PDA Paradox

In China, the UK, and the USA, one can get CoViD, but if you live in the UK, you can also be diagnosed with PDA which a USian cannot. What kind of disease is only available in select locations?

PDA is short for Pathological Demand Avoidance and is considered (in Britain, at least) part of the Autism spectrum. If it's still not clear, one with PDA finds it difficult or impossible to submit to what is experienced as a demand (even if it might be meant as a request or a suggestion). As you might guess, this is the kind of diagnosis that explains to a parent why their child refuses to obey, replacing the label of stubborn, recalcitrant, or naughty, and in the process removes the blame the child would be given and indicates that punishment is the wrong solution.

Harry Thompson, who can claim PDA among his diagnoses, tells us that it has a neurological basis and is independent of one's past experience. Nature not nurture. The demand to see it this way is one I am (pathologically?) resisting so I googled and found no compelling evidence but much cultural agreement. We want to leave behind the previous cultural agreement that Autism was caused by "refrigerator mothers" (i.e. bad nurture) but I am resistant to the demands of cultural agreements in general. I think Harry would understand this impulse of mine.

Harry says he resists labels: "To brand oneself with restrictive labels is to ultimately restrict oneself altogether." but he bows to the tyranny of neurodeterminism, a word I just made up to mean the reduction of who a person is to their brain. At least he starts off that way but later on he says: "The person doing the labelling [British spelling] may be oblivious to the fact that it’s the very environment which is holding these symptoms in place." He recognizes that all his language--the whole book we're reading--exists in a context. Even the diagnosis PDA is an expedient that can be tossed aside when in his "natural habitat" and he simply becomes "a person expressing himself in the way he feels most competent, in an environment he feels most comfortable."

Most of us, when we're born, experience the world as something we're eager to join. We don't question our culture or our gender but feel we belong in it, pushing away any doubts. Others, though we know it's the only game in town, remain hesitant or suspicious. I always imagined autism as an outright refusal, fleeing sensory input, rejecting even language, with the so-called treatments being ways to force it on the child "for their own good." Seen this way, all autism is PDAish.

For Freud, it's all [b:Civilization and Its Discontents|357636|Civilization and Its Discontents|Sigmund Freud|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438544596l/357636.SY75.jpg|848942] with that failure of contentment resulting in neurosis. Harry imagines some kind of environment that he doesn't need to rebel against, but is that really possible?

Perhaps we don't need to address each other in the form of demands. Marshall Rosenberg suggests this solution in [b:Non-Violent Communication Training Course|3692070|Non-Violent Communication Training Course|Marshall B. Rosenberg|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|69460]. Meanwhile, others manage their intimacy by artificially creating environments of demand and submission, known as BDSM.

I, diagnosed normal, find much of Harry's ways of thinking perfectly understandable, even though he describes his brain as radically different from that of normal people in the context of this book. I agree with Harry that what we're dealing with are not really disorders but differing ways of being human. All psychological pathologies are social constructs anyway. The formulation of this one in particular as pathological from the standpoint of a presumed normal point of view is unfortunate but predictable, and yet I still can see PDA as a useful classification that will resonate with those to whom it applies and their care-givers, as long as we recognize its not a disease.

Even the demands of writing a book seem to have been a challenge for him and somewhere after the first half, he sort of relaxes and decides to just say whatever he feels like, though politely so we can avoid being triggered by the demand of his point of view. Then he has his mother write an ending to transition us gently back into the "normal" world. I have to wonder what his father, a. k. a. "the beast", would have said on this occasion.

He often chooses some infrequently used words when more common ones would do; e.g. lachrymose, adamantine, vicissitude; which read autodidact to me, or maybe Asperger. I have to wonder how someone less intelligent with the same underlying "kind of mind" would have made it through the kind of situations that Harry has had to live through. I also wonder if he has "aged out" of those meltdowns he documents. Aren't the late teens the age when males are statistically the most violent?

Note: If you can't tolerate the demands of reading an actual book--you could always watch some of Harry's youtube videos. There's a large overlap of stories between this book and what he has uploaded to the internet.