With every other disorder and neurodivergency, I can intuitively understand the spectrum from mild to severe. But with autism, I don’t even understand how the mild and severe forms are the same disorder.
I’m *vastly* oversimplifying for the sake of brevity, but what I mean is,
***Mild chronic pain:** you are in pain sometimes.*
***Severe chronic pain:** you are in a lot of pain most of the time.*
***Mild depression:** you are very sad sometimes.*
***Severe depression:** you are very sad most of the time.*
***Mild ADHD:** you often have difficulty with executive function.*
***Severe ADHD:** you have great difficulty with executive function most of the time.*
All makes sense, right? But then autism just goes completely off the rails. It’s like,
***Mild autism:** you get hyperfixated on things, you flap your hands, you’re socially awkward.*
***Severe Autism:** you need a full-time caregiver, you can’t talk, you piss your pants.*
What?? How did we make that jump??
I was always curious about this, but then I found out *I’m* autistic and now I’m even more curious.
In: 3
To be honest, [they might not actually be the same disorder in the first place](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_autism).
>Autism’s theory of causation is incomplete. It has long been presumed that there is a common cause at the genetic, cognitive, and neural levels for autism’s characteristic triad of symptoms.
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>However, **there is increasing suspicion among researchers that autism does not have a single cause**, but is instead a complex disorder with a set of core aspects that have distinct causes, where the interactions between these core aspects determine whether or not autism develops. *Different underlying brain dysfunctions* have been hypothesized to result in the *common symptoms* of autism, just as completely different brain types result in intellectual disability.
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>The terms autism or ASDs capture the wide range of its processes at work. Although these distinct causes have been hypothesized to often co-occur, it has also been suggested that the correlation between the causes has been exaggerated.
It is entirely possible (and it’s looking increasingly likely that this is true) that we’re just calling several different brain functional types (which might not even be correlated with one another) by a single name, analogous to how there’s hundreds of different viruses that are all collectively called “the common cold” because their symptoms are similar.
Because no one has any real idea what exactly autism is, what are the causes, and there’s dozens of symptoms and levels of severity.
So in 20 years we might find out that everything we are pumping together under the “autism spectrum” should actually be a bunch of separate disorders.
In the case of myself, I have aspergers (which I’m sure someone is going to tell me I’m wrong and it’s not called that anymore but whatever we all know what I’m talking about and that’s what it was called when I was diagnosed) but I share alot of symptoms with people that you would call “severely” autistic, just to a lesser degree.
For one example: hypersensitivity. I feel physical discomfort with some sensations and sounds. It’s actually quite awful. *shudder* Anyway, the point is that, to continue using the term, severely autistic people will sometimes also be extremely hypersensitive to a lot of things, like lights, noises, strong smells, certain tastes and textures. It’s why you may see someone wearing soundproof headphones all the time (not saying that wearing soundproof headphones makes you autistic or that autistic people all wear them, just that that’s a valid reason why one *might* wear them).
Another example would be lack of control of emotions. Personally I find it difficult to control my temper. For a person on the more severe end of the supposed spectrum (see my comment on aspergers) they may have even less control over their emotions and they might even get frustrated more often due to the larger issues they face communicating and interacting with the world.
Obviously, both of these examples aren’t true of all autistic people. This is because, as mentioned by others, autism is likely a collective name for a large number of issues and neurodivergencies suffered by a lot of very different people. It’s a complicated subject, both medically and socially, and this is just my take on the matter. I’d have listed more examples but I’m off to work. Have fun dissecting this and disproving me.
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