It seems to often be rather colluding, doesn't it? Good to hear from you about this, as it confirms this feeling... And why I had such a terrible time when I misguidedly went on a podcast with two successful clinical psychologists!!

Also, as someone with a degree clinical psychology, I just cannot trust ANY psychology study anymore. The level of superficiality is unbearable.

Instead, we should be listening to their accounts, picking them up and putting a plaster on their knee... and planning how to protect them in future.

And then (in our research etc.), we should be looking around and saying, with great compassion and curiosity, what the heck is going on here? And what can we do to really fix it?

(End of thread)

If the canary shows signs of distress in an environment, endlessly studying the canary will only tell you so much.

At some point, if you want a proper explanation, you have to study the air!

Perhaps it's toxic. Violent. And abusive.

️

12/13

#SocialInjustice #Inequality #Abuse #Competition #Globalisation #Capitalism

Perhaps it's time to turn the telescope around?

Even if there will be complaints.

11/13

We say an autistic child has “social difficulties” when they get bullied in the playground.

Without looking at the behaviour of the kids who are supposedly okay. The bullies. The bystanders.

It's the strangest thing ever. I've often found myself scratching my head over it, and why everyone acts like it makes sense.

10/13

#SchoolTrauma #Autism

When a less powerful population is suffering at the hands of others, we look for the explanation inside that population.

🧐🧩 (Note: the puzzle piece is used ironically here)

9/13

So... what about autism? ️

8/13

#Autism #Neurodiversity #Neurodivergent

Yet it gets read backwards: this is what she's like, therefore it explains why this happened to her.

7/13

So even where researchers identified psychological characteristics (anger, confusion, frigidity) they shouldn't have assumed those characteristics had been there beforehand.

‍️

6/13

The population whose behaviour you are trying to explain isn't in your research, and the population you can get access to becomes the place where you look for the cause.

But there’s another problem too...

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5/13

But the battered women would.

So the researchers redirected their attention to the women and began examining their personalities instead, deciding that they were “aggressive”, “indecisive”, “passive”, or “frigid”.

After which, that can basically be given as the explanation for the violence.

4/13

The thing researchers were trying to explain in those studies into abused women was men’s violence. Yet they were looking for the explanation in the characteristics of the women the men are violent towards.

Men’s violence is men’s behaviour, and yet an enormous amount of effort has gone into trying to explain it by examining women.

️

3/13

#Feminism #EqualRights #SocialJustice #GenderEquality

Have you not also found yourself wondering what it is about autistic people? About yourself?

And about women who've ended up in abusive relationships? Or wondering what it is about yourself, if it's you who has? (Newsflash, however: in spite of persistent studying and expecting a conclusive result, researchers have been unable to find a consistent profile. They just can't find what exactly the “thing about” these women is.)

2/13