I know there’s a lot we just don’t know about ASD and that this is likely one of those things. It’s that’s true, what are some the theories for this?
In: Biology
Because it’s not really one disorder, it’s lots of different disorders that share a few similarities and that are individually very difficult to determine a cause of. The term is rooted in the work of a Nazi paediatrician – Asperger – who decided that all of these disorders should be grouped together under the term “autistic psychopathy”. Had this guy not existed, it’s quite likely that we would not have “autism spectrum disorder” in the general manual of psychological diagnoses, but several different disorders instead. Scientists are not infallible, especially not psychologists who work in an incredibly subjective field, and it’s very common for incorrect work done in the past to misinform work done in the present. People approach autism expecting it to behave like one disorder with a scale of intensities, and so they publish their own research with that assumption too even though it hinders the usefulness of their work.
Brain function isn’t a have it/don’t have it thing – it’s a whole bunch of scales. Imagine god existed and had a Skyrim-like character-creation program he used to craft every new human. You’ve got a skin colour scale, a height scale, a hair colour and eye colour scale and so on. But you’ve also got scales for brain function, like lack of cognitive empathy, lack of executive functioning, memory strength, attention to detail and all sorts of other things. Each scale can be adjusted individually. “Autism” is kind of like adding up the number of points you have in each of those scales and then saying “if you have more than 100 points in total you’re autistic”. That has a lot of leeway though. One person might have 50 points in cognitive empathy and 50 points in executive functioning and 0 points everywhere else, whereas another might have 0 points in cognitive empathy and 0 points in executive functioning but a lot of points in several other scales, and another might have 20 points across the board. You can also go well above 100: someone with 300 points is still classed as autistic but has a lot worse problems than someone with 100 points. Anything sufficiently abnormal in a wide range of mental skills is classed as autistic, but this means a huge degree of diversity in what classes as autistic because you can be abnormal in a lot of different ways. Frankly, the diagnosis is most useful as a means of accessing medical services and accommodations within society. Its use as a diagnosis is rather limited outside the social services society has deemed applicable to the diagnosis.
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