Does anyone else hate it when people say "everyone's on the spectrum"?

Sorry but that's not an accurate representation of autism. You can define light by means of its spectral differences, so its a progression across a scale or a continuum. But the distinction is not degree of disability, and the fact that certain parts of the spectrum are intercepted by water vapour is about their specific properties at that wavelength, nothing to do with a continuum (I've spent much of my life working with sensors and the relationship of the spectrum to natural life and I used it a lot in my teaching).

"Continuum" was a short sighted analogy picked on by scientists to describe the wide variation in manifestation and severity of autism. But it is only a "continuum" if it does define the varying degrees of severity, and I don't think it does.

What it is doing, to our great disadvantage, is diluting public perception of autism. Because everyone can identify they are somewhere on this spectrum, they perceive that, while some people are way up the spectrum, and therefore disabled, there are a lot of people who seem to be only a lttle higher up the spectrum who could do more to help themselves, and therefore aren't worth sympathy. Why cannot these lower-down-the-spectrum people get off their backsides, stop moping and do something about their lot, and they could then move down the spectrum and be like the mass of ordinary people. The idea of a continuum weakens the sense of disability.

Human behaviour involves complex interrelationships. One of the adverse effects of Autism is that it compromises an individual's ability to interact within these complex interrelationships. So what has that got to do with a continuum!!?

I'm inclined to liken this to a food web (ecosystems lectures being part of my livelihood until recent retirement - so bear with this a moment). Food webs show us who eats whom, in the natural world. About twenty years ago they found a miracle pesticide that killed off several major crop pests, but it also killed off a spider that was consuming other crop pests. These pests multiplied without their main predator keeping down numbers, and they weren't affected by the new pesticide, so farmers ended up just as badly off.

Autism involves complex interdependencies. Let's take just one - eye contact. It affects most of us. To scientists its just one parameter on the spectrum, and when someone appears to have OK eye contact, it is assumed that they've been largely cured of autism, or so it seemed during the first phase of disability support reviews).

The scientists looked for gaze aversion, visibly avoiding eye contact, as their parameter. But many adults on the spectrum, probably as a response to being constantly criticised for not paying attention, find a way of looking in the general direction of the face, which gets NTs to shut up.

But the real issue about eye contact is we miss out on a lot of visual based exchanges in social communication. So we need to compensate for this information loss.

Either because of motor control issues, or lack of practice (or a lot of other interrelated factors) we are often bad at generating those visual signals for others to read.

So our social interaction is poor, and this has "knock on" effects on many aspects of human social living - in the workplace, in education, in the home, at recreation, etc etc.

We might be able to compensate, but the loss of the visual stimuli has pretty drastic implications. That's not a continuum. That's a complex web of interconnections in which we are under-effective participants.

Some people can compensate by being good actors, and guessing what is needed to make up for the visual ground. But only a few can do that and, to know how to act you need to know what you are missing.

Some people can make up for poor direct person to person communication by being writers, but a lot of people on the spectrum have dyslexia on top of their autism. Also rigidity of thinking, which is partly conditioned by lack of social interaction, affects how we write.

The "continuum" concept is irrelevant. It was a clever buzz word coined by scientists. It is doing us nothing but harm persisting in comparing autism to a contnuum or spectrum. It is not an accurate representation.

Sorry but that's not an accurate representation of autism. You can define light by means of its spectral differences, so its a progression across a scale or a continuum. But the distinction is not degree of disability, and the fact that certain parts of the spectrum are intercepted by water vapour is about their specific properties at that wavelength, nothing to do with a continuum (I've spent much of my life working with sensors and the relationship of the spectrum to natural life and I used it a lot in my teaching).

"Continuum" was a short sighted analogy picked on by scientists to describe the wide variation in manifestation and severity of autism. But it is only a "continuum" if it does define the varying degrees of severity, and I don't think it does.

What it is doing, to our great disadvantage, is diluting public perception of autism. Because everyone can identify they are somewhere on this spectrum, they perceive that, while some people are way up the spectrum, and therefore disabled, there are a lot of people who seem to be only a lttle higher up the spectrum who could do more to help themselves, and therefore aren't worth sympathy. Why cannot these lower-down-the-spectrum people get off their backsides, stop moping and do something about their lot, and they could then move down the spectrum and be like the mass of ordinary people. The idea of a continuum weakens the sense of disability.

Human behaviour involves complex interrelationships. One of the adverse effects of Autism is that it compromises an individual's ability to interact within these complex interrelationships. So what has that got to do with a continuum!!?

I'm inclined to liken this to a food web (ecosystems lectures being part of my livelihood until recent retirement - so bear with this a moment). Food webs show us who eats whom, in the natural world. About twenty years ago they found a miracle pesticide that killed off several major crop pests, but it also killed off a spider that was consuming other crop pests. These pests multiplied without their main predator keeping down numbers, and they weren't affected by the new pesticide, so farmers ended up just as badly off.

Autism involves complex interdependencies. Let's take just one - eye contact. It affects most of us. To scientists its just one parameter on the spectrum, and when someone appears to have OK eye contact, it is assumed that they've been largely cured of autism, or so it seemed during the first phase of disability support reviews).

The scientists looked for gaze aversion, visibly avoiding eye contact, as their parameter. But many adults on the spectrum, probably as a response to being constantly criticised for not paying attention, find a way of looking in the general direction of the face, which gets NTs to shut up.

But the real issue about eye contact is we miss out on a lot of visual based exchanges in social communication. So we need to compensate for this information loss.

Either because of motor control issues, or lack of practice (or a lot of other interrelated factors) we are often bad at generating those visual signals for others to read.

So our social interaction is poor, and this has "knock on" effects on many aspects of human social living - in the workplace, in education, in the home, at recreation, etc etc.

We might be able to compensate, but the loss of the visual stimuli has pretty drastic implications. That's not a continuum. That's a complex web of interconnections in which we are under-effective participants.

Some people can compensate by being good actors, and guessing what is needed to make up for the visual ground. But only a few can do that and, to know how to act you need to know what you are missing.

Some people can make up for poor direct person to person communication by being writers, but a lot of people on the spectrum have dyslexia on top of their autism. Also rigidity of thinking, which is partly conditioned by lack of social interaction, affects how we write.

The "continuum" concept is irrelevant. It was a clever buzz word coined by scientists. It is doing us nothing but harm persisting in comparing autism to a contnuum or spectrum. It is not an accurate representation.