"My Son Has the Kind of Autism No One Talks About"

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I can see the authors perspective although the numbers seem inflated. This summer I took my 2.5 year old to an autism event barbecue. When I got there kids were patiently waiting for their turn in bounce houses, playing baseball and other games. My kid was the only one who kept running away into the woods, didn't care for games or bounce houses and would not sit at the picknick tables like other kids. Also after visiting pre k programs I noticed how many kids were verbal and fully aware. I understand that autism is a spectrum but kids should get the services that their condition deserves. However an autism diagnosis is a way for parents to get a host of services. Some of the lighter cases really are wasting taxpayer money and taking away services from more needy children. I think that autism should be separated into two different conditions. High and low functioning.

"In 1938, an Austrian pediatrician named Hans Asperger gave the first public talk on autism in history. Asperger was speaking to an audience of Nazis, and he feared that his patients — children who fell onto what we now call the autism spectrum — were in danger of being sent to Nazi extermination camps.

As Asperger spoke, he highlighted his "most promising" patients, a notion that would stick with the autistic spectrum for decades to come.

"That is where the idea of so-called high-functioning versus low-functioning autistic people comes from really — it comes from Asperger's attempt to save the lives of the children in his clinic," science writer Steve Silberman tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross." From NPR article on the book NeuroTribes

The problem is, we DO need diagnostic differentiation to address differences in intervention across the spectrum - and highly verbal children need a significantly different type of intervention than nonverbal or language-impaired children (and adults, for that matter.) Typically, language has been the defining feature of "functioning," but other than that the label is kind of stupid for all the reasons listed by the OP's article and more (plenty of non-language impaired kids have problematic behaviors.)

There is also a separate measure of "functioning" that is used generally across the field of disability; the World Health Organization uses the ICF http://www.who.int/classifications/icf/ ... t.pdf?ua=1 In that case, IMO, it's silly to divide autism into "high" and "low" functioning when we're really talking about degrees of impairment in a global sense - the fact that autism is the cause is kind of secondary.

At the end of the day, we're supposed to be helping everyone in the world be their best selves, or at least meet a minimum standard of quality of life, right? I struggle with these classifications for that reason.

But I think it's not accurate to say language distinguishes "high functioning" from "more severe." Kids who can use language still sometimes express their frustration with kicking, biting and screaming, and highly verbal kids may be delayed in things like potty training.

Any communication impairment - even if it's just in the realm of pragmatics - can cause a child to be incredibly frustrated and act out.

The major difference is that in one group, you can teach them to use language as a communication tool because they have language, and in the other group, you need to offer them nonverbal communication tools and slowly build language as it is possible. So the theraputic approach needs to have a totaly different toolbox.

It really is a spectrum and some of our kids do not fit neatly into either category. My kid does not fit well, in either category. He is very verbal (and hyperlexic) has crazy splinter skills. He does advanced math but was tested as less than 1/10th of one percentile in social skills. His behavioral issues can be pretty bad when stressed, too. So where in a binary paradigm would he fit?

The whole reason they do an ADOS and all that other stuff is to test specific weaknesses and strengths. That is what the assistance should be based on, not by separating kids into binary categories. Verbal kids still need pragmatic speech and social skill training and a host of other things, but not all kids in that category need the same things. Non-verbal kids also need different things. Some may need help in some things that others don't. Some have issues swallowing or motor skills. Some don't.

Edited to add: I don't know if autism will ever be spread into meaningful categories. maybe if they find out specific separate genetic causes or something, but even then there may be severity differences.

The light it up blue part made me very angry. But then again the whole article made me angry because they make it sound like most autistic children act horrible, and therefore we all are horrible and need to be cured. And as usual no mention of autistic adults.

I think it's a really big problem on many levels when people only want to recognize the most obvious not least being that children and adults with autism will continue to need some kind of support of some kind, and services are truly wasted if everything is yanked away once progress is made and the recipient loses what they've gained because of no longer getting any supports. I think probably it's almost always a mistake to push for perfect and normal rather than be satisfied with some differences and a little bit of need but able to manage, communicate, function, and be happy.