Would you socialise with LF autistic people?

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I agree. To be ret*d doesn't mean you can't learn, it simply means it takes more time and effort than the average person to learn something. I'm sure that most people with Down Syndrome have had the term mongoloid directed at them, and unfortunately my son will probably hear that word long before he enters high school. They aren't stupid, they know what it means.
It would seem as though using the term mongoloid is socially ret*d, since it is well-known(and has been for quite some time) that people with DS are not a race of people from Eastern Asia.

My husband has a cousin who I believe is considered lower functioning. I am not sure why though... I get confused by functioning levels and think they tend to mean little... in some ways I am higher functioning than she is and in other ways she is higher functioning than I am. I guess it would depend on the person... My cousin in law and I get on well. I would socialize with her if she lived in my state. But like all people, some I can get on well with, others I cannot. I would have to meet them first to know, their functioning level means nothing to me though, it all depends on what they are like.

it is the only reason I can justify driving 100 miles a day to a job where I can not earn a living.

I have spent the last 7 years working as a job coach and also as a group home manager out of my interest to look out for "my little boy" mind you he is a year older than me and has a mustache, I spend 180$ a week on gas to be with him.

(i will also thank someone, {who really I don't have a crush on, if u believe it maybe I will too} , on the forum for teaching me to ask his opinion on how attractive women are in his native Romanian) and no I will not repeat the words here.

I had the impression that the "Low functioning" part of LFA was referring to one's level of intellectual functioning since "high functioning autism" often refers to individuals with autism with average or above intelligence. This was almost supported by wikipedia with its mentioning of "Sometimes the syndrome is divided into low-, medium- or high-functioning autism (LFA, MFA, and HFA), based on IQ thresholds,[52] or on how much support the individual requires in daily life; these subdivisions are not standardized and are controversial." but, yeah, apparently it's controversial.

I think the two criteria in DSMIV for LFA is IQ< 70 and lifelong dependence on others.

This is controversial because IQ is in itself is not an all encompassing scale of intelligence. A LFA may not speak but there is a strong suspicion they take in all of their surrounding environmental data and are able to recall these from their LTM at incredible levels of detail. As a teacher once told me being able to speak does not make you intelligent. LFA people may be walking repositories of information.

In the future it may be possible to engage with LFA kids through interfaces that allow indirect communication.

Alongside the observation that IQ is in itself not an all encompassing measure of intelligence, I want to add that it's also not a predictor of whether or how well somebody can talk. A common misconception seems to be that if you did badly on an IQ test, you won't be able to talk well either, or be entirely non-verbal. So there seems to be this idea, whenever the LFA/HFA categorties are discussed, that an autistic person who can talk quite well (about special interests, let's say) must be of "average or above average intelligence". On the one hand, maybe talkative autistic people who scored below 70 on an IQ test were mis-measured because of their autism (anxiety about the testing depressing scores etc.) On the other hand, maybe people who "really" have mental retardation can actually be quite talkative.

I suspect that far less is understood about thought than researchers claim. I am guessing that in the next 50 or 100 years, the concepts we have of "mental retardation" and "IQ" will be considered quaintly wrong and IQ testing, if such a thing still exists, won't resemble today's tests at all.

MENSA will have something to say about that.

There seems to be a debate at the moment about whether more money allocated to autism research should be diverted to research for higher functioning spectrum individuals (AS, PDD_NOS & HFA) away from LFAs. Obviously there is also reason not to do this.

Oh I'm sure they will. They seem pretty invested in making sure that the words "top" and "superior range" continue to be applied to them. I assume they will fight against anything that threatens to alter that label. I'm not envisioning a flip-flop, though. I'm envisioning an alteration of the intelligence paradigm that makes the whole 20-200 line scale a moot point. Howard Gardner and his Multiple Intelligences Theory is trying to get away from the linear paradigm (or at least expand the number of lines rather than having just one line). I think the current research into how other animals think will be part of that paradigm shift.

http://www.123compute.net/dreaming/knocking/alex.html






Here's where the folding in of Asperger's Syndrome to Autism Spectrum might be helpful. Instead of seeing LFA and AS/PDD-NOS/HFA as separate categories and one category gets money while the other doesn't, the folding in might promote the idea that there is commonality and they should be trying to figure out what that commonality is and why it manifests so differently in different people. Functioning labels just get in the way of that line of thought by promoting the idea that there are discrete boxes.

I am in the top 1% of IQ and have a job where I make money in the top % of the world as well. That said, my autism is not mild. I make SOOOOOO many accommodations to fit it. I call myself high maintenance/high output sort of being. I have seen many Aspies who don't have half the struggles I have with abstraction, sensory issues, anxiety, etc... They pass nearly as NTs and cannot get a DX very easy (whereas I just have to be in the same room with a shrink and they call me out in 5 min) but these Aspies are not as high IQ and mostly they are unemployed.

Which of us is "high functioning"?

^^That

~Kate

Very good question!

I've wondered about that as I've typed "mild" about myself because I have been able to get advanced degrees and do my job, albeit while recognizing certain limitations, which you've pointed out. My sensory issues are often "over the top" and emotional/relationship wise I've often been a royal mess. Is my AS "mild" or not? Is "high functioning" to do with IQ only, because if so then I am quite high functioning...but...

~Kate

I have absolutely no idea. The problem is as you've described- a whole bunch of different parameters can't be boiled down to a single high/ low measure (or even a high/medium/low) measure because those parameters don't correlate with each other. So people generally choose one parameter and then use it to pick a HFA or LFA box (oddly, it's quite rare that anybody ever chooses an MFA box even though it ought to be chosen sometimes using a linear measure). Some people use IQ test results. Some people use vocal speech. Some people use needed level of support- from needing assisstance with self care to needing simply financial help. Some people use how long a person can "roll with the changes" without having a meltdown. Some people use severity of sensory issues. etc. etc. etc.

And so comes the problem you describe. A person can be high functioning according to one or more of those parameters and low functioning according to others. If people stopped to think about it, that's the reality for all humans. Nobody functions well in every single parameter or poorly in every single parameter. My dyscalcula doesn't stop me from writing several pedantic paragraphs but it does stop me from doing mental math above a 2nd grade level (I need a pencil up to about the 5th grade level, a calculator for highschool level, and am utterly unable to do any college level math). I am high functioning at written communication. I am low functioning at math. I can't think of a single person who isn't simultaneously high and low functioning depending on which parameters are looked at. I don't know why autistic people are expected to be any different and be mono-functionally categorizable, unlike the rest of humanity.

I think the real problem comes when people start to mentally bundle the parameters. If a person doesn't function well with vocalized speech, they must also have a low IQ (I deliberately didn't say 'low IQ score' because of measuring problems). If somebody functions really well at work, they must also function really well with sensory issues, and so on. This is absurd, but there we are. People seem married to this LFA/HFA duality (I suppose people rarely say MFA because that messes up the duality concept) and will artificially tie together different parameters even when people have high measures on one and low measures on the other. They'll just assume that functioning well on this means functioning well on that and same for functioning poorly.

I think the best thing would be to abandon this whole LFA/HFA concept because it forces people to make assumptions in order to put somebody in one box or another. I think the clinicians should spell out the parameters they are using and then put a measure on each parameter, rather than trying to lump them all together and assume that somebody will be uniformly high or low (but never medium??) functioning in all areas. That would also allow progress to be charted. Instead of saying somebody is LFA (for example), pick from a menu of communication types (conversational speech, echolalia speech, written conversation, PECS board communication) with no restriction that only one communication type can be chosen. Do the same for IQ subtest results (which I think are more meaningful than full scale IQ because they show where the scatter is). Do the same for supports needed or not. It would make for a rather wordy medical file and there would not be the conciseness of LFA or HFA or Aspergers. But I think that conciseness is a problem because it leads people to assumptions.

I already do! I have a friend with moderate autism.

You are 100% correct however I suspect there is a situational need that comes about for having these labels.
The primary reason is that despite the many years of autism research we still have a long way to go, even with mapping the genes that code for autistic traits and the developmental aspects where peoples's traits "mysteriously" vanish or modify with the aging process.

So our respective governments allocate money for social support and the health professions need a map or guide to navigate their way across the spectrum of trait manifestations all conveniently placed under the autims/PDD umbrella. For convenience clustering individuals into AS, PDD-NOS, HFA and LFA dictates what health services and therapeutic strategies can be aimed at these individuals - but we all know that it's a broad brush.

The current system for classification seems very inflexible in that (as you pointed out) being on the spectrum for trait A does not mean you will automatically have Trait B. Having trait A when you are 3 yrs old doesn't mean you'll continue having it when you turn 6 yrs old. This is where the labels are not really helpful. This inflexibility is a manifestation of politics.

Agreed. The "ability to talk" is far more dependent on verbal related parts of memory than verbal IQ. I know because my verbal IQ is fairly high but I can't seem to write English papers any better than an average person, and my college peers appear readily more agile with language than I am, despite an average verbal IQ at least 1.5 standard deviations below mine. The implication is poor verbal memory, which is supported by the probable possession of expressive language deficits and relatively poor verbal recall (At least historically).

I really don't know if any of the people I socialise with are LF, as none have admitted to it and perhaps LF is a label people don't want because semantically, it implies inferiority. If they were, I would feel perfectly OK with socialising with them.