The reason the notion of autism spectrum should be offensive

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LOL....you're one of the few people, period!

I've never known anybody who was free and clear on their home before age 50.

A great accomplishment!

I'm not saying the OP is wrong or anything. I'm just saying that usually when a thread has lots of pages within a few days of the birth of the thread, it ends up getting derailed into something slightly different to what the OP intended, until attacks start, then after a couple of weeks the mods end up locking it.

It's just a pattern I see on this board often, a bit like the one about Goldfish's diet.

The reason why these get heated is because some people are adamant with their opinions they will argue and be right and not listen to other people. They are so convinced they are right, they dismiss other peoples experience. I think people in this thread might have been skeptical when the OP started this thread because they thought he would be one of those people.

There probably is a “autistic traits” spectrum that involves every human. But the DSM is a disorder manual and one should be impaired in some way to be labled “autistic”. Where “NT” ends and “Autistic” begins is never going to be an easy to define line. But that is true with a lot of non physical or mental conditions. when does “feeling a bit depressed” end and clinical depression begin? While labels will always be flawed that is not a reason not to use them and make them better, it is the “lesser of two evils” if done well.

The DSM in getting rid of the “Aspergers” diagnosis wanted to fix what they felt was an overdiagnosis problem. “Aspie Supremicists” wanted out of the manual and because they felt superior humans like themselves were not disordered and were not doing well as they should because the NT’s discriminated against their gifts in part because they were associated with those lower “autistic” people. In part the idea of “Aspie personality” vs autistic has taken hold, just not enough to satisfy those who hold that view. “Aspies” are more viewed as quirky socially ackward geniuses, the “moderate” intellegent people from the old diagnosis has been all but forgotten. In another important way the DSM has failed, the prevalence rate is still going up albeit a bit slower. Now people that would have been diagnosed with Aspergers are now diagnosed with ASD Level 1 with no cognitive or language impairments. It is mostly understood that these people are “Aspies” as the term Aspergers is still widely used. The clinicians get nice payments. We are not considered really autistic, curiosities to be fawned over ala Shelden or just people who have been diagnosed with fad diagnosis who should toughen up. And along comes people with your type of thinking agreeing with them in certain ways. If we are viewed as special and gifted there is no reason anybody should have empathy or sympathy for us. It will go back to what many of us in middle age have had most of are lives unreconition.

The above issues are due in part to the DSM. In creating a seperate Aspergers diagnoses it encoured people to think of themselves as not really autistic. That was a built in flaw. Lorna Wing in her paper proposing the aspergers diagnoses specifically stated that the diagnosis was a way of diagnosing people as Autistic without diagnosing them with Autism. Parents would be more accepting of a label that did not have a stigma. When the DSM under pressure from insurance companies and school districts panicked due to percieved overdiagnoses they made the problem worse because the “levels” subcatagories were so poorly thought out and predictably have been so poorly implemented.

The only reason
I don't like
"Spectrum,"
is that it doesn't seem
sufficiently complex.

A spectrum
suggests a
two dimensional gradient,
(How autistic are you?)
which doesn't nearly
account for
all the variations
and subtleties the
ASD population
exhibits.