Criticism of Broad Autism Phenotype.

Post Reply New Topic

Micro traits displayed as a personality type or just neurodiversity or natural difference without any disability

True natural neurodiversity is brain difference without disability or impairment i.e a personality type.

Not the pseudoscience of the neurodiversity movement you see mentioned in the autism community a lot, but that's another subject i wasn't trying to get into on here.

That makes sense. It's also a bit confusing, because there is Unspecified Neurodevelopmental Disorder that shares some similarities with Autism Spectrum Disorder, but not meeting full-diagnostic criteria.

That's why its a disorder - "Unspecified Neurodevelopmental Disorder"

That's the difference between personality type and disorder

BAP is not a disorder

It's a bit more than a personality type, it's a collection of autistic traits.

So basically, BAP seems to describe autism or a collection of autistic traits, but not severe enough to represent a disorder.

Meanwhile Unspecified Neurodevelopmental Disorder seems to require the overall collection of traits to be severe enough to qualify as a disorder, but without enough autistic traits to make an autism diagnosis viable.

That makes sense sense. Although people with Broad Autism Phenotype can benefit from therapy and social skills training.

As I see it, there is no real distinction between ASD and BAP - or maybe it's better to say that the distinction is and always will be socially constructed. Autsim spectrum is often understood as a set of traits in general population, not only in autistic people - hence for example autism quotient (AQ) is supposed to be something like intelligence quotient (IQ) and indicate how autistic / intelligent a person is. In this view:
- if you have small amount and intensity of autistic traits, you're NT
- if you have significant amount and/or intensity of autistic traits, but not enough for a diagnosis according to current criteria, you have BAP.
When adopting broader criteria, we move people from BAP category to ASD category.

The official criteria are blurry on two levels:
- how many / how intense traits you must have?
- what counts as causing significant impairment or suffering?
These are more of practical / moral questions than scientific questions regarding what autism "really" is.

It is blurry and confusing, but so is the world.

We rely mostly on behavioral criteria now - maybe things will change when we know more about neuro-stuff or genes, but for now it seems that also in these areas there are many, gradual differences and putting straight lines between NT, BAP and ASD (or other fancy labels from diagnostic manuals) seems unjustified.

That is an interesting perspective.

Although, NTs in most definitions don't show symptoms of mental, behavioral or neurodevelopmental disorders.