left handed and his left hand was always completely covered in graphite.
Yeah I definitely didn’t think it through, because too small lol.
I too suffered the graphite mark and even had it transfer to my face via scratching an itch. Very embarrassing as a kid!
I also had a tough time with spiral notebooks, markers, and craft scissors.
nobody is really wired to me one hand or the other, we can all learn to be ambidextrous. your are that way because you just feel more comfortable/experienced doing certain things with one hand than the other, it’s a formation of neuromuscular habit.
it’s just a matter of practice, but yes, as children the adults around us often DEMAND we be one or the other. just like they demand gendered behaviors, etc. And children conform because adults like conformity.
it’s interesting as an adult, like getting coaching and having to re-learn basic bio mechanics you ‘assume’ are some sort of default, because well, nobody ever told/taught you you could/should be doing things differently. like there are different way to hold pens for different styles of writing…
not any different really when say, comes to language use and accents. you have a ‘native’ one you got from your upbringing, but you can unlearn it and a lot of people do because they won’t gain social acceptance if they retain it. when I code switch to my ‘native’ speech… people freak out because it offends them because I’m supposed to sound smart and ‘educated’ , not like a stupid working-class hick. and of course, the first year i came back from college all my family/friends basically asked me why i was such a douchebag and talked so pretentiously…
I don’t believe that’s true - handedness is a real thing. You might be able to learn to perform well enough with the other at something with practice, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a naturally dominant hand for most people.
I was talking to a friend recently. I was telling them that I felt like maybe I was hallucinating my diagnosis because so many people around me also had been diagnosed.
She pointed out that we both like to be around people that understand. They don’t get mad when we interrupt each other because they are struggling with the same thing.
She was so right.
You could also both be hallucinating.
Collective delusion/hallucination is a real thing. Often reinforced when like minded individuals form a tight social group that serves to isolate them from anyone who might challenged the hallucination, and who seek to reinforce it in each other.
Human beings are prone to mass hysteria because we are social animals, and our ‘truth’ about the world is largely a construct of our agreement with our peers. Psychological illness and behaviors, like anorexia, paranoia, etc. are transmissible psychological conditions. They are ideas in your head that eventually become the truth of your reality as they are reinforced by the ideas and realities of the people around you, and part of the drive to do that is for people to have their ideals/realities validated by others.
Women who were interested in STEM were also called witches back then too.
Yes. Just read the story of Job to see how big of a bastard God is in The Bible
Also the definition was formalized. Grouping certain human traits and calling it by a common name wasn’t a thing before.
The food supply is radically different to 50 years ago, let alone 100, 1000 and 10000 years ago. There is reason to believe brain structures are changed by diet.
I’m sure there were undiagnosed autistic people throughout history, but I reckon the glut of diagnoses now is due to food
Ed. Right. So the highly processed food and ubiquitous sugar couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it. I’m so glad that Lemmy people know so much that they can exclude this hypothesis so easily and without even commenting
Yeah the literature coming out on the metabolic brain connection, and improving metabolism resolving psychiatric disorders can’t be ignored.
Given we are in a metabolic health crisis that is only trending up, it’d reasonable to speculate it has had a impact on larger mental health trends since the metabolic health collapse started.
I.e. 96% of western adults have impaired metabolic health.
There were always undiagnosed autistic people throughout history. The world and the sciences we live with were discovered by high functioning people with neurological differences.
Science, religion, math, everything.
Also the un-taboofication of it… see, the “left-handed epidemic”
The people who say that can’t read graphs.
Does this graph account for the huge lack of available diagnosis?
We’ve been on waiting lists for YEARS that only grow and grow to get a 2 hour appointment with someone who can diagnose us with ADHD.
It’ll never happen, I’m sure. The government would rather not put resources into diagnosis, so they can claim almost nobody has ADHD, and not provide any support or recognition for it.
Two psychiatrists have told me that I almost certainly have ADHD but “we don’t prescribe controlled substances” so they weren’t going to formally diagnose me. It seems the only place I can get a diagnosis as an adult is private specialty clinics. I’m poor and the two clinics in my area aren’t sliding scale (which I can’t afford for most clinics anyway) so I just get to sit here with a confirmation of what I’ve known for years and no way to get it treated, or at the very least, put down on paper
Good lord what country do you live in?
I’m sure we can guess
The United Dumpsterfires Of America?
I am fairly confident I will lose access to my ADHD medication under RFK and I am completely unconfident centrist corporate Democrats like Gavin Newsom will give a shit about actually addressing fixing it if one of them wins power after Trump. They will completely accept the narrative we are “overdiagnosing” ADHD put out by Republicans and keep helping Republicans move the goalposts until I am dead.
As a trans, let me warn you about the pathologization of normal human social patterns.
Autism and adhd are classified as disorders instead of diseases for a reason. Disorders per definition disrupt normal/expected body functions and don’t necessarily have any underlying cause. Neurological disorders are just a collection of issues that disrupt your ability to take part in society as the majority would expect.
And anyone struggling with it will tell you that, while it may have been normal human behaviour a few hundred years ago, its fucking exhausting to get trough life with it in this age.
I know where you are coning from. With how much shits hitting the fan right now I don’t know if I’d want that lable on me officially. But at the same time does getting diagnosed open up a way to easier help and accommodation for issues that are 100% real.
That seems disconnected from the point being made here
Can you elaborate? I do not get it.
Maybe ‘Autism’ is a social construct. And ‘neurotypical’ is not based in biological reality, but in expectations for middle-class professionals under a certain social order.
upper middle class professionals are the class by which everything else is measured, yes. conformity with their expectations and behaviors are considered ‘success’ and anything less than or different is ‘failure’.
But autism rates are higher among the middle and upper middle class… because they have the resources to diagnose and treat the difference. as a working-class person, i never ever heard of anything about autism or adhd or mental illness until I got to college in my working-class rural town, none of these ideas existed in day to day life or conversation. nobody had depression, anxiety, or any of that. and the freshman year college, all the sudden these terms became daily parts of my vocabulary. i never even really saw them on the internet for most of the 90s and 2000s.
none of these ideas existed in day to day life or conversation. nobody had depression, anxiety, or any of that.
I think the important distinction is that nobody knew they had depression, anxiety, etc… The whole point of this graph is that people had it and were simply undiagnosed. So the people who had those various neurodivergences were likely unsupported and struggled in their daily lives much more than they would have if they had proper support.
Look at the graph of left handedness over time:
When we stopped trying to beat the demons out of kids and forcing them to write with their non-dominant hand, they were suddenly able to exist openly. And that graph shows that as they were able to exist openly, the rates of left handedness steadily increased until it reached its natural levels. It doesn’t mean more kids were suddenly left handed. It means previous kids (now adults) had been forced to struggle more than their right handed peers, because they got beat if they used their dominant hand. And there were 100% adults at the time (mostly entrenched teachers who still wanted to enforce right handedness in writing classes) who would have been decrying the sudden increase in left handedness as unnatural, simply because it wasn’t being unnaturally suppressed anymore.
To be clear, I agree that many of the natural rates likely aren’t a flat line over time. Depression and anxiety diagnosis rates both seem to be particularly dependent on external/environmental factors. So as the world becomes more and more depressing, people are naturally diagnosed more. But it’s not really accurate to say “nobody had it” before, because it definitely existed. It’s simply that nobody was diagnosed before.
You are being revisionist.
Lead was completely banned from gasoline in 1996. It’s first phase outs began 1975. It took 20 year to remove it. Was the ‘natural’ state of car use, leaded or unleaded gasoline use? Why didn’t we ban it outright completely in 1975 if it was so horrible?
Neither. It was just a social change based on the understanding of the negative effects of lead, which had not been previously known and became known and better understood over time.
There is no ‘natural’ state of things. There are just choices we make. Leaded gasoline persists in many parts of the world still. Just like many children are still being beaten into right handedness in other societies.
I seriously doubt anyone is ‘liberated’ by being able to be left handed or right handed anymore than are liberated by what car they buy. But they certainly do convince themselves, and are convinced by marketing, that that Jeep makes them cooler and more fun than that boring losers who don’t drive Jeeps! I have met a few Jeep lovers who tell me my Honda means I am clearly oppressed, and I should get a Jeep like they drive and be liberated by the massive repair bills they come with.
Are you actually trying to equate left handedness (which is a natural innate part of someone’s lived experience) to choosing a car? I used left handedness as an example because it’s a personality trait and the rates have been extremely stable over time, but the natural rate wasn’t really known until we stopped punishing kids for being left handed. Anyone can choose to drive a Jeep, but nobody can choose their hand dominance.
And if you think left handed kids aren’t more “liberated” than they used to be, you’re simply refusing to accept how much they previously had to struggle to learn to do everything with their non-dominant hand. The entire point of my previous comment is that those kids were needlessly forced to struggle much more than their peers, for something that they had no control over. Instead of properly supporting them, the system was focused on hammering down the nail that stuck out. Because the system prioritized conformity instead of support.
You’re toeing a very close line to some of the “being gay is a choice, and they could stop being oppressed if they just chose to be straight instead” talking points.
Yes. They self-identify with the brand and make it part of their identity. Or they inherent it from their families. My family is a Toyota family, for example. I broke ranks and got a Honda, an this was viewed as a ‘betrayal’, much in the same way left handedness was viewed as ‘wrong’.
Yeah, sexuality is a choice. Part of that choice is to conform with social expectations, regardless of if you are gay, bi, or whatever. You very much can change your sexuality. People do it all the time. It’s not some inherent immutable trait you are born with that persists forever. and people around you in our society get to agree or disagree with you. For example, I am straight, but plenty of women I have dated think I am gay because of my non-conformity with ‘straight’ male behaviors. Further, other points in my life, my lack of gayness was also used to mock, deride, and harass me because I was ‘too straight’. So which one is it, am I gay, or am I straight?
Was I needless forced to struggle in my life because my parents were poor ignorant people, vs if they had been well-off and educated? According to some folks I’ve met, I should have never been born because only ‘good’ people should have children. By your style of thought, indeed, I should not exist, because if I had not been born to my parents, I’d have never had to struggle!
The only way for any of us to not ‘needlessly struggle’ is indeed, for us to not to have been born. Do you have kids? I have nephews, they had pretty open-minded and liberal parents. They are now young adults. Do you know what their complaint is? That their parents didn’t oppress them enough, because if they had, they could have been so much more. They think their parents should have pushed them harder and beaten them into more social conformity so they could be more ‘successful’ in life and be popular and be cool, unlike being only average.
Am I reading this meme right when I think it’s implying that folks are getting over-diagnosed with mental disorders? Because that’s some RFK jr shit. Shame on you.
EDIT: I did misread it, I fully agree with OP.
No.
Oh my bad. What does the meme mean then?
It’s the left-handed thing. The amount of neurodivergent people is the same but the amount of people being diagnosed is increasing because of an increased perception and understanding of neurodivergency.
Diagnosed rate never crosses actual so this is false
Doctors still haven’t figured out I’m telling the truth about how the military industrial complex is manipulating me as part of a case study to see if doctors are actually listening to their patients. I mean, I told my ROTC cadre that my nonexistent sister got me pregnant. What else would they have me do? Stare at goats? We got enough of those guys, so I hadda go learn how to be an idiot online to be of service to my country, amongst other things.
I mean, yes, visibility and legitimacy is a major element in why neurodiversity is more widely recognized. However, STEM folks tend to reassert the authority of science as an institution of capitalism and settler-colonialism by not recognizing that these are not “illnesses” or pathological conditions naturally. Yes, they are behaviours that we have no reason to believe are divergent or new from typical human life, and their status as pathological is conditional on the specific social and material conditions that are facilitated by this system.
We are recognizing it more because it is covered more in scholarship, yes, but also because this system has created the conditions where we are even in the position to construct these behaviors as worthy of identifying to prove that they are real. If neurodiverse people didn’t have to justify their worthiness of human compassion and dignity just because they can’t conform to the expectations and demands of a system that only values human life for its productivity, then there’d be no distinction at all.
“However, STEM folks tend to reassert the authority of science as an institution of capitalism and settler-colonialism by not recognizing that these are not “illnesses” or pathological conditions naturally. Yes, they are behaviours that we have no reason to believe are divergent or new from typical human life, and their status as pathological is conditional on the specific social and material conditions that are facilitated by this system.”
There’s a lot in this that I agree with, but in the past, I have been quite irked by people who take a hard line version of this stance, who say that I’m being ableist by referring to myself as disabled. Whilst the majority of things that being autistic and ADHD cause me to struggle with that are better understood as a function of our environment, there are plenty of ways in which I would consider to be independent of societal structure.
For instance, I struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, such that a bright sunny day, or loud sounds cause me physical pain, and also cause me to become fatigued quickly if exposed to them for a while. This sucks, and I think it would even in a society that was structured radically differently
Oh, and what social system of order and productivity do you think should take over that authority? communism? anarchism?
What is ‘typical human life’?
Am i better off being beaten into submission and diagnosed and drugged by a communist expansionist dictatorship than a capitalist state of settler colonialism?
We can’t know whether the prevalence rates have changed or by how much and its foolish to assume it’s only because of better awareness. The world we exist in has changed immensely and we are subject to the affects of those environmental changes.
further than that, our cultural expectations of what is ‘normal’ have shifted drastically over the past two generations.
i’d argue that what once in the ‘normal’, is no longer, hence leading to greater need and identification of various differences where none were previously seen. Sort of like how you think all birds are the same, until you become a bird watcher, then you see every birth as different by species, and if you are a scientist studying a particular population of birds, you would gain the ability to identify them by their individual personalities and characteristics.
but I, as a lay person, have no idea wtf the difference between a sparrow and a chickadee is, they are just all brown/black bird blobs of a similar size that try to steal my food when I eat outside. they are just ‘birds’ to me. but for someone with a PhD in ornithology, they are two completely different things.
To further that point, it’s guaranteed that what was normal, isn’t, anymore. Some things are, much isn’t. For example, few men, relatively, know how to hunt anymore or would be willing or able to kill an animal. Becoming able to do that has wide ranging impacts on who they are. This used to be normal. If we accept that the environment shapes us then when it changes, so do we, and with that, what is considered normal, shifts.
Yeah, normative skillsets and social roles and expectations are in constantly changing.
My BIL grew up hunting and farming but he can’t ever talk about it anymore because people view negatively in his current social environment of professional urban liberals, who think it is considered psychopathic to hunt/kill/dress animals. He used to hunt, trap, skin, and all that to make money as a teenager. What was totally normal for him, is considered borderline criminal behavior to the people around him now.
Yah, urban liberals can be exceptionally closed minded, in their own unique way.
And if you confront them about it. they tell you how ignorant and wrong you are, because they can’t possible be wrong because they are just so ‘open-minded’ if you can’t see how open minded and correct they are, clearly you are a close-minded fool.
Why is the time arrow squiggly?
Probably because it’s made of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff
