as small as a world and as large as alone

10:29am August 1, 2014

madeofpatterns:

autism tests don’t necessarily test what the tester thinks they’re testing, even when tehy get accurate results

Like, I’m pretty sure I *did* know what all the facial expressions they showed me meant. But I didn’t know words for any of them, and the list of 7 emotional words they give me didn’t match what I understood at all.

And I wasn’t able to cross lines and say what I actually thought of the faces. Like “that’s autistic overload” and “that’s a Nice Lady Therapist” and “I can’t match that sound to any of those pictures, because no one actually sounds like that or looks like that. But if you asked, I *could* tell you what was going on in the pictures and the sounds.”

I know an autistic woman who as part of her diagnosis was shown live actors and was asked to name the emotions they were acting.  She flunked because she named their real emotions, rather than the acted emotions.  That should tell you a lot both about autistic people, autism experts, and nonautistic people.

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