The expression you quoted is completely agreeing with you! It’s a play on the expected idiomatic ending “then you have met everyone with autism”, pointing out that the diagnosis is broad and everyone is different
A characteristic autistic trait is having a narrow and deep tunnel of attention.
Perhaps so narrow and deep that you're unable to learn language, because it requires a more holistic processing, and less focus on individual components.
Perhaps so narrow and deep that you're overwhelmed by sensation, processing every touch, sound, sight stimulus individually, leaving little energy to put everything together.
Or perhaps only so narrow and deep that you are extremely focused on math. Or collecting insects. Or memorizing train routes.
I don't know if this is an explanation. But it is extremely plausible for a wide variety of outcomes to be usefully categorized by a singular trait.
The symptoms cluster together and are related. Someone with sensory issues is also likely to have food aversions, for example.
It's also useful for diagnostics and treatment. It means you don't have to fight insurance as much or need rediagnostics to get needed therapies. I don't need to get my child with food aversions, speech delay, and sensory issues a new diagnosis for each just because some people with autism don't have those issues.
I guess then my thought is that whether it's one disorder or 4 or any number perhaps is best understood as a statistical question.
For example, if a parent exhibit autism symptom X (e.g. trouble understanding emotions), are there kids more likely to inherit symptom X, or ANY autism symptom.
If X is uniquely heritable, then perhaps it's best as multiple disorders. But if X leads equally likely to X, Y, or Z then it's better understood as one disorder.
That sounds like a problem with the medical gatekeeping industry rather than anything fundamental. Like a blanket diagnosis of "human" would get you the same thing, but for the middlemen realizing that would completely destroy one of the levers they use to defraud.
With a prevalence rate of < 2% (at least in Australia) this seems like an incredibly mathematically flawed take. Whilst a broad/blanket diagnosis isn't useful for making generalisations about individuals in that group, it's certainly societally useful.
All models are wrong, some are useful. Of course it has some utility, otherwise it would drop out of use on its own. The problem with big catchall symptom based diagnoses are what they drive focus towards and away from. I get that the scientific process has to start somewhere, by putting similar things in a bag, before it can tease out mechanisms and groupings. But when such simplistic models remain how doctors communicate with patients, it crowds out more nuanced understanding. Like even the word "spectrum", trying to add some depth to the pop culture model, is really just a fancy word for a single scalar.
> it crowds out more nuanced understanding. Like even the word "spectrum", trying to add some depth to the pop culture model, is really just a fancy word for a single scalar.
I just disagree with this take.
For people with autism, the broad criteria help to serve as guideposts for common experiences shared by those with autism. When doing treatment, everyone gets into the specifics of what autism means for the individual.
What you are complaining about is similar to someone complaining that cancer is too broad of a term. After all, the word cancer describes a spectrum of mutations and symptoms everywhere in the body.
I don’t disagree that pop culture has distilled spectrum down into a magnitude, but that isn’t how the DSM describes it or how professionals diagnose it (or in my experience how they communicate it). The metaphor is supposed to be like the light spectrum not “less autism ranging to more autism”. Severity scale is distinct to interacting traits of social issues and restricted interests and repetitive behaviors (the spectrum bit).
You may be interested in reading Wittgenstein on trying to define what a "game" is. In short he found that there are no conditions necessary or sufficient to make something a game. Nevertheless, games exist.
It’s amazing how much Wittgenstein anticipated. You can see here how his philosophy anticipated meaning as being fundamentally a probabilistic superposition of the relationships between words,
with no fixed form, predicting today’s model architectures:
> for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a direct relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.
"hot" is still a meaningful word even though 100 F°, 1000 F°, and 1,000,000 F° aren't comparable at all. They're nonetheless still all experiencing heat.
Yes, if we could pin it to a linear scale of Degrees Autistic (Farenheit), that could be estimated with reasonable precision for all day-to-day relevant values by feeling the nearby air on your skin, nobody would complain about "Austism" being too broad.
Am I missing something you can though. That's actually kinda
how it is. I detest the phrase "high functioning" but that group is roughly your outside temperatures. You'll notice the difference between 30° and 80° and the same temperature 72° can feel different in the summer, winter, before it rains, when it's humid/dry but is still the same intensity. Then there's 1000° degrees where (and this is someone I know) he stripped naked, ran through downtown, and yelled at random restaurant workers calling them fascists for not lettting him in and then got
into a fight with the cops.
I think broadly that's what the "spectrum" characterization is meant to convey. And you should expect this, in code there's one happy path and a million different ways to err, some more catastrophic than others.