Published on 12, July, 2020
I was trawling through some data, and I wondered if anyone has any official percentage of HFA (high functioning autistics) over the general population of ASD people. The psychiatrist and the therapist at PsychiatryUK told me that high functioning people (able to work privately and live independently) are a minority, but declined to give me any numbers. We also agreed that the "math genius" archetype of ASD adult is way overrepresented in media, since it is quite rare in real life.
Does anyone have any hard data about that?
actually if you hunt for it scientists have addressed this question https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.856084
Short answer there are quite a lot of HFA people. Also the IQ curve for autistic people is like a camel hump. With one peak below average and one peak above average. Where as normies only have one hump around normal inteligence.
you can see tthe figgure here https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/856084/fpsyt-13-856084-HTML/image_m/fpsyt-13-856084-g001.jpg
I think curent numbers are something like 44% of autistic children have averge / abouve average inteligence.
Yeah, that makes sense. Normie distribution is an almost perfect Gaussian, ASD distribution is not. However, when talking about functionality IQ has a secondary role. I have an ASD colleague that is incredibly intelligent while in a controlled work environment, but is totally helpless outside. The company had to assign a manager just to him, to keep him from 'sperging to the wrong people or scaring off the customers!
As I've said high functioning has never meant function within sociaty, it's function on an IQ test. That said autistic people who scoor well on IQ tests can ussually live independent lives with resonable adjustments.