Published on 12, July, 2020
With reference to the Twitter storm over Chris Packham's comments
here My assessment report said there have to be impairments in social communication, social imagination and social interaction
for an appropriate diagnosis to be made. Is impairment synonymous with disability though?
A thing that puzzles me. The criteria for diagnosis says there has to be impairments in 3 areas ,as I've previously posted ;yet there's people with the diagnosis who make out they have no problems .
Why do such people seek an assessment then? If they're given a diagnosis that suggests they have some degree of impairment , but such people don't think they're impaired in any way.
Maybe they are of opinion that the impairment is from the NT viewpoint. So it's only seen as an impairment from people who are NT. You could make the comparison the other way, and say various traits of NT behaviour are an impairment of the ND viewpoint (hypersensitivity to senses for example) but the majority of people are NT, so it's ND that are compared to NT, not the other way around.
So basically some people go for an assessment , that includes impairment as a criteria for a diagnosis, already denying they are impaired in any way ?!
Which comes back to the point of- If you don't see yourself as impaired why seek out an assessment in the first place?
I think we're basically saying the same thing. My point is I could equally say ND's are impaired because they can't hear everything I can, or they take emotions over fact and reason
People with Asperger's/ASD/Autism can be non deficient , even gifted, in some areas while struggling in other areas. Saying a person has impairments in a few areas is not saying they are impaired in all areas. The ' tangerine' is not an 'orange' , but also it's not a perfect piece of fruit and neither is the orange .
It's a bit like, most people are oranges but some are tangerines. You can accept you're a tangerine, and want to be formally assessed so that you can prove, for whatever it is you need approval, that you are a tangerine. But it doesn't mean you have to accept that a tangerine is a deficient orange (which is what the oranges say). You're just different, not deficient. Even if the oranges say you're deficient, you don't have to agree. But it doesn't change that you're a tangerine. But you need oranges to accept you are a tangerine and not expect you to be an orange. (Have I stretched the analogy too far? Haha)
That isn't what is happening. I've never said I don't believe I'm autistic. I attended an autism assessment as I believed, and had confirmed that I am autistic.
I see my behaviour as differences to the predominant neurotype but understood the assessor would follow a deficit model and instead of noting my behaviour in this way would write it down as impairments instead. I was ok with that as I understand different people have differing viewpoints and as such will sometimes use language that goes against my preferences.