Neurotypical - what is it?

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Someone said to me that 80% of people have some autistic traits, and I imagine that 80% of people on the spectrum have
neurotypical traits. Or whatever percentage balances that out.

But if most NTs have autistic traits, who did they use as a benchmark to get the definition of neurotypical? Isn't it actually
neurotypical to be autistic to one degree or another?

Someone said to me that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. So it must be true. Did you validate the %80 number or just accept it?

Neurotypical was a term originally intended to mean not autistic. It was not meant to be seen as "normal"

Autism is a cluster of symptoms/traits. A large percentage of the population shares psychiatric symptoms that span multiple categories. But unless a person meets all the criteria for a particular condition, then they are just another "normal" person.

Do you feel I was wasting your time? So why waste your time? I guess you are just venting.

The 80% figure seems to me to be intuitively correct. 20% of all people are "tall" - that is just how statistics work. Autism is a spectrum, not something you have or don't have like pregnancy. You can be a bit tall or a bit autistic, but you can't be a
bit pregnant.

Is there anyone else out there I can talk to?

I would say that the cutoff is this requirement (taken from the DSM definition of Asperger's):

Other than that, the cutoff is pretty arbitrary. They noticed that a number of people with some impairment had most of the same symptoms, so they called it a syndrome. That's what a syndrome is, just a collection of symptoms. If a different set of researchers had done the original research, the cutoff would have been a little different. As it is now, the definition is in flux, and will probably change in the near future.

Last edited by Yensid on 17 Feb 2011, 4:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Huh? If I felt you were wasting my time why would I bother to respond?




"Intuitively correct" is of limited descriptive power. All it takes is for another person to have a different intuition and you have a situation that can't be resolved.



You can't be autistic at all if you don't display all the required traits.



Why? Am I wasting your time? Can you only talk to people that agree with you?

Actually, you can. The requirement is that you have a sufficient number of traits in each category, so some traits may be missing completely. Also, there is a certain amount of judgment required in deciding whether an individual has a particular trait, so different psychologists will come up with a different set of traits for the same individual.

I stated that imprecisely. "All the required traits" is not the same as "all the traits possible", but it is an ambiguous phrase. If 2 of 3 traits are required and I display 2 of them, then all of the traits required are present. I should have used better phrasing.

Okay, then we are in agreement about the requirements.

I think that the original poster was asking why the requirements were defined the way that they were defined. They could have required, say 3 traits or 1 trait. The answer is basically that the original researchers saw a number of individuals with similar traits, and they came up with a definition that included most of their original group and did not include dissimilar individuals.

This is a "standard" illustration of just about any disorder. Most things done to an extreme cause clinically significant impairments when ya think about it.

At least theoretically, a person can have significant symptoms on the autism spectrum and have few if any clinically significant impairments. That would describe me. My younger years were very troubled with "impairments". It was all I could do to "function" (have and keep a job, keep a place to live, raise children, not get taken advantage of constantly for being so gullible).

When I hit my forties, some big internal stuff shifted. I'll never be whatever "normal" is, but I know how to DO normal (whatever that is). I sort of just submitted and found I could still be this incredibly eccentric person *AND* put on a "typical" uniform when necessary.

Can't wait to get that thing off at the end of a long day

Yes. I think that is a major weakness in the current language. There is no way to describe people who almost meet the requirements for AS, who can make productive use of many of the resources that are available for people with AS. Hopefully, the situation is improving, now that people are starting to understand that autism really is a spectrum, and that the cutoff between autism and NT is not nearly as clean cut as people would like it to be.

My understanding is that the current diagnosed rate is 1 in 120, so the percentage of non-autistic people is 99.166%. If you want to broaden that to include people who have "autistic traits" then it becomes much more complicated as you first have to define and agree upon a list of agreed upon "traits" and there is no real scientific data to back up the percentage of people who adhere to traits in a list that was just made up.

My understanding is the same as MidlifeAspie's.

As our DPsy describes it "98% of human brains function in what we call the neurotypical way" My husband and son are in the 2% that function the ASD way.

My understanding is that in the near future, a brain scan test will be able to diagnose ASD due to these neurological differences accurately about 95% of the time.

I found this post very helpful Gooselady. Be my instant aspie friend. Even our names match