2:31pm February 23, 2012

➸ Sane Old Same Old- Musings: Tumblr Autism Community

saneoldsameold:

How do you guys feel about the line between PDD-NOS and Asperger’s? The line has been shown over and over again to really be left up to individual physicians to draw, so I think of them rather similarly. In my mind, the difference has nothing to do with symptoms and everything to do with your…

My shorter answer:  No. That is not even close to appropriation.

My longer answer:  I think that some people have been taking some ideas to extremes, if autistic people are afraid of being appropriative just for wanting to identify with a better-known diagnosis on the spectrum. 

Myself, I was initially given a weird split-diagnosis.  The doctor told my mother I had autism and wrote down that I had PDDNOS/atypical autism. Apparently he was worried that insurance would think me hopeless and want me permanently institutionalized if I was just diagnosed with autism. And since they attempted to pull that move anyway, he can’t have been far off.  Later when this was no longer a worry, he changed my written diagnosis to autism.

I have a really close friend whose brain works so much like mine that we can often guess each other’s thoughts in any given situation. She’s been diagnosed at different times with PDDNOS and Asperger’s.  And she meets the criteria for autism but since this was all an adult diagnosis, that’s the least likely because of how most clinicians think about not-previously-diagnosed autistic adults. 

All this is to say, all the diagnoses on the spectrum run together. A person can go to three different doctors and get three different labels, because the differences, and how to measure them, are so subjective. There are, in my view, many different kinds of autism. But those kinds are not well represented by the divisions between the official diagnoses. 

So in my view, any autistic person who feels comfortable doing so should be able to identify as aspie. Any autistic person who feels comfortable doing so should be able to identify as autistic. Regardless of official diagnoses. (And as may be obvious, I just call all of us autistic.)

Where some people run into trouble is when they are diagnosed with AS, PDDNOS, or atypical autism and call themselves just autistic. In my eyes this is not a problem. But there are a few autistic people who defend the word autism as their own and only their own. And they will get angry at anyone using the word who isn’t diagnosed or diagnosable specifically with autism.  Or who isn’t just like them, regardless of diagnosis. 

My personal view on that kind of person, though, is that their views on the matter are best ignored.  They tend to be people with a vested interest in seeing themselves as worse off that all those “not really autistic like me” people on the spectrum. They tend to be motivated by things like self-pity and… some things I don’t even have good words for. They basically tend to have a strong emotional investment, for really bad reasons, in a self-image that requires other people to behave in certain ways to maintain it. And they can get really controlling and defensive and sometimes even cruel and nasty, if anyone challenges their views on the matter.  And this tends to be true regardless of whether they use the language of appropriation or the language of “pity me the worst off in the world” to defend their viewpoint.  

Because the issue was never real appropriation in the first place:  Even many researchers and doctors call all people on the spectrum autistic.  To the point that soon that diagnosis will be expanded to cover all of us.  So people who object to this are usually motivated by ego stuff that isn’t worth taking seriously. 

All that to say – call yourself what you feel like fits you best and don’t listen to anyone who says it’s wrong. There are things that are appropriative but this is not it, not even close. 

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