as small as a world and as large as alone, Thoughts on high functioning autism?

10:04am July 10, 2014

Anonymous asked: Thoughts on high functioning autism?

madeofpatterns:

youneedacat:

blazedegg:

my first question

anyone feel free to elaborate or get more specific

i’ll answer this in general and taking as much as i can into consideration but it would work if any of you shared you’re thoughts on this to add to the topic/conversation

I’m not sure what the question even means.

I don’t like the term high functioning autism, though.

Picture two autistic people:

One of them had a short speech delay, but became fairly verbal. Sie went to gifted classes in school and was in college by the time sie was fourteen. In college, sie even had a boyfriend and a sexual relationship with him, although sie never technically lost hir virginity. Sie grew up to be a popular autism blogger and a leader in the autistic self-advocacy community. Sie writes eloquently about the conditions affecting autistic people, and has presented at many different conferences.

Then let’s look at another autistic person. This person also had a short speech delay, or rather a loss of speech, in early childhood. When the speech came back, it was echolalia. Sie could often not make hir words mean what her brain wanted them to mean. Sie could sometimes communicate with speech, but other times her speech was completely non-communicative repetition of things from books or things sie’d heard people say. Sie grew up biting hirself in the arms until she left marks and even holes, and banging hir head on things as hard as sie could. Sie had a hard time, past a certain point, keeping up in school, and by the edge of fifteen sie was never in regular school again. At the age of eleven, sie began losing speech and motor skills gradually, so that everything became harder and harder. Yet more and more demands were put on her developmentally. This made it hard for hir to keep up, and sie frequently considered or attempted suicide. Sie spent hir teen years in and out of mental institutions and special ed. By hir early twenties, sie could no longer speak communicatively at all. When they tried letting hir live on hir own, sie ended up starving, urinating on the floor, and living in such a filthy environment that once sie did get services to help hir, they had to call in extra help. Sie has never been able to work at a full-time job. Sie needs a lot of services just to get hir through a typical day. At one point, in the past, sie banged hir head thousands of times per hour, and could also become aggressive. Sie accidentally did things, without any intention of hurting hirself, like opening the door of cars on the freeway. Sie is incontinent because sie can’t always make it to the bathroom or feel when sie needs to go. While sie can usually type to communicate, sie also has times when sie is unable to do that and has to use picture symbols, or can’t communicate at all. People walk up to hir and think that nobody is inside of her, even doctors have made this mistake. People call hir the r-word on a regular basis. Hir IQ, at 85, is much higher than the tester anticipated by looking at hir.

And… which one of these people would you call high functioning? Which would you call low functioning?

Because if you haven’t guessed, they’re both me. And the idea of high functioning or low functioning autism feels like someone taking a giant saw and trying to split my life in half and tell me that only one half of my life is relevant. It hurts. It hurts really badly. And I wish people wouldn’t do it.

I think low functioning is just the autism-specific version of the r-word.

And high functioning means “don’t look any more disabled than this, or we’ll do all the things we do to those r-words to you too”

Low functioning isn’t autism-specific at all. (Neither is high-functioning.) They’re used widely throughout both DD and psych settings, and occasionally in medical situations too (low functioning diabetic, high functioning deaf, etc.).

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