Someone with autism who has a severe intellectual disability and is non-verbal has significantly different needs from a person who was formally labeled as having Asperger’s, so why are they considered the same disability?
In: Biology
Basically, all of the issues/symptoms that individuals on the spectrum have are related to the same groups of executive functions. Executive functions are things like self-control, short term memory, emotions, planning, etc. So you have a group of executive functions that are deficient in some way, and they all can have different levels of deficiency. Executive functions themselves are complicated things that can have huge variations in how much or how little they impact an individual. There are too many combinations of executive functions and severity to assign each a different name, especially given that the treatments are very similar for several different levels of an executive function.
So, it makes the most sense to group everything under one heading “Autism Spectrum Disorder” and tailor treatment to that particular individual’s needs. What you’re really doing is just creating a label for the individual that can be used to get them the assistance they need. The assistance is going to be individualized, but the need for that assistance is global across the group.
Because it is.
It is broad because so many aspects of “normal” life can be affected depending upon the individual.
For example things people may seem trivial, for a person with asperger’s can seem massive such as doing something for the first time such as ordering an uber or a break in routine or as a 3rd example, being overwhelmed with information when multiple people are talking to you at the same time.
What affects one will not necessarily affect another and vice versa
Because autism is kind of a catch-all term for a wide range of different disorders that all manifest some degrees of similar traits. Basically, for any given autistic person, you could describe their unique experience of autism through the use of a set of scales. And if some god in charge of forging humans had a Skyrim-esque character creation program, each of those scales would be an individual slider, just like body weight and jaw width. A diagnosis of autism occurs if your total value for all those sliders is high enough. If you need say 70 Autism Points to be autistic, then one person might get 10 from each of 7 sliders whilst another might get 40 from one and 35 from a second – and many others may end up with a lot more than 70 points total. All of those people would be classed as autistic, but manifest vastly different symptoms, in the same way that video game sliders have a point beyond which the character’s proportions feel uncanny, but can still go a lot further into the outright ridiculous territory too, and the more individual sliders you’ve set past the uncanny point, the more amusing the character looks.
Also, bear in mind that autism, like many mental disorders, isn’t stand-alone. It has a lot of comorbid issues, particularly learning disabilities and attention disorders. Someone can have just autism, or can have autism and one or more learning disabilities, or have autism and an attention disorder, or have all three. All of those people would primarily be diagnosed as autistic, but the comorbid conditions create big differences between them and someone who only has the same amount of autism and no comorbid conditions.
>person who was formally labeled as having Asperger’s
Asperger’s used to be a diagnosis separate from ASD. Unfortunately, that mean that the resources available to someone with ASD were not available to someone with an Aspie diagnosis. “Yes, Mrs. Smith, we would love to help your child out but because he’s not diagnosed Autistic just Aspie so there’s nothing we have to offer him”.
So Asperger’s got lumped together with ASD in the latest DSM-V. I’m Aspie, but my official diagnosis is Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1.
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