If it’s any comfort to you, online interactions - granted for some of us more than others - are problematic, period. No matter how carefully and neutrally you word a thing, someone will misconstrue your tone and intent.
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It’s exciting to read how iNaturalist has helped your son bloom and given you a new bond. I can think of so many games, more or less, that iNaturalist can accommodate. Trying to achieve a certain number of observations of X in your neighborhood. Finding X other observers in your town that have observed that species, and seconding or commenting on their observations (with supervision in the case of a child). Choosing a species you haven’t found yet and tracking down where to look for it. Looking at scientific names to see how many species are in the genus Canis, or Equus (horses), or Sequoia. I have autistic friends who are super good with dichotomous keys for identification. The original purpose of iNaturalist is to “connect people with nature,” in all different ways. It’s lovely to see how it accomplishes that.
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This is so great! Please feel free to connect with me along with your son if you want any autism community resources or anything like that, or just commiseration. I had a really hard time getting through school back in the 80s and 90s (there was no iNaturalist and i lived in a concrete wasteland). Don’t send me a message here as i am buried in notifications, but you can use naturalist.charlie @ gmail.com . Or maybe others would offer the same, it doesn’t have to be me! But since i figured out my diagnosis a year and a half ago i have been very hyperfocused on autism and neurodiversity stuff (probably to the point that it reduced my inaturalist observations a little as my hyperfocus moved elsewhere :D ) Finding the autistic community has been among the most important and positively impactful events of my life, and i actually arrived at this discovery in part through talking to another iNat user.
Us autistic people are programmed to collect and classify information so iNat is perfect for us. Many of us just found our way here, without even knowing we were neurodivergent.
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True in many ways, but a lot of us neurodivergent people do better in text than verbally. In person i do like unless a big crowd. But the phone? noooooooooooooooo
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I learned about my “diverging neuro-mindset” just recently, I had to live with it for half a decade without knowing it. I always loved my mind/brain and the way it works differently, and still I wouldn’t want to swap conditions with a “normal” person. In presumptious moments I even feel pity for them, assuming that the way they perceive the world must be dull and boring.
The real issue: it was hard being treated like someone with a regular brain tuning. I wasn’t able to explain my weirdness, neither to me nor to anyone else. It was unbearably hard loosing friends to that. This resulted in a huge frustration and caused an exogenic depression. Without the love of my wife I would have become a formidable misanthropist by now.
So the diagnosis came as a major relief. Now I really enjoy being different.
I even upped my output of neatly categorized marine critter. 
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That’s awesome! Yeah, as you probably saw I only learned pretty recently too. Around when I turned 41. Though i knew I was somehow neurodivergent I just had the wrong labels
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Yes, I’ve read about that. Gave me a push to write about it, too. :)
It was a weird situation: people expected me to be like them, but I expected them to be like me, too … wrong labels on every jar …
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Why do you bring up binocular vision dysfunction? Using handheld binoculars for a long time causes me to have eye strain. Binocular vision dysfunction is something you have all the time. It’s not related to using binoculars. I don’t have binocular vision dysfunction.
Edit: Spammer?
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Wanted to add an aside here. While i will not diagnose individuals, i would estimate that 30-80% of iNat ‘power users’ are neurodivergent and it’s probably over 50%. Most of these are probably autistic (lots of ADHD people on here but maybe less likely to be power users, i could be wrong). I’ve seen a few cases where people have used being autistic as an excise for toxic behaviors. I’m not talking about social miscommunications, over enthusiastic datadumps, or people ocasionally getting into meltdown states. I am talking about systemic bullying, breaking the community’s rules (not vague social norms- well described rules they have been reminded of, like 'do not agree with IDs with sock puppet accounts").
Many, maybe most of us on iNat are neurodivergent and a huge chunk of us are autistic. And by and large iNat is probably the most civil place on the Internet. Just look at this - all these autistic people NOT being jerks because we are NOT inherently mean and when we are sharing our passions with each other we are at our best. Do not let anyone use autism as an excuse to be cruel. Not only is it unethical, it also does great harm to autistic people - a group who are very vulnerable to abuse, have sky high suicide and addiction rates, and have been targeted and are still targeted for eugenics.
If you have a misunderstanding that spirals into meltdowns, we need to talk it through. If you do it knowingly, again and again, you need to get hit with the ban hammer just like toxic neurotypicals who do the same.
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It would affect the person’s iNaturalist experience in that they have difficulty observing.
Sure, but it was an answer to particular message.
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FYI the referenced post by latoyb (which I believe is now hidden) was flagged and confirmed to be spam, which is why it seemed so out of context. I think it can be safely ignored.
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I agree. Sociopathic or even psychopathic behaviour is a neurologic malfunction and should be treated as such (kindness if bearable, therapy if possible, distance if needed ~ ban). It’s got nothing to do with a persons inherent neuro-mindset. IT-Example: the neuro-mindset is like the OS (and there are some weird ones out there), whereas pathological behaviour is like a virus messing up any OS.
I grew up in a decade where this distinction was not made, so my relatives tended to repress any diagnostic thoughts they had regarding some of my more obvious symptoms and rather told me off for not behaving, subconsciously being afraid that I might officially be a wacko.
I don’t think many are ready to do that, with antisocial disorder (hard case of one) person isn’t an easy one to communicate with positive outcome, tendencies people with this PD have will play as a large distraction from normal communication. On the other hand those with mild symptoms or not enough to be diagnosed can actually be very useful for their skills, I envy them for their manipulation ability, I’m not diagnosed but I fit borderline and would pay to just become a person playing a role everyone likes, because I see on my husband people love when you pretend that you like them, they don’t care it’s a lie, fall so easy for it, but if you show true emotions and thoughts they’re gonna hate you.
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So I finally did the thing, and saw a psychiatrist. I started to explain to her my typical daily struggles, and listened fora while and then said “Well, I usually suggest trying things like meditation or dietary changes before I prescribe meds, buuut… I think we’re going to be safe trialing you on meds right away, you should NOT have to struggle that much to function.”
I’ve been on them for 2 months now, and HOLY CRAP it makes a difference! My skull is no longer a nonstop stream of nonsensical thought-babble, and I can focus on one thing for longer than 30 seconds at a time.
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I suffer from panic and anxiety disorders (not autism as far as I know) and meds have really helped my brain from (usually) not spiraling into full blown panic attacks and allow me to use the cognitive-behavioral techniques my therapist taught me. Obviously they’re not for everyone but for me they’ve been lifesavers.
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that’s so neat. With ADHD at least meds tend to work really well, with the things @tiwane mentions they can be wonderful for some people and harmful for others. I’ve heard SSRIs for instance do not work well on autistic people and indeed they don’t work well for me. But they do for others…
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Their comment was in reply to my comment about migraines from using binoculars. Seemed like they were trying to say that I got migraines from having binocular vision dysfunction. But it was spam and has been deleted.
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I think it was probably a bot that searches for keywords on forums and posts that content.
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Yeah. Weird thing was that it talked about the vision dysfunction but put a link to buy binoculars when I was actually talking about binoculars.