zlacker

It's funny how upset most comments are with the realization that a lot more people are disabled while most of the users in HN are probably on the spectrum

>>guizad+(OP)
I grew up in a Danish town of 20.000 people and two schools. In my school there were 3 dyslexic children. They went to the "special" class 4 hours a week. I'm not sure what to call it, "special" isn't the right word, but it's not just because my English is not sufficient to come up with the right name. It's because this was the place they put all the children with what we'd call disabilities today. Some of the students in the class were only in that class, others like my dyslexic classmate only went to the class those 4 hours a week. It was also a full age range from 0-9th grades. As you might imagine it didn't exactly work.

Today we know that 10% of the population is dyslexic. So those 3 children should've actually been 80. Some of those 77 children could be in the group of adults who can't read.

What is interesting to me is that you rarely see people rant about the dyslexic the way you see people talking about something like ADHD.

>>Quothl+Xz
> I'm not sure what to call it, "special" isn't the right word, but it's not just because my English is not sufficient to come up with the right name.

It's the sort of thing that doesn't have a fixed name, because once it's had a name for ~10 years everyone decides the term is offensive and gives it a new name.

>>guizad+(OP)
There's something a little ironic about calling every user on a website disabled on an article about overdiagnosing disability

>>t0lo+8P
I'm not ironic, you're ironic.

>>astran+zK
It was called special aid, but the reason I can't come up with a defining term is because it was a class with all the trouble kids across age spans from 6 to 14 years old gathered together. Then when the government mandated that schools had to help dyslexic children, they threw them into the mix. I'm not sure how anyone thought that was a good idea. It's no wonder that parents at the time would actively fight any sort of diagnosis because their children would be send into those "special" classes.

Anyway. It used to be that dyslexic children didn't go very far in the education system, and today they do. In part because they can get extra time during tests. I imagine there are similar stories for ADHD and whatever else you have these days.

>>t0lo+8P
You see, this is not overdiagnosing and not every person in the spectrum is disabled.