3:28am January 6, 2012

➸ Social Communication Disorder

[Warning: written without ability to read myself whole post thing over again, and with physical issues interrupting both thought and language, can’t fully take responsibility for what words may have gotten mangled.]

Just as a heads-up on where some autistic people will likely end up. It claims that you have to rule out autism. But that’s the new autism criteria, not the old ones. Expect some people who would currently be diagnosed with some form of autism, who fall through the cracks, may be to endings up there. (SCD is not to be being considered autism spectrum thing thing at all.)

I’d have more commentary but I just greatly physically overextended myself, partly to help a friend who was crashing really bad, and didn’t know how badly I’d fucked myself up until I got in bed. Feeling a bit better now. (A bit better than 8 on the pain scale, that is – I thought I might have done actual serious damage to my body, and was contemplating an ER trip to check it out because some sensations were scaring me. But doing nothing for awhile has me back to… well it’s not 8 and that’s all I can say for it.)

So… I can write now (had to cut an email short fast earlier) but I can’t intellectualize well or translate newfound thoughts.

I can only say that I see a lot of complex ways this could go, some good-ish and some awful. And that it’s interesting the way this one gets to keep verbal communication problems in the criteria and autistic people don’t, even though verbal communication problems are arguably more central for some of us than some kind of generalized “social skills problems” are.

(But I just cannibalized most of that sentence off of something I already said about the proposed autism criteria. Or rather a sentence I started and a friend finished.)

Anyway watching a DSM change over just makes me realize all the more how unreal and unscientific psychiatric categories can get. (Unreal and unscientific being two different things.) As if reading historical documents on autism back to the 1940s (and to things that were probably sometimes what’s now sometimes called autism back a long way further, yuck what a messed up word tangle) and on dementia praecox and onward regarding what’s now called schizophrenia (that was also sometimes now-autism and sometimes involved pre-autism-not-now-autism-at-all-autism FUCK I HATE WORDS), hadn’t convinced me enough already.

Hope that made sense. I can’t read it over to check. Why am I still embarrassed about writing when I’m like this? Sometimes it turns out stuff I wrote like this makes sense and reads how I meant it. Other times entire chunks of words have been distorted so badly they mean the opposite of what I mean. And may also just look incoherent. (But the dangerous type is the type that looks coherent but doesn’t mean what I was thinking at all. People mistake cohering for thoughts-to-words thing.)

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