Diagnostic arbitrariness and NO, not everyone is “somewhere on the spectrum”

Submitted by Judy Hanning on Tue, 2017-11-21 17:00
It’s never good to categorize an individual more so to the people who are on the autism spectrum. It is never easy to assume that an individual may have autism. The article focuses on how not to categorize a person in the autism spectrum disorder.

Since autistic behavior is a subset of normal human behavior, this gets messy. Autistic people might tend to stim in characteristic ways, but everybody stims, and sometimes we’re just getting in extra trouble for a way of stimming that is actually pretty common. Think about fiddling with a pen or pencil as an example of us getting in extra trouble for something most people will sometimes do.

Since autistic behavior is a subset of normal human behavior, this gets messy. Autistic people might tend to stim in characteristic ways, but everybody stims, and sometimes we’re just getting in extra trouble for a way of stimming that is actually pretty common.
~ Alyssa Hillary

Key Takeaways:

1
Someone who does not have autism may show characteristics of someone who might, but that does not mean that everyone is somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
2
Autistic behavior is a subset of normal human behavior.
3
An additional issue is that not every person is easy to identify and not everyone who is identifying the person who may be on the spectrum can understand how it works.
Read the full article here:
http://yesthattoo.blogspot.com/2017/10/diagnostic-arbitrariness-and-no-not.html