Ah, I see. I think the ‘label’ (ugh – what a terribly awful way to describe a diagnosis) and the beatings are orthogonal, though.
In my parents’ time in a (then) Dutch colony, nobody was diagnosed with anything (that was only for crazies), but all the men knew how being hit with a belt felt (daughters were spared, from what I’ve been told). Self-medicating with alcohol and beating your kids if they ‘misbehaved’ was just the done thing, as far as I’ve been told.
This is to say that anyone who showed (what we would now identify as) neurodivergent behaviour probably would’ve been beaten, but this then wouldn’t have precluded them from going on to start a family and business (and maybe beat their own kids).
Actually, this is probably still how it works in many parts of the world. Even here in the Netherlands, beating your children was only outlawed as recently as 2007.
