Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

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> Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different.

As someone who actually has an ASD diagnosis, and also has kids with that diagnosis too, this kind of talk irritates me…

If someone has a clinical diagnosis of ASD, they have a psychiatric diagnosis per the DSM/ICD. If you meet the criteria of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, surely by that definition you have a “mental disorder”… if you meet the criteria of the “International Classification of Diseases”, surely by that definition you have a “disease”

Is that an “illness”? Well, I live in the state of NSW, Australia, and our jurisdiction has a legal definition of “mental illness” (Mental Health Act 2007 section 4):

"mental illness" means a condition that seriously impairs, either temporarily or permanently, the mental functioning of a person and is characterised by the presence in the person of any one or more of the following symptoms-- (a) delusions, (b) hallucinations, (c) serious disorder of thought form, (d) a severe disturbance of mood, (e) sustained or repeated irrational behaviour indicating the presence of any one or more of the symptoms referred to in paragraphs (a)-(d).

So by that definition most people with a mild or moderate “mental illness” don’t actually have a “mental illness” at all. But I guess this is my point-this isn’t a question of facts, just of how you choose to define words.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to possibly offend or irritate. And thank you for patiently explaining. TIL.

Your comment wasn’t wrong. Neither is the reply wrong to be frustrated about how the world understands this complex topic.

You’re talking about autism. The reply is about autism spectrum DISORDER.

Different things, exacerbated by the imprecise and evolving language we use to describe current understanding.

An individual can absolutely exhibit autistic traits, whilst also not meeting the diagnostic criteria for the disorder.

And autistic traits are absolutely a variant of normalcy. When you combine many together, and it affects you in a strongly negative way, now you meet ASD criteria.

Here’s a good description: https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/what-is-autism...

I think a very useful term here is Broad Autism Phenotype (BAP) - subclinical ASD - you have significantly more of the traits than the average person does, but they are not strong enough or not disabling enough to merit a clinical diagnosis of ASD.

BAP is very common among (1) STEM professionals, (2) close blood relatives of people with clinical ASD (if you have a child or sibling with an ASD diagnosis, then if you yourself don’t have ASD, odds are high you have some degree of BAP), (3) people with other psychiatric diagnoses (especially those known to have a lot of overlap with ASD, e.g. ADHD, personality disorders, PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, the schizophrenia spectrum), (4) certain LGBT subgroups (especially transgender people) - all of whom have heightened odds not just of having BAP / subclinical ASD, but clinical ASD too

Like ASD, BAP skews male, but women can have it too. (The average man is a little bit more autistic than the average woman.) Also, autistic traits are positively correlated between romantic partners, so a woman in a relationship with a man with BAP or ASD is more likely to have some degree of BAP herself (as well as being more likely to have clinical ASD)

BAP itself is a matter of degree… autistic traits is a continuum and we are all somewhere on it (actually a one-dimensional continuum is a simplification, it is a multidimensional construct-but a useful simplification) - and clinicians draw a line at some point (they don’t all draw it at the same place, and its location varies across time and space and culture and even clinical subcultures) and if you are on one side of that line you have clinical ASD, if you are on the other you don’t-if you are on the non-clinical side of the line, but nearing it, you have BAP… but “nearing” it subdivides into people who are closer and people who are further away

It’s okay… sorry I wasn’t aiming at you personally. A lot of the common language on this topic irritates me, but people can’t be blamed for repeating what they hear others say… I think we call that phenomenon “culture”

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