as small as a world and as large as alone, Do you think autism is a spectrum that goes right...

3:10am May 25, 2014

expeditionhappiness asked: Do you think autism is a spectrum that goes right up to nonaustic with some nonautistic people having austic traits but below the threshold actually have autism, or do you think there is some fundamental difference between autistic people and all nonautistic people (aka there is a discontinunity or break in the spectrum between autistic and nonautistic). Ive been thinking about this a lot recently and I have no idea what to think

I’m not sure. I do know that there are some people who really seem to sit right on the border, though. Or that there are definitely nonautistic people with a few autistic traits and no other neurological conditions. (They’re often known as the Broader Autism Phenotype in the literature.) But I really don’t know, because to me it’s kind of theoretical. It doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other.

Especially because autism itself is an idea that probably doesn’t fully reflect reality – it’s more real than some conditions are (schizophrenia comes to mind as a condition that shouldn’t even be classified as one condition), but less real than others. And I suspect that in fifty years if science progresses at all, we’ll have names for several different things that right now are all called autism.

But as I say that, I know it can be misinterpreted. I don’t mean that we’ll have the “high functioning” people given one title and the “low functioning” people given another. I mean that Anne Corwin and Donna Williams and a friend from special ed and I will likely be in one category (despite the fact that the four of us would be given radically different functioning labels and we’ve been between us given almost every autism spectrum diagnosis in the book), Temple Grandin in another, etc. And it won’t be on autism vs. Asperger lines either. There are likely at least a dozen categories within autism that could be considered separate. And it’s not always easy to tell from superficial traits who belongs in what category, which is why I currently support lumping all autism together until someone finds a way to separate us out that actually makes some kind of sense instead of basing it on one or two superficially-observed traits.

But at any rate, I don’t think we know enough about what autism is, to know whether it’s a discrete, self-contained thing or whether it has fuzzy edges all the way out to neurotypicality. It may even depend on the type of autism in question.

Notes: