Disabled or different..???

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Maybe however that is the point of this thread to discuss whether it's viewed as a disability or difference by each individual. That's important but a whole different discussion your free to post it the way you want I think you have a great point.

I would say disabled, it is a mental and learning disability. It effects everything about your life (or at least in my case, it might be different for others and I don’t want to claim I’m talking for everyone) But it being a “disability” doesn’t mean it’s bad. I guess it just depends on how the person views it

ASD is a spectrum disorder where outcome ranges from invisible "normal life" to catastrophic.

Everyone with ASD falls somewhere in the range, some are extreamly disabled some are bardly distinguishable from NT.

I wouldnt be too concerned with words like "different" or "special" they were created by NTs to avoid offence. They are meaningless.

A bit like when white people used to call black people "coloured" because they were afraid of being perceived as racist and wanted to sound "nice". The irony is calling a black person coloured is racist the ..correct word is "black".

In most explanations I've seen of the social model of disability, the underlying intrinsic difference is not just a difference but is an "impairment," or, at least, involves an impairment.

Example: Being unable to walk is an impairment. The degree to which that impairment is disabling depends on societal factors such as whether and what kinds of wheelchairs are available and whether all the buildings that the person need to access have ramps, elevators, appropriate bathrooms, etc.

So, in terms of the social model of disability, it seems to me that the appropriate question to ask is whether autism, in and of itself, is an impairment. I would prefer to say that autism involves impairments rather than that it "is an" impairment.

Autism is not just an impairment. For a significant number of us, it involves unusual abilities too. And, for reasons explained in my blog post Autistic savants potentially much more common?, I believe that the proportion of autistic people who at least potentially have unusual abilities is probably a lot greater than the proportion of autistic people who have actually manifested unusual abilities in today's society.

To me the great tragedy is that most autistic children are not brought up with a strengths-based approach.

I am really good at growing flowering shrubs because I can objectively remember what I did and decide what worked and what didn't work. NTs have a nasty habit of letting their personal biases influence their conclusions.

I approach this topic from the perspective of someone who has moved from seeing "autism" as an unbroken line between two points (ie a spectrum) to being persuaded by some of the top level science coming through in the past five years that there is no one autism, that Aspergers Syndrome is significantly different from HFA and other autistic varieties. There is even good research now showing that "Aspergers" brains work very differently from other autistic brains.

As I understand it, that is what Hans Asperger also thought and wrote. However because of his nazism, all of his work has been downgraded, and the best of it has been lost. However the loss started well before his nazi past was exposed: he never restricted diagnostic factors to only behavioural symptoms - the latter was an invention of the USA, and in my opinion a huge blunder, which set the research back decades.

Now we are supposed to be compressed into this one size fits all mentality and I don't think it's working in the best interests of the ASC population, I think it causes confusion in forums and threads like this, and is not serving anyone really very well.

While I do think there are probably many "autisms" I do not think there is all that much difference between Aspergers and HFA. Language ability before age 3 is pretty much meaningless after a certain point in ones life.

When the idea that Hans Aspergers was surreptitiously advocating for autistics was debunked by two historians we both said that it is up to the Autistic community to decide about the use of "Aspergers" and "Aspie". Now almost two years on the decision is clear, the terms are almost as popular as ever.

As a person whom vehemently defended the use of those terms prior to the Nazi complicity revelations I hope at some point we will move on from that terminology not only because of Hans Asperger but because Aspergers was always flawed in describing the experiences of "Aspies". It was accurate enough to be very helpful for a lot of people and that was a great thing. Hopefully going forward we will have science that better describes the "autisms" and terminology that is both accurate and easily understood.

You are very much right. If you think about it this makes many people not want to say they have asd of any kind because it confuses the person they are telling. due to all the unclear information. someone will say they have adhd or other disorders which are more widely understood way before asd, which let's face is being seen as some kind of really bad disease when there is so much you can do for people with asd. Every correct treatment is like a college education and wrong like a prison stay for someone on the spectrum its that significant. It's not equal just on par I mean. When people say you got to just work hard don't kid yourself treatment is part of the process.

yea it's why I wanted to find out if people see themselves this way or were theses just terms used it's only real if people say so. empirical evidence is usually the truth or the most useful information per say

So true look at people like temple who were opened to opportunity and revolutionized a whole industry. And many people like me already have the tenacity we just need the opportunity to grow. Ill read your blog

Disabled! Suppose that someone offered to cure you instantly. How many of us would say no? I don't think we can fool ourselves. We have serious deficiencies (especially in empathy) and I think if we are honest we will have a very hard time convincing ourselves that they are not deficiencies.
This is not just because we must live with non-ASD individuals (although it is a big contributing factor). I don't think the world would be a better place if populated solely by people with ASD. You can often get much more warmth form non ASD people.

That's true however asd people need to be given more credit for the good they do and more widely understood so people don't underestimate people with asd and they themselves too dont.