digitalraven | You Are Not Good Enough

I posted this on Twitter a couple of days ago, but I think it requires expanding on here.

Too often, discussions of mental health in both tech and in fandom (specifically SF fandom) focus ASD (autistic spectrum conditions). Sometimes, in tech, it also includes depression and anxiety, in the guise of “burnout”. But that’s less common.

I can think of a lot of reasons why this is the case: let’s start with “because they’re talked about more in those fields.” Tech and fandom are places where people “expect” to find people on the autistic spectrum because media portrays people with ASD as “belonging” (or being more comfortable) in tech/fandom related spaces, which is in turn because stereotypes about people with ASD and stereotypes of people involved in tech/fandom have significant overlap.

Some quotes that I’ve seen recently (no source given, because it’s not a public place) that sum up this attitude:

I think a lot of us computer geeks rate a little bit aspie

and

It’s a common thought in [snip] that computer geeks tend to fall somewhere on the spectrum.

and

I’d be very unsurprised to discover that mild ASD/Autism is common among authors, especially of genre fiction

I’ve got to admit, this attitude pisses me off far more than it should. Follow the chain:

I’m active in tech
I’m an author of both games and genre fiction
I have a mental health condition
I have no signs whatsoever of ASD

If I try to start a discussion about mental health in these fields, I’m immediately fighting against the idea that the only ones that have any relevance to the field are ASD and depression/burnout. Err, no. My work in both is directly impacted by being bipolar, but I can’t talk about it because nobody cares. It’s not one of the two acceptable mental health conditions to have in tech, so I can please piss off and let the “real” discussion happen.

Allow me to offer three points of rebuttal:

Fuck you
Fuck you
FUCK YOU

This deliberate attempt to minimise and ignore other mental health conditions in both fandom and tech is actively unhealthy. It makes the environment hostile to people like me. It keeps us excluded, feeling like we don’t belong, like we’re not worthy of support.

To everyone in fandom and tech: You need to be better because you are not good enough. If you are not willing to see that you need to change, you are part of the problem and I am sick of pretending that your mealy-mouthed appeals to two conditions amounts to a single iota of worthiness when you implicitly use that as a stick to beat the rest of us.