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by zozbot234
1763 days ago
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> What you think of as severe autism is more likely autism in addition to another developmental disability. A reasonable guess, but if that was the case we would expect low functioning autism to be extremely uncommon compared to either "mild" autism or other developmental issues, since very few kids would happen to fall under both conditions. Unfortunately, low functioning is more common than that, common enough in fact that some people think of it as the typical case of autism itself. |
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Diagnosis of autism requires running through a checklist as part of an interview, or a behavioural analysis if younger. If you're completely non-verbal and thus incapable of being interviewed you can still be shortcut diagnosed as autistic, which is actually my entire point, the behavioural checklist is not that stringent. A number of severe learning disabilities can pretty easily be swung into an autism diagnosis, making the spectrum seem more like 20 conditions we can't distinguish rather than 1 condition with vastly differing presentations.