In regards to autistic people and looking at you - I've had several people on the autism spectrum admit that direct eye contact makes them very, very uncomfortable, and that they have been told/taught to force themselves to look others in the face against their natural instincts. So it might not be a forgetting thing as much as it is a "this makes me uncomfortable, so I subconsciously try to avoid it whenever possible" thing. Probably even more so with a person like I who does habitually watch people to pick up their reactions, and is fairly dominant atop of that...
I also reckon how (well) your senses work tends to also play into how you read people. I've noted before that I have very acute hearing (to the point where I can easily tell whether your regular 220V wire is live or not by hearing alone, and so forth) - which is mostly a good thing, but can be a bit annoying when I have to be in an environment with a consistent background of loud noise (the continuity-part is actually fairly important - thunderstorms are fine, someone just talking very loudly for a while might not be). My vision, though ... well, I have very high hue/light/contrast sensitivity (as has been discussed multiple times before), but I'm naturally also fairly shortsighted (as I have also mentioned before). Now, this is the kind of shortsightedness that is fairly easy to negate with lenses. Essentially, it means I can pretty much choose whether I have nigh perfect sight, or am shortsighted (and can read microscopic letters up close). Incidentally, it also makes the difference between being able to, and not being able to properly discern micro-expressions. And oh does it make a difference...
For the matter, it is fairly easy to consciously mask larger expressions, but not micro-expressions. You probably know what I mean ... the "mouth was smiling, eyes were not" sort of things. (Micromimics are also what makes facial expressions so annoying to draw ... you have face half the size of your screen, you alter ten pixels out of the literally eight hundred thousand the image consists of, and suddenly your brain decides that the person has a completely different mood.) Yeah. There are are a fair number of expressions people have only in very specific scenarios, to think of. I think I've mentioned how there is this one particular kind of smile which is at once polite, but also hostile. Think of the kind of smile many service people often have. My friend from high school has a very distinct dedicated "this is BS" expression; he generally obtained it whenever a presenter said something completely out of left field... Things like that.
((Since only sociopaths have a tendency towards indifference towards others' feelings, I'd say any sociopath would rank far higher on that particular probability scale than any only autistic person... Both of these traits maybe more so than only sociopath, though.))
As for the other topic ... no, by no means endemic to Denmark. The US might be the worst offender, but you see it here, too, and pretty much anywhere. Suffice to say, even leaving aside that the effects of those drugs tend to be highly noticeable (and hence very alarming to me), and the fact that I've heard a lot of rants from the psychiatrists I know (at least two of whom almost exclusively deal with the shortcomings of others in their profession) ... I no longer can count the people who have suffered permanent severe brain damage or died to professionally prescribed medical psychoactive drugs. This way, I've lost more people under 70 than I have lost for every other reason combined.
Following applies to mostly depression, anxiety and such. (Nor autism-spectrum, as while some people's reaction to it isn't exactly healthy, nor are some of the approaches to trying to "normalise" them, it luckily doesn't get treated by heavy drugs given modern medicine's standards.) ADD/ADHD, not so much, either, as much as I only know one person who took something for it - to rather nasty effects on his ability to function, granted. The friend of mine above was actually also diagnosed with that, but never took anything for it. Brilliant person, maybe even more proficient programmer than I am, if one with a bit different specialization. Gets bored somewhat easily, but generally for the lack of anything to do, not inability to focus... He told me how he managed to end up getting transferred to higher gride one time, just by doing everything but study and, when confronted about it, in full honesty, responding that he knows it all already. Said teacher then proceeded to tell him to give the lesson himself. And, well, he actually did get up and gave the lesson himself... The teacher was not happy. (He was also over a year younger than the next-youngest student in high school, as the direct result of going to school early and then skipping a grade on top of that.) ...I think most of that used to be called "being children," really - basically, if a person "grows out" of ADD/ADHD by the time they become an adult, they most likely never had it.
But I derailed. ...Prescribing things is easy, figuring out why is difficult. So most of the time, they just play medical Russian roulette until they (maybe) find something that kinda-sorta works, and then consider their jobs done. Cut to five years later, a neurologist is having a hard time figuring out why their patient has been becoming increasingly paralyzed, and finally pinpoints it to something she has been taking for depression for all these years (that is a specific example I know here, and by far not the worst I have seen second-hand).
So yeah. Medical industry, especially the mental health part of it, is too overburdened to spare everyone the attention they need. The research that goes into the drugs is pathetic to say the least, and for some we don't even know what they actually do, other than that they sort of seem to work for some people, on short term, for some reason. To my knowledge, they pretty much don't even test for things like chemical imbalances (don't have the means to, either, often enough) - it's fairly blind shooting, educated guesses at best.
For some people, there really is some chemical imbalance caused by their brains somehow ending up missing some gland to produce something, or oppositely making too much of something, or not having enough of some receptors, for absolutely no reason other than some manner of damage or a genetic fluke. (As opposed to not having enough of some chemicals simply because you decided cooking was too much effort and tried to sustain yourself on ramen noodles for two months. In which case, something-something about being what you eat.) For those specific people, a drug will most likely be the only correct solution. Kind of like insulin is for diabetics. But to get that right, we'd need better means for figuring out what is going on. And the exact right thing, not a kinda-sorta-works-we-don't-know-why thing. And in the right amount, and... And ... well, we have none of that, currently. Long way off, still.
Often enough, there is no chemical imbalance, only things people were never supposed to put up with on a daily basis to begin with. Like people who stay in severely abusive relationships and are treated for depression to cope with it rather than prioritize getting out of the harmful situation like they should (which is actually fairly common, from what I can tell). Or who have been putting up with inhumane working conditions for years on end, and finally worn thin, yet continue working under the same conditions because necessity or lack of acknowledgement towards how bad things are. So ... basically, like you said, ignoring the actual problem. (It's not broken if we duct tape it together, right?)
Err... Yeah. Grim themes indeed.
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Did you know that you can use a regular graphics card for deep learning neural network processing?
