I remember that on Reddit, a few years ago, there was a woman on a subreddit.
I was just looking what was on Reddit and doomscrolling r/shitposting for 20 minutes was more than enough. I decided to just type-in random words to the URL bar to see what subreddits I would stumble upon.
After lots of private and NSFW subs, finally I ended up on r/alone and I found this lady in the sea of “i wanna kill myself soooo baddddd” posts.
The lady was autistic if I remember collectly. She had a boyfriend who also had a mental ilness. Unlike her though, he was violent. He would scream at her for pointless things and shit.
The lady was always confused. At least she seemed so to me. Which is probably the autism. She had a hamster cage and had a brain-injured hamster that she kept because it was sick in the head just like her, as she put it.
Have no idea what happened to her. I still think about her sometimes. It just felt so sad.
<disclamer>I don’t want to troll, this is a serious comment and I just want to highlight different perspective to improve mutual understanding.</disclamer>
Definition of words depend on the context. They are model to express ideas and have a common understanding of things. A bit like Newtonian model explain why planete orbit around the sun (Until mercury drift comes into play).
If we were on the context of neurological conference or medical comitte, I would completly agree with you. But we are on Internet, on Lemmy, and on a post that don’t even aimed to talk about mental disorder. Stating this, when talking about illness in this context, one refer to high level definition of illness that you’ll first find in the dictionary. According to Oxford dictionary: “a condition in which the body or mind is harmed because an organ or part is unable to work as it usually does; a disease or sickness”
I hope you would agree that, taking only this definition, Autism, at least more extrem cases, respect this definiton.
Adding precision can be usefull, but you’re then changing context. Let’s take an analogy.
My daugther asked me yesterday why the sun rise on a side and fall on the other side of the horizon. I told here it’s because sun rotate around the earth. This explanation is enough to answer the question, and is in the context of talking to a 5 year old girl. There is no need to explain that earth actually rotate on itself and around the sun, and that rotate around galaxy. There is no need to detail about Newtonian mecanic, nor general relativity in this context. This would just add noise to the discussion. The geocentric model is true in this context.
Another analogy. I’m talking about multiplication, and affirm that ab = ba. In this context, without precision, everyone agree with this. But, strickly speaking, multiplication being a binary operation acting inside a group, it’s not always commutative. Typically, matrix multiplication is not commutative. So, ab = ba in the context of algebric structure is false.
As a matematician, there would be no reasons to feel ofended or to claim that ab=ba is false when commenting post talking about, let say, carpentry. You can precise that, when digging into the details, there are cases when ab != ba, to open another discussion, but claiming that ab != ba, in the context of carpentry, is just… wrong.
Worst than that, it generate conflicts. You claim that someone is wrong without arguing, or explaining your own context. Going to the extreme, I’m quite conviced this kind of behavior fuel intolerance, up to the point of having a a retarded redhead elected (I think this will become the new godwin point). Most of people have nothing against Autism, LGBTQRST+, or whatever minorities. But being constantly corrected that “there is no 2 gender”, “autism is not a decease”, “the terms master or blacklist are ofending because it refer to slavery”, etc… just becomes unbearable and makes people fall into intolerance. Not because they have something against the minory itself, but because they feel attacked.
My 2 cents.