Autism is a term used to describe a significant proportion of humans who overlap enough of certain traits. These traits are human traits, but are outside the typical range for most humans, either hyper (over) or hypo (under). Autistic people experience various prejudices and exclusions due to their diagnosis, differences, and societal stereotypes.
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In Brief
Medically speaking, Autism is a neurological condition that has a spectrum presentation. Autism is diagnosed based primarily on the deficit / disorder model, which highlights only the problems that an Autism brain has, which has the unfortunate side effect of both invalidating Autism Identity and Autism Strengths. In modern times, Autism has been added to the ICD and DSM as mental disorders, leading many people to mistakengly think that talking therapy can fix Autism.
First of all, Autism itself needs no more fixing than other outlier groups of humans such as tall people, left handed people, and people with green eyes. People who are tall enough do need to be mindful of hitting their head, left handed people do need to manage living in a right handed world, and green eyed people often have cooccuring mild melatonin pigmentation which can lead to being easily sunburnt in sunny environments. What we are talking about here are accomodations for difference, not diagnosing disability.
Secondly, talking therapy by a properly educated therapist can be helpful in understanding the differences the particular Autistic personn’s brain works compared to the neurotypical, and how they can take advantage of those differences, sometimes compensating for deficits; learn how to compensate for how inflexible neurotypical people can be; and help the Autsitic person connect to their neurotype for both cultural and identity affirmation.
Secondly part 2. When we use therapy to “fix” Autism, it is akin to gay conversion therapy, where the assumption is that being Autistic or Gay is a choice and a wrong choice at that. To be clear, this is wrong and bad.
Autism is a Neurodivergence
Neurodivergence has been covered on this website elsewhere.
In brief, while no two people share the same neurology, the differences between brains can be mild, moderate or substantial. The most commonly found cluster of brain types is used medically as the reference brain type, and we refer to this as neurotypical. It is often falsely assumed to be the “correct” brain type, but is just simiply the one we find more examples of, at around 30-50%. Considering this to be the “right” way to for human brains to exist is okin to saying that right handedness is correct, or that brown skin is natural and other skin tones are deformities, simply because they are the most common found in humans.
We explore the idea of Neurodivergence via a CPU analogy here.
Autism is the name we give to a rag tag group of Neurodivergent People who are fairly diverse from each other. Autistic People share a number of similar compensation strategies and challenges for there diverse different neurology. An educated assessor can use these similar externalised taits to recognise that the person being assessed has a neurological difference within the cluster that we call Autism.
Autism Traits and Spectrum Presentation
Labels are useful, so long as they don’t become traps. Recognising that you are Autistic means that you can use many of the strategies that have been developed to help manage challenging traits, benefit from your strengths, and compensate for society. Being misidentified, or medically misdiagnosed, can be very harmful. We cover the harms of the label trap further down in Stigma.
To facilitate medical staff to diagnose people with Autism Sepctrum Disorder, a number of traits in common have been identified. These are not all of the Autism Traits, they are just the easiest for diagnosticians to identify. All Autism Traits are Human Traits, that is, there is nothing non-human about being Autistic, or having these traits. We also cover the stigma attached to this misunderstanding later.
When scientists measure human abilities, they define below average, average and above average based on statistics, usually using the normal distribution curve. The area under the curve (dark blue) is how much of the group is included in every section. The Average here is about 85% of people, that is, 85% of people’s “ability” in a trait is considered to be average. The number of people in the “above average” and “below average” sections under the dark blue line are considered unusual, but within the tolerance of the test. Outside of that, a person’s ability in that triat is considered abnormal, and often the result in finding “average” is discarded as an outlier (assuming a mistake in recording or testing).
Autism Traits are generally human traits that fall outside of Average, generally in the hyper or hypo range (although above and below average can be considered). Recall that the Medical Model is trying to fix things, so for a trait to be part of the diagnosis it is assumed to be a problem. So if that presentation of the trait is considered to be problematic, then it helps you get an Autism diagnosis. If you have manged to find a way to manage that trait or capitalise it, then it often isn’t considered part of your Autism diagnosis, even though it may be a part of your Autism Identity and neurology. We talk a bit more about this in the Diagnostic section.
Here is an example of a “Rainbow Diagnostic Graph” shared by shared by DW on Quora.
Each piece of pie is considered to be the strength of problem in the presentation of this trait in a person. The traits titled here are mostly problematic and misleading. For example, Depression is not an Autistic Trait, but it can be an experience or co-occurring diagnosis to Autism, and is often coupled to the same root problem that Aggression and Anxiety is – limited spoons (interanl resources) and the cost of managing in an environment that doesn’t support you.
The caution I’m trying to give you here is that these traits are what diagnosticians look for, because that is what they’ve been trained to do and it is easier for a technician to look for these presentations than to understand what it is to be Autistic; but they aren’t actually at the root of being Autistic. This is more about looking at how someone is not coping well due to being Autistic in an environment that is likely not inclusive for the Autistic person. When we change the environment to be inclusive, help with some medication, and upskill the Autistic person’s set of skills, most of these diagnostic traits disappear. That has not “fixed” the Autism, they still have their neurological differences. We have “fixed” the struggle that gets the person diagnosed.
Autistism is not the struggle of difference, it is the difference in neurotype.
Autism is Old – A brief history
Autism was a word coined by German Psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911. The definition has changed a few times to its more contemporary and more inclusive definition, with a highlight change to the concept of neurodivergence in the late 1990s due to Judy Singer (also Autistic), who adopted the ecology description of diversity into neurology. The worldwide prevelance of Autism in all populations at between 2 to 5% informs us that Autism is not new, it has been a part of humanity for hundreds of thousands of years. Autism is a congenital neurological condition and also considered an identity.
The rest of this section is academically interesting, but mostly no longer relevant, so feel free to skip to the next section.
Almost nothing that Bleuler [LINK] used to explain his observations is relevant any more, because his assumptions are basically wrong. Bleuler also coined the term Schizophrenia, and he thought that Autism was a symptom of Schizophrenia, caused by an infantile wishe to avoid ansatisfying realities and to replace them with fantasies and hallucinations. Autism etymology literatlly comes from the Greek Autos (self) and English ism (originally ismos, the state or action of) – translating essentially “selfish”. To be very clear on this, Autism is not Schizophrenia, nor it is a symptoms of Schizophrenia, and most people diagnosed with Autism are not actually selfish.
Hans Asperger identified, in 1943, in over 200 children a pattern of behaviour and skills that seemed to lack empathy, struggles making friends, unidirectional conversation, strong preocuption with special interests and awkward movements. Asperger recognise that these children often had strong inteligence despite the observed “seflishness” and “poor social” traits. Asperger described the children as “autistic pscyhopathy of childhood”, incorrectly assuming the children were non-empathetic. We now know that people diagnosed with Autism are generally hyper-empathetic rather than hypo-empathetic or absent of empathy.
Asperger described how 4 of his cohort were teaching him things about their special interest, referring to them as “his little teachers”. His works weren’t well known in English speaking medicine as he published in German and translating to the more ubiquitous English was fairly rare. Asperger effectively increased the definition of Autism, showing that Autism had a spectrum of presentations. In 1981 Lorna Wing proposed a new subtype of Autism which she called Asperger’s Syndrome, where the Autistic person was considered to be inteligent and fairly functional. There is controversy around Hans Asperger’s writing which we’ll cover later, and a more fundamental understanding of Autism that has led to Asperger’s Syndrome falling out of favour as a diagnosis.
Steve Silberman, in his book NeuroTribes 1999, credits Judy Singer, an Austrlian socialigist, with creating the term “neruodiversity”. Singer says she was inspired to the concept of biodiversity and applying it to neurology. Harvey Blume published the term “neruodiversity” in an article in 1998, a year prior to Silberman’s book, who later states that the term was in online spaces as early as 1996, such as InLv, which both Blume and Singer were writing. It is not clear who actualy created the term. Jim Sinclaire, in his 1993 speech “Don’t Mourn For Us” emphasised thinking of Autism as “a way of being”, stating “it is not possible to separate the person from the autism”.
Our current view of Autism is that it is a congenital neurological condition, often including some developmental delay when compared to neurotypical people. While its basis is in neurology, it is also considered an identity.