High functioning? It depends:
- peiautisticadults
- Mar 27, 2021
- 1 min read
Updated: Apr 2, 2021
I recently saw this cartoon https://the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/UnderstandtheSpectrum.pdf by Rebecca Burgess from The Art Of Autism website showing what often happens to so-called “high functioning” autistic people, who look “normal” to others’ eyes who see them as “not very autistic”. It shows how they can therefore be overloaded by others’ expectations and criticized for not meeting them in the expected ways, until they are overwhelmed and then people suddenly think “Whoa, you’re more autistic than I thought” and that they’re not actually capable of much after all. Autism is a spectrum and not a scale from high to low. Please click the link to see the entire cartoon.
This article recently appeared on mashable: https://mashable.com/article/what-to-know-about-autism/
This section refers to the same topic as Rebecca's cartoon above:
"Autistic people aren't "more" or "less" autistic. These kinds of labels, such as "low" and "high functioning," can actually harm autistic people because it ignores the fact that autistic people's characteristics and skills can fluctuate — even within the same day, says Lydia X.Z. Brown, an autistic attorney. This kind of dismissal can make it hard for autistic people to get the support they need.
Autism doesn't operate on a linear spectrum, that is autistic people don't fall somewhere on a line with "less autistic" at the beginning and "more autistic" at the end. Rather autistic people, like everyone else, have vary…