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
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.
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