Do you want to Autism label to continue?

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So I'm pretty skeptical of autism as a discrete category that effectively exists outside of our current society. Yes, ASD seems to generally encompass a set of behaviors that stem from genetic, epigenetic, and environmental causes that seem to be correlated with one another, but the line between "autistic" and "not autistic" frequently seems to be rather subjective and shift depending on what country you live in, who you are speaking to, etc. And environmental and epigenetic factors will probably also vary depending on culture, location, and time period, making that correlated set of traits soup that is ASD even more complex.

I'd say you're Autistic if the criteria generally describes you well and are not better accounted for by other diagnostic entities, and you need the label to help you get by in life. But I don't believe in Autism or Asperger's (what I'm diagnosed with) as discrete biological entities that exist outside of our current time and place. I was talking to some acquaintances yesterday who kept insisting that Isaac Newton was autistic. I don't know that he fit either of the criteria that I just outlined, and I'll never know until maybe the end times because he's the only one who can answer that and he's been dead for centuries.

Doubtless, many people in the past would have received an autism label if they were alive today, but I don't know if that means that in their lives, in their societies, they were "autistic", because I don't know that it was conceptualized like that.

As such, I'd kind of like a world where no one is "autistic". Which is not to say that the traits and behaviors don't exist-- I'm not talking about "curing" us. I'm talking about getting to a point in society where our behaviors are accepted and the label is no longer necessary. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, but that's what I would like. We may still have friends and communities where many of us would have in earlier times been labeled "autistic", but we are no longer carrying the label as a community and instead just exist as together as people with similar sensitivities, interests, communication styles, etc.

Do you agree with this, or do you want the label to continue as an identity?

The label is not a personal "Identity", it is a label for a spectrum of developmental disorders. People should not identify themselves by autism any more than they should identify themselves by color-blindness or tone-deafness. Autism is something that you have not something that you are -- no one ever goes around saying "I Am Autism" unless they're taking part in a public-service announcement for Autism Speaks.

The title of this thread alone is infuriating. Autism is not a label, it's a diagnosis. And it's much better than real labels we're often smacked with such as "lazy", "stupid", "behaviorally dysfunctional", "mentally r-ded", "worthless", "creepy", "weird", "potential serial killer", "god's punishment for their parents getting them vaccinated", and on and on.

I have the impression (which could be wrong) that eliminating the word "autism" would be a way of denying the existence of the disorder itself. Sort of like the way that "Illegal Immigrant" has been replaced with "Undocumented Person" to make a certain class of criminals more acceptable to the general public (i.e., "voters").

Unless the OP has the credentials to support his the basic premise of his thesis, there is not much more to be stated in its favor.

Not sure what you mean by "acceptance" that already exists, we get looked after by society in the form of parents / carers and social security, various disability protection laws also.

Unfortunatly the type of "acceptance" your possibly referring to can never exist as autism is sometimes a burden on those who have to do the caring and the gov, both financially and human energy/time, because of this simple fact they make efforts to counter it via medical research ABA etc.. which is normal.

That will happen long after people accept other aspects and we no longer need labels for them -- aspects like race and sex, for example -- if it happens at all.

I struggle to follow small talk with unfamiliar people and don't mind if mutual friends explain that I'm autistic, it's a handy explanation in many other ways, convenient and concise .

Last edited by Sahn on 04 Nov 2019, 2:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think you mean you want the old autism label to exist and have us all go back to the 1980's before it was even a spectrum where lot of us were either labeled as being socially inept or as having other delays or as having ADD or a learning disorder, etc. or being just plain weird or stupid.

Yes you are right that the autism diagnoses depends on culture. Someone might get diagnosed easier in the US than they would in EU where small talk is considered weird or that eye contact is considered a threat and people are more direct. You would need to be more severe on the spectrum to be diagnosed in that country while in the US, they would be diagnosed more.

It is also possible this could all change again when people accept socially inept people more but autism is more than just being socially inept. There is the sensory issues, the restricted interests and the non functional routines and some have it so severe, it does impact their functioning and their ability to be employed so the diagnoses will always exist for those people than for the ones who can function and compensate.

Agreed. The diagnostic criteria are intrinsically subjective and arbitrary, varying from one edition of the DSM (or ICD) to the next, and applied differently by different practitioners.


Indeed, autism is a broad category of what probably will eventuably turn out to be hundreds, maybe even thousands, of distinct neurological conditions, once it becomes better understood. (There are already around a thousand different genetic variations associated with autism.)


It wasn't, of course. The modern idea of "autism" began emerging in the 1940's and didn't even begin to be applied to more than a few of us until the 1990's or so.


For those of us with kinds of autism that are relatively mildly disabling, that would indeed be best, at least in an ideal world.

However, in order to have any chance at all of attaining such a world or anything even remotely approaching it, we'll need lots of us, together with sympathetic NT relatives of at least some of us, to band together as a community.

And that requires a commonly-accepted label. It's not logistically possible to build a community of namelessly weird freaks. Even with the label, it's an intrinsic challenge for many of us.

Hopefully the community, or at least some parts of it, will be able to help devise more enlightened ways of helping the more severely disabled autistic people, as well.



See above. In the foreseeable future, we still need the label.

I think the label should continue.

Agreed that knowing oneself to be "autistic" is much better than all the other, more informal labels you mentioned above.

However, a "diagnosis" is still a label. Every word is a label.

We need there to be more autistic-friendly workplaces.

More autistic-friendly workplaces would enable NT's to work more productively too. For example, almost everyone hates big open offices and would prefer to go back to the days of smaller offices and cubicles. (Open offices save money on real estate, but are one of the many examples of upper management being penny-wise and dollar foolish.)

We also need more enlightened kinds of therapy and education for autistic children, with less emphasis on trying to make them act normal and more emphasis on identifying and developing whatever potential strengths they might have. (And, no, Aspies aren't the only ones who have strengths.)

Autism affects nearly every aspect of a person's personality. That's why the "autism spectrum disorders" used to be called "pervasive developmental disorders." So it's reasonable for autism to be an important part of a person's identity, though not the sum total of a person's identity.


People say "I am autistic," not "I am autism," of course.

Point taken that some people will always need the label. I'm not saying that a scenario in which many of us are accepted is likely to occur any time soon. I'm more saying that ideally a label wouldn't be necessary for many of us.

I mean, I get school support services alright. But overall NT society still gives me labels like "ret*d" and "creepy", dx or not, as they will until they learn to accept my behaviors, which like I said, I doubt will happen in my lifetime. I'll continue to be judged for my behaviors, not label, unless I go around with a nametag that says "I have autism", when self disclosure ime doesn't do much other than win me pity points-- but still doesn't lead to true appreciation or acceptance.

I'm just saying that I wish that the label wasn't necessary.

Maybe this is just my experience but it seems to me that social norms are collapsing and many NT's are starting to have only slightly more of an idea about what the rules are than we do.

Many ideas and behaviours that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago are now mainstream. I actually think that widespread acceptance of our behaviours will probably occur in the next 50 years.

^^^^
This
That is why when deciding on a username I decided on "ASPartOfMe" (Due to things we have found out about Hans Asperger's background I would drop the "AS" part if the software allowed)

As for the original question, up until or if science determines Autism is not a thing, separate conditions etc I hope we keep the "Autism" label/diagnosis and "Autistic" identity/description.


Getting to a point in society where "Autism" is less negative would get us to where you want. There are plenty of labels that have positive connotations(exp. "extrovert", "go getter" )


I agree. I do suspect that of a lot (but not all) of the people who want to get rid the label are really saying "Stop using your fake disease label to whine, excuse bad behavior and mooch"