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.
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