"Anyway, diagnosis is the only way out of the dilemma. It's the only way your reality can be different from other people's without someone being at fault - is if you have a word like "sensory overwhelm" to explain the difference."
It's frustrating how this person gets so close to understanding the actual fundamental problem but then veers off into, not just ignoring the fundamental problem, but reinforcing it even as they make well-intentioned attempts to mitigate it.
I have never seen an autism symptom list that didn't make me think "that's me!" I don't think my parents even knew what autism was when I was little, and they had no notion that I might have it. And yet they functionally did a lot of autism accommodation for me, because they were respectful of my stated preferences and self-reported experiences and allowed me significant autonomy and input on how I was raised.
My parents didn't know about autistic restricted eating. But they did not force me to eat aversive foods, because they didn't force me to eat food I disliked, they provided me with food I liked, and they allowed me substantial input on what I was fed.
My parents didn't know my stimming was an autism thing. But they let me do it anyway, because they realized that sometimes children do odd quirky harmless things and that's fine.
My parents didn't know about autistic sensory sensitivities. But they didn't force me to wear clothes that triggered them, because they didn't force me to wear clothes that were uncomfortable for me, they gave me input on what clothes they bought for me, and if necessary my mother was willing to modify clothes to be more comfortable for me e.g. by sowing patches of soft cloth over scratchy underwear tags.
When I was very little my mom took me see a live theatrical performance and when the lights went off I had what in retrospect I think was a meltdown. My mother didn't know about autistic meltdowns, but she could see that I was distressed and didn't want to be where I was and reacted correctly: she immediately moved me to a more familiar and comfortable environment (the plaza outside the theater) and treated me with compassion. She didn't try to make me stay in the scary environment, she didn't try to talk me into ignoring my discomfort, she didn't guilt me for ruining her fun, and she didn't get mad at me for ruining the enriching cultural activity she had planned for me. She accommodated my meltdown because she had an empathetic and compassionate response to my obvious distress and she felt that the problem that should be prioritized in that situation was my pain, not the inconvenience the outward expressions of my pain caused for her and the other adults around me.
My parents didn't realize they were (probably) raising a special needs child, but their parenting failed gracefully because they respected and accommodated my preferences, desires, and aversions. I think promoting that approach to children is probably a more reliable way of getting the needs of disabled and neurodivergent children accommodated than keeping authoritarian parenting norms and adding a bunch of diagnosis-specific carve-outs for children with legible disabilities and neurodivergences, because respecting a child's preferences doesn't require the child's difference be conveniently legible to medical bureaucracies. Also, authoritarian parenting hurts able-bodied neurotypical children too.
"They will tell someone they're in pain, someone they trust, and that person will say no they're not. That didn't hurt. It can't have. They're being selfish/dramatic/lying."
Yeah, that sounds like an awful thing for a child to experience. The reason it happens so often is that a lot of adults have a default assumption about child behavior something like "If a child acts like an ordinary experience was some kind of torment for them, they're probably lying or exaggerating or being manipulatively dramatic in an attempt to weasel out of having correct discipline imposed on them, and the correct reaction is to punish or at least shame them for it so they learn it's antisocial behavior and adults will not indulge it." If you have that as a default assumption about how children behave, it is likely to make you abuse children. The correct thing to do with that assumption is discard it and replace it with assumptions that are more respectful of children's explicitly and implicitly stated preferences, not add a bunch of "but if they're autistic or..." disclaimers to it.
One of the most horrifying things about that tweet sequence is the possible implication that, for all their good intentions, Victoria Duncan thinks that kind of invalidation would be an appropriate response to default presumed unreasonable by the adult complaints of a neurotypical child. I hope I'm being inaccurately uncharitable there, but it's hard to not suspect it when she puts so much emphasis on medical diagnosis as the only way to prevent disabled and neurodivergent children from being abused this way.
If I got killed by being run over by a bus tomorrow and it turned out reincarnation was real and I got some input on what family my next reincarnation would be born to, I think I might take a family like my previous set of parents (clueless about autism but inclined to accommodate their child's preferences) over a family with the mindset of Victoria Duncan. I'd trust the former more to not abuse me if I had some difference that wasn't conveniently legible to the family pediatrician and school nurse.
It's disturbing that Victoria Duncan apparently thinks a medical diagnosis is "the only way your reality can be different from other people's without someone being at fault" (charitable interpretation is she's describing an approach lots of parents and adult authority figures take toward children, not her own beliefs). People have different subjective realities and different preferences all the time and learning to accommodate that is a very basic social skill that's basically expected in settings where people interact as more-or-less equals; maybe Jane in accounting thinks dark chocolate is awesome and Citizen Kane is a masterpiece and her colleague David thinks dark chocolate tastes terrible and Citizen Kane is over-rated crap, that doesn't mean one of them is "at fault" and in need of correction, it just means they have different tastes and there might need to be some negotiation if they're going to share a dessert or watch a movie together. A lot of neurodivergence accommodation is basically taking that attitude and social skill and applying it to preferences and desires and aversions that are farther toward the thin tails of the bell curve. If it's especially hard to get adults to apply this social skill in interactions with children, I think it's because of the authoritarian approach many adults take toward children.
I'm not one of those full-on anti-psychiatry people, but when I see stuff like this I empathize with where they're coming from. You shouldn't need a doctor's note to make you treat your child as a person whose preferences, desires, and aversions matter.
