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6:04pm July 3, 2014
thislousytshirt replied to your post:Is there a value-neutral way of saying an autistic person who is capable of functioning without much assistance in their current environment? Someone who’s not “obviously disabled”? Someone who might seem “barely autistic”, just into the spectrum? On a multitude of axises - motor, social, sensory, etc. Per outside judges or their own perception. I just want a word for it, without it being a More/Less Autistic than Thou gatekeeping question or a diagnosable/meaningful subtype.
so more autistic does not equal more disabled?

Not necessarily.  As far as anyone knows.

A person can have lots and lots and lots of autistic traits, but function pretty well in society.  

A person can have very few autistic traits (but enough to be diagnosed), but need a lot of help.  

And according to Morton Gernsbacher, the autistic people who function the best in society are the ones with the highest measurable number of autistic traits, which is currently the only way we have of measuring autism severity at all.  (I co-presented with her on why functioning labels are a lousy idea.  That was part of her reasoning.  She’s an autism researcher.  I wish I had the cite for that one because it’s pretty interesting.)

At any rate, I do regard myself as severely disabled, severely impaired, whatever you call it, it’s all word games to me even if the disabled/impaired distinction means a lot to other people.  

But I don’t know whether or not I’m severely autistic.  Because we don’t even know what autism is yet, let alone how to measure how much of it you have.

And I’ve known people who were so severely disabled that they couldn’t even qualify for a full autism diagnosis.  They only qualified as PDDNOS.  Why?  Because a full autism diagnosis requires the ability to do certain things.  If you’re too severely disabled to do some of those things, then the only diagnosis you can get is PDDNOS.  That’s one of the major uses of the PDDNOS diagnosis, is categorizing people who are too severely disabled for an autistic disorder diagnosis, but who clearly are autistic.

Autism gets stranger the harder you look at it.  Seriously.  Like it’s not any of you – it’s not your brain not working right (even if some of you are overloaded by this conversation, and I apologize for any part I’ve played in that) – it really is this weird.  Really.  Weird.  Stuff.

Of course that’s partly because the brain gets weirder the harder you look at it.  And because we haven’t studied enough about the nonautistic brain to even know how that works, so studying the autistic brain (and other atypical brains) is going to be even harder.  Brains are weird.

Notes:
  1. thetigerisariver reblogged this from soundingonlyatnightasyousleep
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  4. chavisory said: Totally concur with the *weirder* it is the more you look at it. It is really effing WEIRD.
  5. withasmoothroundstone posted this