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It’s just that most of the symptoms of things like autism and adhd are things that we all experience, but to a different extent.
And when people watch TikToks saying “ever feel awkward in social situations? You’re probably autistic!” it gets a little out of hand.
Where’s the line though? I feel like a lot of symptoms can crossover into things like anxiety or ADD and people might disqualify themselves because they don’t have some of the more stereotypical symptoms
Lol what, this is completely false
Explain
False equivalency. You’re either pregnant or you’re not - there’s no spectrum to it. It’s not a good comparison, as someone else in the comments humorously pointed out.
I don’t understand. In order to be diagnosed with autism, you must have deficits in social communication across three criteria groups (reciprocity, nonverbal communication, developing/ maintaining relationships) and repetitive, restrictive behaviors. The symptoms can change in severity throughout your life, but must be present throughout your entire life. And the symptoms can’t better be explained by intellectual disabilities.
Like, you either meet those criteria or you don’t. The spectrum is for those who meet all the criteria above as a way of explaining how different all of us with ASD are. My nibling is high support needs, nonverbal but I, as a low support needs adult, understand him better than I get most of my allistic peers. Allistic individuals might identify with parts of autism, but that doesn’t make them autistic unless they meet the above criteria
Autism spectrum disorder is as the name suggests a spectrum, a lot of people are from a medical standpoint very mildly autistic - research on the biological underpinning of autism is still in the very early stages so we’re not sure what the physical difference is where we can say ‘if you lack this’ or ‘if this is malformed’ or ‘if this bit is like that’ so the diagnostic determination is simply ‘do you seem to fit somewhere in the spectrum’ - maybe we’ll find that there is a gradient of autistic severity linked to something like diminished function of a regulatory hormone somewhere and that indeed these people have a few percent diminished function and that correlates to slightly autistic behavior traits. We might likewise find that there is a fairly simple on/off trigger which these people have but which due to the structure of other brain features doesn’t result in pronounced behavior.
