Autism: An Epidemic of the 21st Century?

[Kilroy_x]

Psychologists are not beyond corn pone opinions. The entire DSM is filled with sliding signifiers. They might as well have just chosen labels like jerk, prick, douche, and bitch, they would have been equally substantive. There is a problem with psychology as a field, and that is that for the first half of its existence it was built predominately on unfalsifiable theories. Freud, Adler, Jung, etc. However, the tendency towards elaborate story telling rather than factual exploration never really went away, and we can see that in theorists like Fromm, who remained prominent and respected well into last century, and probably remains so among too many. The field is not an island either, so we see it moves in tandem with social movements. People heralded it as a triumph when homosexuality was removed from the DSM. This was a diagnosis held in place by largely by the prevalence of "psychoanalytic" theories. However, the diagnosis did not disappear as a result of scientific progress, but as the consequence of a social movement, which unfortunately just further demonstrates the overwhelming triviality of the average movement within the field.

People tend to have a preference for story telling over proposition and refutation when it comes to things they consider sacred. It is humanities arrogance and self-importance that renders them incapable of accurately assessing what is in a mirror.

Here is the great mystery to me. Why does every label formulated automatically import a pejorative property? No, I'm not trying to do something as superficial as disprove the existence of a "normal" category. That horse has been beaten to death already. I'm asking why every new variety of human consciousness discovered has to be a disease.