Is categorizing autism on WrongPlanet wrong?

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I don't think there is anything wrong with classifying autism.

However I have a lot of misgivings about the categories of AS, HFA, and LFA, because I don't think they're accurate ways of describing the differences or the similarities and I think they do a lot of harm.

So okay with categorizing, not okay with those particular ways of categorizing. Too simplistic, too harmful.

There is isn't anything wrong with classifying autism here.

I understand that categorizing autism may be a necessary thing for the medical field to do to understand it. I also feel that categorizing is something that many humans do naturally to help them better organize life from their own perspective. The question though was "Is categorizing autism on wrongplanet wrong?"

I do not believe that wrongplanet is the place we should categorize members as we are all here to learn about autism and to share and vent and hopefully feel better about ourselves and the world around us. Categorizing sometimes comes very close to Pigeon-holing (to me) and I really hate to think that by calling ourselves LFA, HFA, NT or Aspergers we would be categorizing ourselves into some sort of hierarchy where one group is greater and another group is lesser. I have to stick with my original answer, that categorizing on this forum is not a good idea.



I suppose this is why I also, have alot of misgivings about the present categories. Thank goodness my son was not dx'd early in his life because at age 3-5 he was quite LFA and I'm just not sure what good/harm a dx would have done him. The psychologist said that he seems to be a classic example of an asperger individual but she gave him a dx of HFA because of his delays in speech as a child. You never know at any time in a persons life what wonderful things they can accomplish. I've always felt that labels can be limiting or can hold a person back. Of course, I have never let a label keep me from doing exactly what I wanted to do

What I have seen happen in a lot of forums (and books!) of autistic people over the years that gives me some of the misgivings, is something like the following scenario:

Robert (name picked out of nowhere, don't know if anyone here is named Robert) is diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. He goes to an autism board and meets Cindy (again, name picked out of nowhere).

Robert is a visual thinker. Cindy is not. When Robert discovers this, he says "I have Asperger's syndrome and I am a visual thinker, and you don't despite being some kind of autistic, so you must be HFA."

Meanwhile there's a woman named Maria hanging around, and Maria was diagnosed with autism. She is a visual thinker, does not see Robert, and sees Cindy who is not a visual thinker. She says "I am autistic and I think in pictures, and Cindy doesn't, so she must have Asperger's syndrome."

That's just an example. It doesn't have to be picture thinking that divides people in these things. People can pick out just about any trait, in some cases ones that aren't all that related to autism, and when they find someone who differs in that trait, they think "Okay, that person belongs in the other autism category, the one I am not in." When it's not that simple. I think the "experts" in the field have mostly done a more complicated version of this error. People forget, among other things, that not all Kanner's patients were speech-delayed and not all of Asperger's patients were not, and that some of them were interchangeable with each other in terms of autistic traits.

With HFA and LFA, there's a reason I have the signature line I do. I have never seen a definition of the division that seemed accurate, those ones shift around with shifting agendas. I have been labeled both at various times, but I do not like either (and it's not that I "progressed" from one to the other, just that people saw different aspects of me and labeled me differently based on the aspects they were looking at; it was in their perception, not in some difference inside of me, that they made these divisions).

I would not mind quite as much if functioning were measured in one narrow area, then another narrow area, then another one, suitably narrow to the point where it could actually be measured in some areas. But the way it's used, it's like they take a couple narrow areas, measure what they perceive a person's functioning to be in those areas, and then infer things about the rest of the person's abilities based on their (mis)perception of those few narrow areas. I don't think a person can be called high- or low-functioning, but someone can say "The person appears to be very good at this thing, and not very good at that other thing, and somewhere in the middle in that other thing." Something like that. I would also prefer it be kept in the realm of appear because sometimes a person is good at something in ways that other people don't perceive, or bad at something in ways that other people don't perceive.

Unrelated to accuracy, I often see people using HFA/LFA as ways of pushing status or agenda. For instance I have seen people who call themselves HFA saying basically "We're not like those low-functioning people, so do whatever you want to them, but leave us alone." And I have seen people who call themselves LFA saying "High-functioning people don't understand how awful it is to be me, so you should listen to my opinions above theirs."

So it is often misused -- even if you believed the classification was accurate -- in ways that serve more to say "I'm right and you're wrong so nyerh" than anything else, and often a person will put themselves in one functioning level and whoever they disagree with in another. For people calling themselves HFA, it's "You're too low-functioning to know what you're doing" or some variant; for people calling themselves LFA, it's "You're too high-functioning to understand real autism" or some variant. I even have seen someone tell parents "Don't be alarmed, we're only advocating for the rights of HFA/AS people, we understand they're not the rights of LFA people," which really bothers me because I think human rights are for everyone and because I think statements like that further the false/political divisions. I also have seen one person labeled LFA recently saying "HFA people can talk, LFA people can't, and it's only HFA people who disagree with me on this issue." (By her standards I know several people she'd call LFA who disagree with her, but I am almost sure she would find some new way to divide HFA and LFA if she noticed.)

But I don't think the classification is accurate, and I also think it's misused.

This is a really interesting discussion!

I think people automatically catergorize people or things to help them understand the world better. Catergorizing people doesn't have to lead to thinking one set is better than anothter. Unfortunity though. it seems some poeple will always use catergories that way. Because of that, I *do* tend to catergorize A LOT but I don't often voice the categories.

Now, oddly enough maybe, I don't catergorize the people on WP. My son is labeled PDD-NOS so he's in his own category! Because he was my introduction to this world, I tend to think of WP as a group of individuals.

Very interesting discussion!