what is really interesting working in mental health how is really seeing where folks do know stuff and where they absolutely do not. we had an affirmative care for autistic folks training and for me, the only thing i got out of it was instead of "pathological demand avoidance" use "persistent drive for autonomy" in regards to folks who have a "PDA profile" aka if their brain sees them as being told to do a thing, they are like nah i am gonna do my own shit.
one gal today asked if we had more stuff for her to look into because she knew nothing about autism and the training went too fast for her, which i think its great that we got a space where we feel safe to admit we dont know about a topic and we can then help each other.
she had a question about when someone can't communicate for themself, how do we find out if we hsould use autistic or person with autism, because she has a family member with a kid whos autistic and that person uses person first, and i tried to explain the whole like yeah see the issue is that folks are hearing autism and getting mad at that when instead they need to stop it actually.
also if youre sitting there with a therapist and youre like, i dont think this person knows about this thing im telling them about even tho its a mental health thing: they might not. im an msw now. i had 1 (one) class on just like, here are disorders that exist. it was a summer course where we flew thru the DSM while being told that really since we dont diagnose, we dont need that much info like this anyway.
but yet, if i got someone saying i got xyz going on, no actually it is useful to be like oh shit i know all of those to be symptoms of this thing, do you got any of these other features? like yeah, knowing what flavor of anxiety you have specifically doesn't really change how we approach therapizing anxiety, but folks show know basic hallmarks of shit like autism!