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1/ I am reluctant to intrude upon its standalone brilliance. I can give a historical context. Historically, clinicians underdiagnosed autism in young girls, because the assumption was to look for something like how it was expressed in boys. https://twitter.com/notchuraverage1/status/1355562118712610823
2/ For reasons associated with the Catholic church and poverty, Ireland had a lot of undisclosed sexual abuse. Not repressed, just suppressed, not talked about.
3/ A weird, homegrown Irish refrigerator mother theory developed and was applied with unusual behavior, like spectrum behavior in girls.
4/ Like the later repressed memory theory discredited in the US, refrigerator mother theory caused enormous damage to families with the assumption that bad mothering was the root of problems that did not have strong psychological causation.
5/ The proponents of refrigerator mother theory were not members of the Irish Psychological Society, which did not have an enforceable ethics code anyway. Nonetheless, some proponents of the theory were condemned as unethical.
6/ Versions of refrigerator mother theory are alive and well among trauma-focused care proponents.
