From personal experience, and having been diagnosed in adult life as Autistic, (although that one word is used as catch all for a huge scale of abilities and cognitive function) I'd say that Autistic people tend to focus on detail, and not the bigger picture and therefore are more likely to analyse and pick apart any complicated story, and in my limited experience, and fault lines are met with a stubborn 'No', relying on cold hard facts, and not emotional connection.
We need to be very careful about dismissing autists as delusional 'nutters', Its thought that Alan Turing was probably autistic, so it can be a source of genius too!
I'd be interested if there have been studies done and whether my thoughts are on the right track.
You are on the right track. Folks on the spectrum are not "delusional nutters", not even remotely. Autism is a spectrum disorder with massive variability in its presentation from person to person, so quite frankly, simply knowing that someone "is autistic" tells you very little about that person because of the sheer range of ways that condition manifests itself from individual to individual.
There are no mental illnesses that make a person "nuts" by default. Even individuals who experience delusional disorder tend to be perfectly normal in almost every facet of their lives except for the one area related to their specific delusion. I've worked with individuals who were perfectly "normal" and "sane" in every single aspect you can measure except for one weird quirk: said individual had become convinced at some point that their left arm and leg were amputated and replaced by perfect replicas, down to the nano-level. They were indistinguishable from the originals, but the individual was convinced the limbs they currently made use of are not really "theirs".
That's it. That's the delusion. It's obviously strange, it's hard to understand why or how someone would arrive at such a wild belief, but this belief was so compartmentalized and segmented away from the rest of this person's every day life that it wasn't a belief even worth "treating" in any therapeutic sense, since said belief didn't cause clinically significant distress of any kind.
People who hear voices are not "nuts" either. They just hear voices. Something that isn't very uncommon in the general population. It only becomes a problem when the content of the voices is distressing. If the voices start telling you things like "you're worthless", "kill yourself", "don't trust them", etc, that's when they tend to seek help because of the distressing nature of constantly hearing such things. There are plenty of other people who hear voices who live perfectly normal lives with them. Some such individuals are "psychics" who interpret the voices they hear in their own uniquely spiritual way. These voices are welcome and found to be helpful by psychics, who tend to regard them as spiritual advisors of some kind.
It's what the voices
say that leads to clinically significant distress in many cases. If you're distressed by the voices, then you seek help for them. If you find them helpful, like psychics do, then you don't meet any diagnostic criteria even though you're experiencing auditory hallucinations. The point is the mere presence of a diagnosis tells you very little about a person. Every diagnosis has wide variability in presentation. I've never met two individuals with schizophrenia whose symptoms were identical with each other. Same for PTSD. I've worked with Vietnam vets who for 40 years have never had a single good night's sleep because they're frequently tormented by flashbacks while they sleep and wake up in a state of hypervigilance, believing they're still in a combat encounter.
Other veterans I've worked with struggle less with night time flashbacks and more with active daytime ones, or survivors guilt, or flashbacks triggered by certain sounds. There are too many variations to list. But PTSD isn't a thought disorder, it's a stress disorder. It doesn't destroy your ability to distinguish what is real and what isn't like psychotic disorders can. PTSD is characterized by a persistent state of autonomic nervous system activation. You're always in fight or flight mode, so even though your mind fully recognizes you're not in danger, your body does not. But none of this has any bearing on someone's inability to reason, weigh evidence, and do all the things Grusch was tasked with doing in his job. And furthermore, it is curable. It is one of the few conditions in the DSM that one can recover from without any medication.
People's utter ignorance about what it means to have a mental health disorder is what lends these kinds of accusations the ability to be weaponized.
There is nothing about these claims about Grusch that have any bearing whatsoever on his credibility, his character, or the truth/falsehood of his claims. The truth or falsehood of his claims can only be determined by the evidence, or lack of evidence, available for said claims. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, about a person's having PTSD that is going to give you any kind of meaningful psychological insight into why they believe what they do with regards to special access programs and crash retrieval programs.
As a skeptic, and as a mental health practitioner who works with
extremely acute and untreated mental illness in the criminal justice system, there is just nothing in this story that should be of interest to anyone but his family, closest friends, and his therapist. And the sooner we leave this behind the better we'll all be for it.
