Many months ago I had some thoughts along the lines that I haven't seen anywhere a full list of the impacts of autism together with the proportion of autistic people experiencing each one. I was interested for instance that many people mention trouble with fluorescent lights where I have no issues, but I share with many the difficulty with processing spoken words in the presence of background noise and/or other conversations. Neither of these (lights, voices) features explicitly in diagnostic criteria for ASD ("sensory differences" do) and this got me wondering about diagnostic criteria versus experience of ASD.
As usual, I have an urge to classify things in life that I come across that capture my interest!
This may be linked to some of the tense debates that sometimes arise along the lines of "You can't be autistic because you're not like my child (or aunt, uncle etc.)" which results from the fact that autism produces so many different sets of symptoms or "profiles", and, naturally, a system of processes that is concerned only with *diagnosis* of "autism vs something else" is very concerned to develop highly sensitive and specific *diagnostic criteria* and far less interested in common experiences as a result of autism (which a system concerned with care *would*, but I have no experience or knowledge of this).
These are fresh thoughts and I've just learned by reading the first few paragraphs of this paper on rheumatism that *classification* of conditions *is* more concerned with identifying relatively homogeneous groups of people within a larger group sharing a common diagnosis; this appears to be why we have both DSM (for diagnosis) and ICD (for classification).
Despite all of that, even the ICD doesn't address the level of detail exemplified by the fluorescent lights / voices in a crowded pub example, and neither talks about the different ways that aspects of executive function are changed. Thinking about it now, the executive function topic is what brought this back to my mind as I was discussing with my wife how we are each affected in different ways in regard to EF (she's on the waiting list for ASD diagnosis so we're still having the conversations about "could this be part of it?").
Fascinating stuff (to me at least).
