My Views on Virtual Autism and Clarifications

All right, so I'm gonna dive right into it. And as you're coming in to this live video, it's going to be a longer video I don't want to make it into. I will make an official response about this, but at the same time, if you're watching this, whatever from wherever, please let me know where you're from. And obviously, if there are, like, comments that are hateful or whatever, I don't really mind. The reason why I'm doing this is because recently we had a Facebook. What are those called? Reels that were cut from a longer video, and it was made into a shorter video and has garnered quite a lot of views. And obviously there are some people inside who are giving feedback. And I wouldn't say it's like hateful speech, whatever. I don't really mind, you know, like, as all. As long as we're all open for a discussion, I think it's okay. And we're talking about virtual autism here today. Please let me know where you're from, let me know what's going on, say hi or whatever, and we're gonna dive straight into it. So the first thing I want to talk about is the naming convention and the reasoning behind why I'm talking about this. All right, so let me just post that right here. I don't know how to, how to do this, man. Like, let me just add an item or something, right? I think I can do a banner or some short. So I'm gonna. Right here and I'm gonna talk. This is what I'm gonna talk about. Naming convention and reasoning. Why, why, why it's called. Why do you call it that? So the first thing is, I do not like the name. I detest it. I don't think you should call it that. You know, like, there's a lot of words that are quote, unquote, offensive nowadays. And I want to tell you, this is something very cultural. Some places where this is from which, you know, like virtual autism by its name was named by a Romanian clinical psychologist. And his name is. Let me just real quick. I don't even know how to. How to really say his name properly. So if I butcher it, please don't kill me, right? His name is Marius Theodore Zamfir. So, like, I'm just going to put it here. It's not me who came up with the thing. So I remember the first time that I heard about virtual autism was when I was doing a talk about, like, some. With. With another autistic adult, right? I've been working with autistic people for a very long time, for like seven or eight years now. I'm. I'm a pretty young fellow, so that's around like a third of my life, pretty much a little bit more, I guess, like a quarter of my life now. So, you know, like, virtual autism, I heard about it was because I was doing a. A whole discussion, a sharing with a. With a autistic adult, and a parent asked, oh, does screen time or gadgets make a child autistic? And my answer, and still is, is that no, it doesn't. Of course it doesn't. What are you talking about? No, autism is not induced, is not created. Children are born, born with it. So far, this is what the research says, and I'm gonna side with it and agree with it for now. All right? I don't know. I keep an open mind. Maybe there are things that actually induce such. Such autistic symptoms or like, autism or whatever. There are theories out there and talk about, like, a parent just talked about this to me. She was like, oh, you know, some. Some people say that there's like, heavy metal poisoning or whatever that creates. Or vaccines or whatever that create such. That had made autism into a real thing, into a more prevalent thing, so. So to speak. But I am not in the. I'm not here to discuss that. I'm not here to talk about any of that. My job is an interventionist, right? I teach children. I teach parents how to teach children. I intervene with children so that they become a better version of themselves. That's my job. I'm not here to talk about, like, magical cures, what caused this or whatever. Obviously, prevent. If we could prevent all this, then, you know, like, I'd be a lot more. Less busy. I'd be a lot more happy with my life. But at the same time, we're here to talk about virtual autism and, like, why it's pissing a lot of people off, right? So this guy, Marius Zamfir, coined virtual autism this term. I don't like it. Let's talk about the reasons why. All right, let's talk about reasons why it's pissing people off. Okay? The first reason is that it's using the name virtual autism. Autism, sorry, autism. And the word virtual is very misleading, right? Virtual. What does it mean? Like, theoretically, he has autism. Like, what does that mean practically? Like, you know, like, it's. It's an adjective, right? It's virtually like autism. Right? That's. But what he meant, what this dude meant was that virtual, as in, like, Screen time, like screen time induced autism, like stuff, which I don't really think is the proper way to talk about this, but why? It's pissing a lot of parents often. And I had like a back and forth email with a parent who was like, oh, you're pissing off, like professionals. Whatever. I'm a speech therapist. You shouldn't be even diagnosing it, right? So that's the first reason why it's pissing people off because of the naming convention is making, like, parents think, oh, it's not even a real thing. Why are you, like, naming other kids virtual autistic? And we have a saying in Cantonese. I'm from Hong Kong. We're the. We're the meanest people on, on planet Earth nearly. I don't know all the cultures, but we basically use swear words to say hello in Hong Kong. I'm over generalizing, but what I mean is we have a lot of these things that we talk about and use as slangs. But you know, like. And cultural is different within the whole world, right? And I'm saying from a point of view where I'm telling you that if someone on the other side of the. Of the earth coins a term, doesn't mean that. If you don't agree with it, then so be it. Then change the name, right? There's a lot of these problems that happen all the time, right? Especially if you like, you know, I don't want to get political here. It happens all the time. And I don't want to give any examples. I don't want to get flagged by YouTube or Facebook, right? But what I'm trying to say here is I'll give you a slang, right? In Hong Kong, if you stutter and you say things that are not clear, right? People will say that you have verbal cancer, right? That's the legit word. Word by word. That's what people say. That's like how we grew. How I grew up with words is like that. So when I'm like. When I hear like virtual autism. Of course, the first time I heard it, I was like, dude, that sounds pathetic. That sounds crazy. But let's talk about the reason why. We're heading towards why I talk about it, why I use it. I don't use it as clickbait. The reason why I talk about it is because, first of all, it's not real diagnosis. I can talk about it, right? I cannot as a speech therapist, by law, in a lot of countries, I cannot say he is. He's autistic. I Can't say that. I cannot say that because it's a real diagnostic term, right? But virtual autism is not a real diagnostic term. I can point to it, I can discuss it, right? At least, at the very least I can talk about it, right? Number two is that there's more and more people asking me every day in the DMS and the PMs and the emails is like, is it virtual autism? Is it classic autism? Dude, If I get a dollar for the number of questions that I get and I don't do a video about it, then first of all I'm doing the parents all over the world, especially those are in India, a disservice. The people who are very, very offended by the terms for that term is not from Asia, not from whatever, they're from the West. I grew up in a Western educational system. I'm not saying anything bad about it. I know it's a term. In the very beginning when I heard it, I was very turned off as well. But at the same time because I changed my mind because like the autistic adult who I was doing the thingy with, the whole workshop that we went on, three hours talking about like how autism has given her such a hard time in life and also how she came out from like being non verbal and such. Sorry, if you want to watch that, we've made it private to only people who have joined, then you see like when the reason why I don't do. I hope you can see why when I'm talking about this virtual autism thing, I'm not using as clickbait. If I, if I were, I would have used that person's autistic, that autistic adults video as a means of getting all of you to, to subscribe to me, right? I don't really care, to be very honest, right. Whether you listen to me or listen to someone else, I don't care. All I'm doing this for, and hopefully you can understand is that I'm trying to inform you the best of my ability and if you disagree, then so be it. We can have a discussion, right? So anyways, back to the point. I was talking about how this, this whole virtual autism thing has, you know, like why so many people are being like so, so angry about it is is that other than that, I really think that, you know, all these people who are searching online for this term, they're looking for they as in like you parents, right? Parents are looking for confirmational bias, right? They're trying to confirm something that they hope is real, which is My kid is not really autistic. He's just virtual autism. And it can be, and it can be actually, it can actually be reversed, so to speak, right? So autism reversal, autism cure, has been thrown on the Internet, especially in Southeast Asia and South Asia and different parts of the planet, because parents want to have hope, right? So the word here is hope. It's a prayer. It's like people are searching online for this thing just because I hope that my kid isn't really autistic. I hope that it's virtual autism. And all I gotta do is remove the screen time. Who am I, first of all? Who am I to say to the parents, first of all? I've tried denying it. I've tried, I tried that before, right? I've tried saying, I tried shutting the parents off and saying, dude, whether it's virtual autism or not, that doesn't matter because virtual autism is fake, is not real. The thing is about this, if you tell someone who is in denial, and I've worked with parents for a very long time as well. I've. My bachelor's degree was in social science. My, My internship is always to work with lower income families. And it's always about like teaching parents whatever and this and that, right? And, and helping, you know, like how to say, it's always social services. That's what I've been doing for a long time. Um, and that's what I was always cared about. But I realized that if you shut someone off and you tell them that their only hope is fake, it creates some sort of distrust, number one. And they think that you're like going on top of. Let me just turn off this banner here. It goes on top of. It's very hard to convince anyone and it's very hard to help anyone if the first thing that you say is, dude, you're wrong, it's, it's not true, or whatever. That's not good. So what do we do instead? Well, the thing is, I'm not saying that. If you can't convince them, join them. I'm not that kind of person, by the way. What I'm trying to say is, if you're still watching, I'm very happy because this is a rant. Everyone who sees the word, like virtual autism, they get like, either they're confirmed, confirming with their, with their heads, oh, this is real. I'm gonna like really dig into it and like comment and say, yeah, it's real stuff, or they're gonna say this bull crap, educate yourself, whatever. And then they go like, they Go into like, what's that called? They just flip everyone off and they say that this is not real. How can you say that to me? I've been through so much, right? My kids autistic. How can you say that as like either autistic or not, right? But the problem is this. There are parents who are searching for this term and hoping that is true for a very long time. And whether there's clinical studies or not for this, obviously they aren't, right? Even if they were, they would be in Romanian because it came from Romania, right? So my point is this. I'm not going to shoot anyone down for terms that are may or may not true. I'm not that person. What I'm trying to say is if it's autism or not, from the very first day, for me, at the very least, a diagnosis is it gives the parent clarity about what to do next, right? It gives the parent the. And it's also very hard to accept, right? If you tell someone the diagnosis or something you have. It's a reality that have to have that you have to accept, right? It's. It's hard, cold truth and it hits you like a bus. I've seen it many times in my life, right? No matter. Within my family, outside, no matter what diagnosis, medical, psychological, you know, like developmental, any type of diagnosis, you know, hurts. All right? And what parents are always looking for, for me to answer a lot of times is that they come to the clinic, they pay a bunch of money for my time or for my colleagues time to ask this question, is it going to be better or not, right? How long do I need to see a result? Can I get through with this? Will my son go to university? Who's. Who's two and a half at that time? So from my perspective, if I were to talk about, like, if I were to hear that and someone would ask me those questions, right? I'm not going to shoot that person down and say, look, your worries are not, you know, you don't need to worry about it. Your feelings are fake. You know, like virtual autism is not real. How does that make that parent feel, right? Whether that parent is educated or not, it doesn't thrust the parent into action, right? And this is what agents of speech is all about. It's not about, you know, like getting click, clickbaity. It's not about getting you to like fear monger or whatever. Whatever the word is. I forgot how to pronounce it. It's not about making you feel sad or whatever. It's to empower you. It's trying to push you into action, literally it's trying to thrust you into action to deal with the situation. And I've always been a very pragmatic person. Right. I've like agents of speech is my thing and obviously, and that's why it's very action oriented. We talk about like diagnosis doesn't really matter, like you can hear it, you can whatever. But if you know that your child has a deficit and you, if you don't do anything about it, then that deficit is only going to get deeper. Right. Whether, whatever it is like virtual autism, autistic, whatever, whatever label you want. Right, right. Labels are human made. Right. But, but the, the good thing about a label is that for people who know and for people like me and when I see it on a piece of paper, at least I can have a slightly clearer picture about the, the kid or the person who's coming through my door, professionally speaking, before I see him or her. Right. That's what diagnosis does. It also gives you a lot of resources because when you have a diagnosis it's easier to get funding, it's easier to get services because we can't serve everyone in the whole damn world. Right. You got to have some sort of prerequisite and that prerequisite sometimes is a hardcore truth or like something really hard to accept for parents. So talking about that, that's why I talk about virtual autism. I don't talk about this on YouTube videos or whatnot is going to bore the living hell out of someone who's watching. So I'm still very happy that there's a few, some more people that are watching right now. I see that Chandra is, her name is CK name CK From Reading, England. Very nice. J. JK From UK as well. Thank you for joining here. As more and more people are talking about virtual autism and whatnot, I think it's very important that we go back into like, we have to be very like you have to take both sides. Right. The first thing is is there an increase of use in screen time? Yes. Right. Is there increase of the, you know, like, of people who are like children who are autistic? Yes. But some things are not correlated. Like, even if they are correlated, that doesn't mean that there are really like together like it's, it's not really cause and effect. I don't like to use that word. But you know, like for instance, when summer goes, when summer it's hot, ice cream sales go up. Right. That's a correlation. Yeah, but it's not That's a direct correlation, but there are correlations that are very indirect. Right, but how about this? Let's, let's just think about how many of of you guys are watching this throughout through a phone, right? How many of you guys spend more than three hours on your phone Screen time. Think about it, right? Think about how many children now they're using like laptops, tablets for work, for school, for entertainment. How many children you see outside in the restaurants are using tablets and screens, right? So why is it so far fetched to talk about that? You know, we, we know that gadgets are bad for even adults. How will it, like we always talk about like if you look at the videos and if you, you go to Google Trends, right, and you type in dopamine detox, right? These two words, the trend is going up. Why? Why is it? Well, the reason is because adults are understanding that like for instance, if we can, for me at the very least, when I don't have, when I want to work and I procrastinate, what am I going to do? I'm going to start looking at my phone, right? And kids, if they want, don't want to communicate, whatever, what are you going to do? They're going to look at the phones as well. Think about all the studies that are saying that how you know, like we're becoming dopamine junkies and whatnot for adults. And you know, if you think about, oh that's, that's happening to adult brains, what's going to happen to children brain, child's brain. I don't know the answer to that. And I also think that if it's a risk factor, and I was talking about like some, some parent also got really heated that she was a registered nurse or whatever, I forgot her name, but she was saying how, oh you, how can you talk about like screen time as if, like what was it? Cause, effect or whatever. First of all, there's no cause effect in this world. There really isn't. There's only correlation. And I made this, I made this analogy to her and she said how dare me, right? Anyways, the analogy was this. There's studies saying that there's a correlation between smoking and having lung cancer. While smoking is a risk factor, it might not be a cause effect because there are people who are 90 years old, they're smoking like a chimney, but they're just still healthy. Why is that? Because like there's a correlation and it's a risk factor, right? So if there might be, might, I don't know, might be There are multiple studies that are already pointing towards the user screen time and it's hindering the language development of children. And if that's the case, if that's the case, then screen time is going to become. I don't know if it's true or not. Like, for now, might be a risk factor. And if it might be a risk factor, why would you think about using it as a, you know, like, oh, it should be okay, right? Like, well, of course, anyone's advice would be, oh, try to reduce it, right? Because it might be risky. And then that mother in particular went, like, really crazy, I would say, because, like, what am I trying to do? I'm just trying to give advice here, right? I'm trying to help, right? If you don't like that fight, then by all means go away. But she was saying, how, how dare you compare smoking to like, watching, watching a screen? I grew up with the tv. How come I'm okay, right? Well, I grew up with the TV too, right, so. But then you didn't have, if you change your channel, you, you don't get a new show immediately, right? I'm just putting it out there. So that's why I'm talking about virtual autism. Because I think that there are a lot, a lot of parents who will skip getting a diagnosis for autism just because they think it's virtual autism, right? They will think that, oh, the, oh, the experts are not up to date with virtual autism. My kid is not classic autism, right? And that's why I can skip the diagnosis and just cut the screen time and see what happens. That's not the case. If you look into all the things we talk about and why we want to get the parents to watch our videos and join our community, watch our courses and stuff is because is not about you thinking about what if, right? What if. Oh, it's going to be like, I'm pretending a little bit. Don't mind me. I'm not trying to mock, right? I'm trying to say is that if parents think that. Oh, no, I, I really think that, you know, like, this virtual autism, I already confirmed it with my brain. You can't confirm stuff. You can only do confirmation and only, like, you can't really confirm. You can only dynamically assess your child over and over again by changing variables, right? And I'm getting a little bit, like, heated here. And that's because I feel like a lot of people, like, especially in Southeast Asia, they would see a kid for like two minutes. It's like, oh, it's Gadget addiction, right? Oh, you should do whatever. You should cut screen time and he should be fine. How do you know? Right? The real answer should be, well, I don't know any. I don't know anything. It looks to me that your child's language delayed is not talking as much as he should be right now. And therefore what we should be doing now is to reduce all the variables and see what works. And one of the variables is reducing screen time. If the parent talks about virtual autism and the professional should say, well, okay, if you think so, then that's fine. I mean, like, that doesn't take away the fact that, that you should be taking action and trying to reduce it to see if it is or not to rule it out. Right? That should be the conversation. Not instantly say, and say, hey, hey, hey. Virtual autism. Wrong. No, that doesn't. Doesn't exist. It turns off the parents who are looking for it, and they will only look for, like, positive and things that are confirming their biases and their beliefs. When you Google search something, right? When you find something, what do you search? You don't say, for instance, I think I have covet, right? What I like, I would say covet symptoms. I'll look at the symptoms. I'll think about, oh, well, this is kind of true. Kind of true. I won't search. Why do I not have covet or whatever. Is covet even real? I won't even search that. Right? I won't search that. So the thing about this is, if you want to become a part of, you know, the fight, right? The fight, is it really for you or if. Is it really for the kid? Right. If your child is already autistic, Right. It's on the spectrum. Autistic people don't really give, you know, anything. They don't give a damn, to be honest, about what other people say, right? They don't really care. They don't really care how they are labeled. The diagnosis gives them clarity about why they operate in a certain way. I'm being very generalistic here because it's just from my experience, I'm not saying that, you know, like, most autistic people will not go online and say, I'm autistic. As an autistic person, the people who I know, like I've been serving, they would never say that. In fact, they just want to minimize the impact they want to have on the world and try to just like, be here, you know, like, just unless they're like an advocate or whatever. And then. And usually people ask them questions Then they will answer, and they don't really know how to lie. And they will share and sometimes overshare. But rarely do they put their hand up with initiative and say, I say rarely. There might be other cases, right? Just from the people who I've served, from my knowledge, right. As a practitioner, as a service provider, that you know, only, like all of them, they would not say, as an autistic person, that's offensive to me. Right? They don't even know what's offensive, to be honest. Right. You have to teach them what's not offensive and what's offensive. That's part of our training programs a lot of times. Right. So if it's not serving the autistic people, is it serving your professional, like, dignity, or is it serving you as a parent that you want other people to understand your point of view? Those are all. Okay. I'm just saying that when you're. When you're thinking about this and you're trying to push other parents towards the right way, having an argument is not the right way. Right. It's never the way, you know, like, saying things that are, like putting other people's belief down is counterintuitive. Right. It's like whenever you talk about something near and dear to yourself, whether it's politics, it's religion, right. It's finances, it's about your children. These are all near and dear topics, Right. When you talk about, like when you hear that virtual autism, what the heck are you talking about? It's very easy to get emotional, but we all got to stop and ask why. And I did, and that's why I want to talk about it more. Right. Words don't mean the same thing in different parts of the world. I hope everyone understands this by now. Right. If I were to speak English and the way my culture has taught me to, from my background, I think I would offend a lot of people, right? Same as if I were to speak English in my. In, like, I don't know, an American culture and speak it in Cantonese and Chinese with my family and friends in Hong Kong, they would think that I'm being very indirect, right? So I want to tell you, this word virtual autism is not made by, you know, like, scholars from the. From the west, right? And they use an analogy. Well, let me just read the quote that I got, that I got from the. From the person who coined it. I'm just gonna really quickly find it and I will post it here, right? So if I post it as a comment, somehow it did it two times. Oh, because it's too. Too long of a comment. So maybe I'll use this first and then I can. I called it autism because. Called it meaning virtual autism because it has a specific. It has the specific symptoms of children with autism. Perfectly identical symptoms. It's almost impossible to make differential diagnosis if it has or does not have fertile autism or classic autism. Look, this is a person who is a clinical psychologist in Romania who does do these, like, diagnosis on a daily basis, right? Because the symptoms are perfectly the same. Symptoms of autism include lack of social repress. I can't read this word, sorry. Lack of visual contact, lack of language development, lack of play and especially social play, a role in which the child pretends to be something or something. And stereotypical and appropriate games. Okay, so the guy is called Mario Sam for. If you want to Google him. Go. Go ahead, dude. Started. Started war on the Internet, basically. But anyways, yeah, I hope you understand. Like, it just shares the symptoms, right? And then I saw a really funny comment on Facebook. It's like, if someone. If a kid watches the videos on their tablet and ignores you, doesn't make them virtually deaf. No. Right. What other. What are the symptoms of being deaf? Not being able to hear. So if you're talking about, like, induced death from, like, having a loud sound, maybe that's virtual deafness, right? Maybe that is the case. It has to have similar symptoms, man. Right. I'm not saying that this is the correct term. This. This term is getting people, like, people see it and they're like, what the heck's going on? But at the same time, you have to understand naming conventions, these things, right? It might be called, like, prolonged screen time syndrome, or whatever, Right? It might be that. Or it could be like, the lack of language input, right? The poor language environment. That's what speech therapists say. It's because of poor language environment because most of the things are from a screen. Therefore, it created a language disorder or delay, so to speak. And calling it virtual autism helps parents who want a better answer to, you know, like, to find a better answer. And they will search it and they will see it, no matter. It's from my. My mouth, my vocal folds, vibrating, talking about this. Or from some random person on the Internet. I'm a random person on the Internet. On the Internet too. But I'm just saying when you're looking at these things, take a. Take a break and think about why it's becoming a thing. Right? Try not to dismiss these things. Try not to think about, like, instantly and say, dude, that's you're not educated. Think about, like, whatever. Well, I'm not here to, you know, like, get back at anyone, so to speak. I'm just saying that this topic is becoming more popular for a very specific reason. And if you're not here to help change the narrative in a constructive way, then you're being destructive to. Especially if it hurts you that way as a parent, as a professional or whatever. Think about the people who are trying to have some hope while searching for this term. All right, that's all for this rant. I'll probably make a proper video about this, but I really need to, like, get all the references in place just in case I get attacked really, really bad. So, you know, that's it. If you have any more things you want, like, any more comments you want to talk about, by all means put it down below. And if you do see, you know, like, my Facebook reels surfacing around right now. It's got, like, around like 100, nearly 200,000 views. If you just look at my Facebook page, you'll probably find it. You see the comments there? I really have not much else to give about this topic, to be honest with me. Almost with you. Sorry. Is that whether there's virtual autism or not doesn't take away the fact you still have to work with your kid. Doesn't take away the fact you still have to get a diagnosis with your kid, right? Still doesn't take away the fact that your child's gonna have a hard time communicating. And that's why I'm talking about it. Like, you shouldn't be thinking about these things. You should think about how to treat it, right? Whether it's classic or virtual autism, it doesn't really matter. And there's like loads of these terms flying around. There's like Einstein syndrome, right? Oh, is your child on, like, have Einstein syndrome? I don't know. Who cares, right? Think about how to teach, not that kid. Doesn't matter. If they're gifted in a certain way, they can't talk, then, dude, they're going to get. They're going to have a hard time at school, end of story. Doesn't matter if they're genius or not, right? Even genius. If you watched, you know, Big Bang Theory or whatever, you know, that Sheldon dude, he's smart and all, but he still gets bullied and he's got made fun of social. Humans are social animals. If you don't teach that part, doesn't matter if there's a particular part that your IQ or your whatever is pretty high. That's, that's my point of view. Right. So I only zoom in on the things that we can do and you know, like just let go of the things that we can't control. Right. So to end this, I will probably not be talking about so, you know, this, this virtual autism anymore. You know, I really don't want to talk about it unless I can get this Mario sky to. To do an interview and such and we can like clear this up and we can like totally have a. More of a discussion because it's not a term that I made people think that I made up this term or whatever. I didn't. Okay, that's it for now. Let me know in the comments. Hopefully they're nice so that people don't like talk over each other instead of having a real discussion. I think that is exactly why we're having a lot of problems in this world is because we don't take others perspective and feel offended immediately. Just with a glimpse of an eye. Right. Not reading, judging a book by its cover without looking into the contents and not having an intellectual debate about why does it become a thing. All right, that's all for now. I'll see you guys pretty much soon. I think I'm just making this live I of a whim because I think it should be addressed. But depends how many people will actually see this video. I don't really care. But you feel free to share this and let other people know about it. All right, that's all for now. Have a good night. And you know, don't be a stranger comment. Tell me more about your child. And at the end of the day, I'm not, I'm not gonna put any links here as well. I'm just gonna talk about this. All right, that's all for tonight. And that's it. Bye Bye.