This aversion to agency is not unique to fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, or Long COVID. It reflects a much broader shift in the culture of diagnosis itself. Increasingly, we prefer explanations that place the cause outside the person and therefore absolve the person from responsibility for change. Trauma is preferred to personality. Burnout becomes more acceptable than depression, because burnout says the workplace broke me, while depression raises questions about how you live. Neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD and autism are preferred to questions about adjustment and socialization; they locate the problem in the brain’s wiring. Notice the pattern. The preferred diagnoses are increasingly those that externalize blame, minimize agency, and transform suffering into something that happened to you. We are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with stories that ask people to change and increasingly attracted to stories that say the person cannot in any way change it themselves.

No one complaining about the alleged “wave” of “invalid” autism self diagnoses has an answer to this. Self dx always precedes official dx, out of simple logical necessity.

I have a theory about autism and cPTSD... I think unmet autistic needs cause cPTSD over time. As in, things like... Long term unaddressed sensory anxiety... Long term anxiety from social misunderstandings...