Why I hate the High-Functioning Label

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This post I just saw on Facebook pretty much says it all:

"Congratulations, you're high-functioning!"

"What does that mean?"

"It means you're not allowed to talk about how difficult autism is for you. And you need to pretend it doesn't affect you in public. But don't worry. At least people will still have unreasonably high expectations for you."

"But what if my autism comes with mental health issues, executive functioning issues, comorbid conditions or PTSD?"

"What do you mean? You look so normal."

"..."

Autism again has to be different.

Do year hear people talking about High Functioning cancer, depression, stroke, or Cerebral Palsy?

High functioning means that you are able to function pretty much independently. People with low functioning autism rely on constant supervision. That is why they make the differentiation. It means you dont have a severe learning disability. Just because people use the addition "high functioning" wrong doesnt mean it is discriminatory or useless. Trying to get rid of the differentiation is like saying chronic hepatitis is the same as acute hepatitis or like saying the "paranoid" in "paranoid schizophrenia" is discriminatory when it actually differentiates it from "histrionic schizophrenia" and "catatonic schizophrenia".

My understanding is that the strict definition for the term "high Functioning" was IQ greater than 70 when applied to autism.

It occurs to me that the term may have originally been coined to describe autism when there wasn't an accompanying intellectual disability.

With time and usage I suspect the definition has become looser and less rigorous.

And I do not like the term either.
Severity levels based on how much support is needed makes a great deal more sense.

People use the term differently but the effect it can have on us can be devastating none the less. The biggest problem is that people assume that if someone is high functioning that person will be high functioning in every area across the board. This actually is the exact opposite of what it means to have a developmental disability which is what Autism is. A developmental disability means that your brain has different rates and levels of development in each specific area of functioning unlike neurotypicals whose brains develop pretty evenly across all the areas of functioning. So you may function highly in one area but lowly in another. But because people do not always understand this, they put expectations on us to function at our highest levels of functioning in every area. Then they get upset with us if we can't. That is the biggest danger in the functioning labels. And the opposite is true of people who are labelled low functioning. They are often underestimated in areas because people expect them to function at low levels across the board.

Now if the high/low functioning levels are used in purely clinical terms, I believe they are still used to differentiate between an IQ higher or lower than 70. But because IQ has so many different facets to it and there are so many types of intelligence, even this can be inaccurate in true measure of a person's abilities to function.

Not trying to be a smart alec here, but there is no such thing as "histrionic schizophrenia." I get what you mean though, and I agree with it to some extent, although I wish that so called "low-functioning" people weren't differentiated as being low-functioning solely based on intellectual or cognitive disabilities. There are a lot of people with severe autism who are speculated to have an intellectual disability, but actually are extremely intelligent, and there are also those with major cognitive deficits that hinder their lives just as much as autism does. I just wish there wasn't the whole autism=intellectually disabled stereotype out there, because it doesn't give people on the spectrum with severe communication deficits that prevent them from expressing their intelligence enough credit.

Actually back in my psych ward days the staff mentioned occasionally to each other wether we had a “high functioning” group or a “low functioning” group, referring to the overall severity and acuity of the unit, as well as wether the people could function in group.

At least in those situations, the functioning labels had some literal basis.

I ponder that "high-functioning" was developed as a description for those on the spectrum who wanted to separate or not be treated on the same kind of wavelength as "low-functioning" or intellectual disability. I don't think that's supposed to be a bad thing even though some might extrapolate that idea. It's adaptive, so to speak.

Labels in cans or people can be informative and /or deceiving.

Being weird or creative is in the eye of the beholder.
Sewiously yours.

My situation is a little different since my brand of autism has it's own name (NLD), but the severity of my disability is also underestimated because I talk so dam well. They don't quite get that so little in life is about talking, and so much of it is based on doing things.

Do you think we should do away with those labels altogether then or use something different out of curiosity?

This comic has been posted a few times before (more than once by me), but it seems to apply to this pretty well:
http://the-art-of-autism.com/understand ... planation/

NLD is not a "brand" of autism. It's a learning disability that mimics some of the impairments of autism.

As matter of fact the medical community had been using the term "high functioning" for other psychiatric conditions decades before it was applied to autism. A friend and breadwinning coworker of my dad who worked at a professional job was a "high functioning psychotic" back in the Sixties and Seventies. He was out to lunch but he managed to fit in to respectable society. The term was not invented FOR the autism spectrum. In fact that's the point. It was only recently that autism was thought of as a spectrum that included folks that outwardly seem normal. So when they decided that autism wasn't just Kanner type extremely disabled folks, but could be expanded to included the outwardly normal less impaired folks they appropriated the term "high functioning" from precedent with its use for other conditions.

I'm sorry but I respectfully disagree.

Who says you're not allowed to talk about how difficult autism is for you? Who says you have to pretend that it doesn't affect you?

I'm autistic and although the world outside my home can be highly stressful, I haven't let this stop me from having a highly successful career. Autism for those of us who are high functioning (as opposed to people on the other end of the spectrum who lack the ability to speak), does not need to define us nor does it need to limit us.