Proposal: The Social Disability Spectrum

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I propose another spectrum, with three benchmarks for judging increasing level of severity. Note that anyone on the Social Disability Spectrum can acquire a deficiency in social skills.

Weakness: Social skills are not everyone's strong point, but a weakness can be overcome with relative ease. Learning social skills or simply practicing them more than someone not on the spectrum should be sufficient to acquire an acceptable level.

Impairment: Signified by marked difficulty with social skills. An impaired person will most likely have some to a lot of difficulty with social skills all of his/her life. He/she will acquire a social deficiency apparent to others, but the degree of deficiency may markedly decrease or become completely hidden as the person gets older.

Classic Disability: The most severe. Someone with Classic Disability will have great difficulty with social skills from the earliest stages of development, Social deficiency will appear early and will not markedly decrease over time, or will not decrease to a level appropriate for functional social interaction.

This spectrum occurs independently of the Autism Spectrum. However, most on the Autism Spectrum will fall somewhere between Impairment and Classic Disability.

Thoughts?

I don't agree.

What you said somewhat represents how many people think words such as 'impairment' or 'disability' are defined because their parents taught them this.

Impairment = all levels of severity (mild, moderate, severe, profound and in-between each). Being disability isn't related to severity, it means you are hindered, deprived of your legal rights, you're made incapable of doing something.

You can be disabled one day and not be disabled the other day.

You can be at risk your disability because of your disorder/impairment.

You can be disabled and not have a disorder.

You can be impaired but not disabled, but you could have been in the past and could be again despite that your impairment never changed one bit in all the time.


I mean, think of glasses.

Being near-sighted would make someone severe and classically disabled.

Makes more sense to me to call them disabled if they can't get glasses and call them mildly to severely impaired for needing glasses, no matter if they got any or not.

Without glasses they might get killed by a care they didn't see coming. Really disabled.

With glasses, they might be absolutely save wherever they are. Really normal. A weakness maybe because glasses can be annoying.

Yet in both examples the the 'thing' (near-sightedness and needing glasses) didn't change. But one time their need for glasses as well as their near-sightedness is a severe classic disability when as soon as they out glasses on their nose it suddenly stops being one and becomes normal/a weakness?

I hope it becomes obvious from this that by your classification you didn't describe the underlying problem but the level of functioning. E.g. how well do I get along in life under certain circumstances?

You also make it sound as if when you're severe, you will never be better than milder/normal people in the area you're severe in.


And we already got a spectrum of functioning: high-functioning, moderate-functioning, low-functioning.

Parallel to that we have what actually describes the underling problem: mild autism, moderate autism, severe autism, profound autism.

You can be severe and HF. You can be moderate and MF. You can be mild AS and fail and not do what someone with much severer AS can do.

The UK already opperates like this as to how much money they give to people with disabilities.