It's not a one dimensional spectrum with just severity as variable. It's a multi dimensional spectrum, you could potentially assign a "condition" to each dimension (hypersensitivity, OCD, rigid thinking, non-verbality, ...)

But virtually everyone in the field does believe there are many different mechanisms behind autism, some of which have little-to-no overlap either in the mechanisms themselves or necessarily even in the presentation.

Many scientists believe that one day we will likely be able to split off at least some of the undifferentiated mass of ASD into potentially completely unrelated disorders that may share a lot of aspects of presentation.

For example, we may find out that one set of genes combined with cytokine storms in utero cause dysfunction in synaptic pruning, while another set of genes combined with gut dysbiosis may affect brain plasticity in the critical period of early childhood. Those would be two completely unrelated conditions, with overlapping symptoms for some (but not all) who have them.

That's the benefit of a broad diagnosis. Narrow diagnoses make it hard to get specific treatments for problems.

That's my main concern about trying to split up autism. It's all well and good for study purposes, but for "can I get my insurance to pay for my kid's occupational therapy" purposes I'm really skittish about such a breakup. All the sudden my kid might have "omegaism" or whatever and boom, it's uncommon for them to need OT so insurance won't cover it.

The diagnostic criteria isn't based on whether the condition is treatable.

For example, nobody who is diagnosed with autism is proclaimed "not autistic" if they find therapy to be unhelpful.

If a person can take care of himself, hold a job, and generally not burden anyone else why does he need treatment? To try to make him into whatever we consider "more normal?" Just let him be who he is.

So... you agree with what I am saying?

My point is, if it is commonplace to refer to Autism as a spectrum we are already acknowledging that it is not a single thing.

Which seems to be the entire basis of this article while also mixing in the rambling of someone anti-science that frankly won't change even if it was split up.

???

In what way is GP being dismissive, or taking the "autism is my super power" position with that comment?

> Couldn't disagree more. The "autism is my super power" movement is borderline offensive to people dealing with severe or low functioning autism.

I doubt those types are saying much of anything. Its more likely their caregivers.

Again the old name for those of us who think its more a super power used to be called Aspergers syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome . And we got folded in to Autism Spectrum Disorder, as did a whole host of other diagnostics.

And we have been found to be more truthful, better at focusing, can hyperfocus, notice more details than NT's, and plenty more. We're only a disease cause we're the minority.

I have never in my life used "autism is my super power" so please don't put words in my mouth. I will agree that it is offensive but that is very different from saying "somewhere on the spectrum" when I don't feel like having a more in dept conversation.

And again my point is that contrary to what the article seems to be trying to make, no one really considers Autism a single thing.

That is exactly what I meant to say which is why I added an edit. I for sure could have phrased that a lot better.

Now yes there are people who are undiagnosed for whatever reason (including some people I know that don't see the point after being diagnosed with ADHD, I know personally I had to have this conversation with my psychologist to determine if there was a point to actually do it at that point) that use that phrase and it gets a bit tricky.

But nowhere am I trying to imply that *everyone* is saying this.

I don't think it's safe to draw conclusions about what "most people" think based on the discourse around RFK and his nonsense.

> common, mild cases where the person has no serious issues existing in society and frequently benefits from their "disorder"

This is not at all a thing. People with some mild neurodivergence sometimes being good at very specific tasks is not even in the same ballpark as "Benefits"

There's no benefit to a brain that struggles in modern society.

>but I assume that it is referring the fact that these two extremes need to be treated completely differently

Except they don't. What is different is the intensity of the treatment. My girlfriend needs patience and a little therapy. Her sister needs intense forever therapy and infinite patience and a system that will allow her to live despite never being able to be a productive member of society.

>They do not for a moment think about the more severe cases that require people to have full time caretakers because they are unable to feed themselves.

They are regularly the parents of exactly those people and are sick and tired of you speaking for them and making their life harder. Those people who need fulltime caretakers can only pay for them through social security benefits, and guess who is trying to change that?

>even discussing ASD is made remarkably difficult because these extremes are the same diagnosis.

The reams of neurodivergent people I have interacted with in my life have never found issues with this, and have regularly been very willing to engage with the nuance of a poorly understood disorder which by definition has no single cause and might be several similar looking diseases because that's what the word disorder means in medical science

The discourse around RFK is that morons with no experience, training, or even ability to read introductory material apparently should shut the fuck up, and let the adults work.

Agreed; in short: any monolithic system will have individuals with natural dispositions transverse to that order, those individuals provide resiliance and novelty but also risk driving decoherence and defection. Yay pluralism.

"You do it in your own post, attributing a defined, binary, thing as "I am somewhere on the spectrum"

"You either have some quantity of illness or you don't."

I'm not sure what kind of argument you are making for (or against?) "binary" symptoms. The DSM-5 clearly lays out the spectrum. There is a conglomerate of effects caused by autism, and where you are on "the spectrum" is determined by how many of the symptoms you have, and their severity.

There is nothing wrong with someone claiming "I'm on the spectrum" if you don't know how or what they were diagnosed with. That language is consistent with the DSM. Unless they admitted to self-diagnosing, it seems wrong to assume someone is lying about their own experience.

"You can't just ascribe some quirky, possibly somewhat anti-social, behavior as being on the spectrum"

Quriky, somewhat anti-social behaviour (in your words) essentially is one of the dialogistic criteria. But nobody would be diagnosed with autism for that alone. Just like how autistic folks usually avoid eye contact. That doesn't mean they ALL avoid eye contact, and it also doesn't mean anyone who avoids eye contact is autistic. It's a wholistic diagnosis. One would need to be experiencing SEVERAL of the symptoms to receive an autism diagnosis. IME, the majority on the spectrum are indeed level 1, and high functioning, even to the point others might question if they are really autistic.

If you take issue with people self-diagnosing, I don't think anyone would disagree. But your combativeness in just discussing the topic kind of looks similar to people who refuse to accept that autism is really a thing ("there were no autisms back in my day" kind of thing).

I both agree and disagree with the over-diagnosis claim. Yes, everyone is suddenly autistic, which lessens the meaning or impact of the term. Also, the DSM 5 reclassifies a good portion of human behavior under the umbrella of ASD, so this is in part driven by the diagnostic model itself. We continue to see rising rates of severe autism in children, which are likely attributable to this reclassification as well as better common understanding of the diagnostic criteria. Presumably, just as many adults either qualify now or would have qualified as children.

At the same time, there’s the neurodiversity movement that seeks to destigmatize and depathologize these diagnoses for both high functioning and more profoundly disabled individuals. Just because you don’t conform to the norm - and ASD is heavily defined in relation to deviation from an underspecified norm - does not make you “mentally ill.” So we have autism as an identity additional to a diagnosis, which I think can be really empowering for people, and also cause confusion and frustration for others. It’s a reclaiming of “disability” from the paternalistic and abusive medical and pseudoscientific practitioners that have been harming autistic people for decades.

I also wish you were not being downvoted. You express some common sentiments and I think your comment adds to the conversation.

> It comes as no surprise that psychiatry, and medicine in general, is suffering from a massive reproducibility crisis.

Psychiatry still hasn't coped with the fact that it spent most of the 20th century taking Freud seriously. More recently, it still hasn't figured out a way to repudiate the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic in the 80s. The people who were involved are literally still working, and have moved on to Facilitated Communication in severe autism, Gender Identity, and are still pushing around the fraud of Multiple Personality Disorder. Literally the same people involved in all of them, and now their children. [edit: forgot about one of the most important, Recovered Memory Syndrome]

There's just no scientific method in most of psychology, it's simply guru-led systemic theories delivered mostly (but often entirely) by a single person who is licensing practitioners. What comes along with that is a complete inability for any of these theories to die. They just eventually become unpopular and unprofitable, and people jump onto the next thing.

The psychopharmacological revolution has complicated this even more, because now there are billions of dollars wrapped up in it. The only advantage to SSRIs and the new generation of knockoffs was that they didn't cause tardive dyskinesia, there was never any statistical evidence that they performed any better than the previous drugs. And in the case of the previous drugs, they weren't ever shown to have much of an effect other than quieting down patients. They were all based on the wackjob theory that people having epileptic seizures suddenly became sane, and were one of the ways of inducing a seizure-like state, along with freezing baths, saline injections, electrocution, etc. All of the pioneers were also enthusiastic lobotomists.

How can we say that these new tactics are medicine or science when the statistics on mental illness keep getting worse?

>In the 1990s we drugged kids (especially young boys) who weren't able to sit still with ADHD medication

This never happened. We did not overprescribe Ritalin.

What actually happened, is uninformed people like you with no actual evidence spread FUD about how giving kids well understood medicine was "bad" and the direct result of that was people like me, my sister, and my brother who all had stereotypical ADHD symptoms that we inherited from our stereotypically ADHD parents were tested and rejected an ADHD diagnosis by untrained school guidance counselors terrified of something that wasn't happening.

Each of us spent the next 30 years utterly failing to thrive due to struggling with these symptoms, and experienced immense suffering from normal life things. We all have finally gotten real diagnosis, and some of us are getting real treatment, and we are so much better off now and able to function, and we are even able to pass those learnings back up the chain to our parents.

A huge part of the "ADHD Epidemic" right now is the fact that a couple million people with clear ADHD symptoms were passed over by people who were supposed to be helping them due to the exact FUD you are spreading now.

>This generation it's autism, and it's likely over-diagnosed just as much as ADHD.

ADHD is not overdiagnosed. Autism is not overdiagnosed. Provide any evidence at all to support your shit claims.

If someone with just a whiff of autism struggle gets diagnosed as autism, that's fine, and they will be explained how they might not even need significant support, and they don't really get any treatment at all. For people with gentle autism like that, it's mostly just about understanding why you are the way you are. "Oh, that's why I <X>". And you suddenly have a framework and vocabulary to better explain the struggles you have and the problems you experience, and a way to bond with people who have similar difficulties, and a way to think about your own brain that can help you lessen the negative impact of being different.

>It comes as no surprise that psychiatry, and medicine in general, is suffering from a massive reproducibility crisis.

There is ZERO reproducibility crisis in ADHD science, and amphetamine based ADHD medications are some of the most well supported, scientifically, medicine we have full stop. You can literally measure physiological brain differences of people with ADHD, and if you give a kid with ADHD a stimulant medication for their life, those measurable differences go away

If you give ADHD people stimulants, all cause mortality decreases. They become statistically better drivers, which is something that ADHD people are statistically worse than average at. You lower all forms of addiction and substance abuse, because ADHD people struggle with self medicating and abusing substances as a rule. Notably, all the good Ritalin does for people who struggle with ADHD is not duplicated in people who do not have ADHD. People who take unprescribed Ritalin as a "study drug" have worse outcomes than people who take it for actual ADHD.

Giving kids with ADHD stimulants reduces bone fractures and STDs!

>You either have some quantity of illness or you don't.

This is stupid. Some people with bad eyesight need glasses to do normal day to day things while others don't, or only need glasses for reading, but both are diagnosed nearsighted

>Much to the disservice of people suffering from the condition.

Stop talking for me, you are doing an atrocious job of it.

>It's not anti-science to call into question the amount of bunk, p-hacked, corporate funded garbage coming out of even the highest tier of medical grade journals.

It is entirely antiscience to demonstrably have no clue what you are talking about and yet claim the experts are wrong. That is literally antiscience. There's no p-hacking in ADHD science. There's no corporate funded garbage for ADHD. Ritalin is old and cheap and no longer patent protected.

>If anything, your own post demonstrates the anti-scientific (pop-sci) instagramification of mental illness.

How dare you thumb your nose at kids self diagnosing on tiktok (not instagram, pay attention) as "pop-sci" when you yourself know only reactionary FUD. Shame on you. Educate yourself.