Published on 12, July, 2020
Diuscssion on a Facebook group:
According to someone, if you're high functioning, you're mild and the terms high functioning (which according a friend who is a GP, means you have speech and the low functioning person doesn't) and low functioning are offensive. She then said she uses mild Autism to describe those of us who are high functioning.
I do find the term "mild Autism" inaccurate and offensive. I may be high functioning, but am certainly not mild. Then there's the low functioning person who in some situations, may be able to cope better than the high functioning person and vice versa.
I have a feeling the same person who said this, also once said that Autism is just a personality difference. I beg to differ.
I was always lead to believe that if you're classed as mild, (any medical condition) you have very few problems / it doesn't require any medical intervention.
I have argued elsewhere that there are dangers in thinking of this as a spectrum. It is certainly not a nice steady linear gradient.
Also I think some elements are common right across the spectrum and severity is possibly more due to the combinations of other factors. I certainly don't consider all the symptoms/manifestations to increase uniformyly as you go up the scale.
Of the basic elements, I suspect most people with Asperger's or autism have poor eye contact, don't pick up on non-verbal inferences in conversation, are slow at following conversations, and may be perceived, as a consequence, as lacking empathy. This also affects how they communicate with others.
Also most people have some sort of sensory "bottleneck" in terms of processing information in their environment and some level of sensitivity. With increasing sensitivity this is certainly contributory to more severe autism, inducing acute discomfort and pain, and consequent overload. But some people at the "mild" end get a lot of distress in this way.
Most people have organisational, focus and routine issues. That again ramps up with severity, but not uniformly.
It is a shame that this expression "mild" has caught on, because it can only be because those that use the term don't have a clue what they are talking about (which category sadly includes way too many health professionals who darned well ought to know better!).