Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by coldtea 872 days ago
>Well the nature of autism being a "spectrum disorder" (per the DSM, the officialest psychology book) inherently means that there will be people who are 1%, 2%, 5%, 50% autistic.

Not exactly how "spectrum" works. It's about the variation of type and severity, not merely the variation of severity.

And there's no 1% or 50% autistic per the DSM. It's just autistic (or non-autistic), and autistic comes at 3 levels, which is not 33% 66% and 100% autistic, but autistic with low, mid, and high support needs.

If you're diagnosed as autistic you're not 5% autistic or 30% autistic, you're autistic, period. Your support needs just vary (and the 3 levels is a crude, but "good enough", breakdown for policy decision making).
1 comments
zug_zug 872 days ago
Sure the DSM isn’t capable of assigning a % but that’s just a practical simplification it makes. There are over 100 genes strongly linked to autism and many other correlates. There are obviously people in the world who stim every minute, some every hour, some once a day, some once a week, etc. All of these symptoms fall on a range (be it eye contact). Often with these cases a sibling has a more severe case.
link
coldtea 872 days ago
>There are obviously people in the world who stim every minute, some every hour, some once a day, some once a week, etc. All of these symptoms fall on a range (be it eye contact)

Those are just the easiest to spot and measure outward symptoms. Not that relevant for giving some imaginary finegrained "autism score", just to diagnose.

Internal symptoms, the important ones, like sensory issues, social adaptability issues, routine issues, emotional regulation issues, and so on, are not quantifiable like that, and those are the ones that actually matter.

But whether external or internal, the symptoms don't neatly fall on some specific range for a single individual, but vary with age, external conditions, factors like stress, sensory triggers, environment, emotional state, masking, and so on.

There's no "this person stims about X% with some specific interval" measurent" (or whatever other symtom you want). And thus there's non measurable "autism percentage within this 0-100" (whether on a linear scale or in some higher dimentional space).

link