Published on 12, July, 2020
I prefer to use autism or ASD because I believe high and low-functioning autism creates a false perception of The Autism Spectrum. To me and I imagine many others, low-functioning and high-functioning create the image of a horizontal line with one side saying "most autistic" and the other side saying "least autistic", especially since I hear people say "end of the spectrum."
I see The Autism Spectrum as more of a circle divided with each section representing a difficulty, with the individual in the centre having a variation of difficulties with differing levels of severity to one another. Like someone described as low-functioning may be able to walk through shops with no oversensitivity while someone described as high-functioning can have a higher level of severity in sensory processing that it's too hard and not be able to.
Do you think we should avoid the use of high and low-functioning as they're not clinical terms anyway?
Actually high functioning autism is a clinical research term that was popular in the 80s. Bluntly if you're doing research on a bunch of autistic people you need a metric to categorise them and IQ tests were that metric, the patients were often children and the researcher didn't want to go around calling the autistic children in their research the high intelligence group and the low intelligence group. So substitute functioning for intelligence and you get high functioning autism and low functioning autism. If you really want to throw the cat among the pigeons why not do away with high / low functioning and tack the IQ score onto the diagnosis.
i find IQ to be a bad indicator of intelligence personally.for one they always seem to be mulitple choice questions, sorry but if you need multiple choice question you probably wouldnt have even got any of the answers right at all. thus IQ becomes very aided by multiple choice, and even people just pick any options without knowing and get it right and end up with 200 IQ when they didnt know anything really, plus the people that do know the answers, perhaps they wouldnt have known without multiple choice because their memory was too bad to recollect the correct answer but multiple choice was there so that they didnt need to use their brain or memory. without multiple choice even if you know the answer it maybe lost in your memory somewhere, with multiple choice you dont need to rely on thinking or jogging your own memory for the answer.