Published on 12, July, 2020
Discussing elsewhere the “spectrum” word in ASD. Wondering how others feel about the word before the D word (disorder).
Sorry but I don’t identify as being part of some ego mad Drs interesting “spectrum concept” in a position on a range to be plotted on the chart and fawned over. There she sits right about there I am autistic, it’s who I am imagine being on the black spectrum or the gay or depressed spectrum on the Bi Polar spectrum or the Lesbian Spectrum No
The word spectrum in my view helps the average people grasp that not all Autistic people are exactly the same. Why is that so hard to grasp that we need a fancy word. Are all black people the same shade of black? Are they a spectrum of black I guess they are (my kids are black and this is not a racially motivated comment). Yet we do not highlight this range of skin colour - black people are just referred to as black.
it just seems ridiculous that Autism being a range needs a special word because it’s so difficult to comprehend.
what do people think?
Don’t even get me started on the third part the “disorder”
Xanadu said:
Also truly are we on a spectrum at all in the true meaning of the word spectrum?
used to classify something in terms of its position on a scale between two extreme points
The implication that it is simply a line from mild to severe can do more harm than good, IMHO. There is a variation in language skills, variation in sensory differences, variation in social comprehension, variation in executive function differences, and so on, to any degree of separating one ability from another (e.g. semantic language skills vs. pragmatic language skills, spoken vs. written language skills.) If it were a simple spectrum, then the gradation would apply across all of these areas in equal proportion, but it quite obviously doesn't. This simplification is dangerous; it is why those of us with good functional language skills are so often assumed to have little impairment in other, less easily observed, areas, for example. Nor are functional differences consistent; my functional language skills can be just dandy until I find myself in a particularly stressful situation, or need to combine them with pragmatic language skills; during an extreme period of burn-out, I can lose these skills completely, to the point of complete receptive and productive aphasia.
As the old saying goes; "A little learning can be a dangerous thing." If taken too literally, the "spectrum" analogy can be as much of a misconception as many of the misconceptions it aims to disabuse people of. The "everyone is on the spectrum" attitude, which would be true if the analogy was accurate, leads to a kind of false empathy for autistic people; the idea that people can understand us by extrapolating from their own experiences, or from what they have learned about some other autistic person, and this discourages people from looking any further. My experience is that explaining my autism to someone with no prior exposure to it is much easier than explaining it to people who think they know something because they absorbed the over-simplified "spectrum" concept.
To me, autism is a "category" containing a multi-dimensional region of closely associated conditions, not a "spectrum".
See now you are thinking along the same lines as myself but articulating it much better than I have - I was looking for a word and yes category does fit !! I was looking I think for a more complicated word because this is what I do "over complicate" and also I "over think" . . . I don't think NT can understand me any more than I can understand why they need to fill silence with 'weather talk' or why they ask you how you are, when they a) do not care and b) do not really want to know. It is an exchange of pleasantries before they get to what they really want and I don't understand the need for it. I suspect never the twain shall meet
That said thinking of who I am as point in between two extremes will not get them any warmer to what I am whatsoever! Still it is far better than them doing the old "I knew someone once who was autistic and you are so different" - Gently gently on the understanding for the NT folk I guess . . . Let's not overcomplicate for them when we've come so far xx