This will unpopular, but I would recommend that anyone who can manage it to avoid any sort of formal psychological diagnosis. Unless you strictly need it for medication, it is always something which could potentially drag you down. Anyone can use the DSM (alongside an actual doctor) to get something of an "informal diagnosis" which will help them understand themselves better and to work with a doctor to form coping strategies. The formal diagnosis could potentially be used against you in the future, whether it's related to autism or not. For some people as well, the formal diagnosis does not seem to help and instead feels like a modern form of astrology; it becomes part of their internal view of themselves, and they trap themselves within the boundaries of their diagnosis.

Autism, high functioning or not, rarely comes on its own. It often has comorbidities like PTSD, depression, anxiety disorder and ADHD. Many of these extra disorders, like the former 3 in my list happens due to how autistic people interact with the general society. Bullying, abuse, SA, etc are reported at higher than average rates by autistic people. A diagnosis often helps to deal with them and plan for the future. In addition, medication is used for these conditions. Autism doesn't really have a treatment as far as I know (could use a fact check). There are some therapies available, but they have limited effects.

Another matter is that 'high functioning autism' doesn't mean freedom from hardships. They learn and work differently and don't fit well in regular classrooms. If you search online, you'll find several hilarious accounts of puzzled and perplexed autistic students in their classrooms. Despite being 'high functioning', they really could use accommodations. This is true at home too. If you leave them alone, many would simply starve to death without even ordering food online. Another matter is 'masking' - something high functioning autistic people do in public. It makes them more approachable to others. But it also creates enormous cognitive loads that can later develop into other disorders. Diagnosis really helps in these cases.

It's interesting that you said this, because I know someone with a psychological problem and their therapist basically does something similar. The therapist just says he prefers not to label things, as it might get in the way more than help.

activities that would result in "identifying themselves as autists" include: seeking a diagnosis in the first place, getting the help of a mental health professional, frequenting support groups and forums, and wearing a fitbit or smart watch.

It's really not a good thing when people, high functioning or not, are forced to choose between getting the help they need and being targeted by their government.

> and wearing a fitbit or smart watch.

Since when is wearing smart watches only for autists?

It's one of the many private data sources they were planning to use to track and collect data on autistic people for their database. https://people.com/rfk-jr-to-launch-autism-registry-using-pr...

Autistic or not, giving that kind of health information to private for-profit companies who collect that data to use it against you or sell to third parties was never a good idea even before the government wanted to take it for themselves.

Ah, I didn't know that. To me your sentence read like autists out themselves by wearing a smartwatch.

Fully agree with you on that, the less data they have, the better.

Channels about autism also disproportionally cover people who are willing to talk about their autism. Recently I've been reading The Lost Girls of Autism. Something that stood out in the anonymous accounts is the fear of being "discovered" and the associated anxiety and depression. Since reading that I'm not super comfortable with the idea of incentivising high-functioning people to hide.

Why do you consider that a good thing?

If the public face of autism is someone who needs no support or accommodations and is in fact very successful - people will understandably be confused when someone with the same diagnosis needs substantial support.

I assume that you don't have direct experience with autism? Success is a very misleading criterion. Even the very successful autistic people often suffer from significant distress. Level 1 autism (the most independent one), is also listed as requiring help. They too need accommodations - but it might be different from what you imagine. And their life situation can change drastically and dramatically at any stage.

In my opinion, people need to learn - and in many things, already know - that things have scale. For example, with "pain": a bruise, cavities in teeth, kidney stones, migraines all hurt, but the level of effect on someone's life is vastly different.

Also, people have no problem minimizing the things as well, where pain again is a good example. In many situations, if it cannot be seen, secondary parties easily disregard it.

So, in conclusion, this confusion with the autism levels should not be a problem.

High functioning people pollute the discussions about the problems of their low functioning peers who can't speak for themselves. It's selfish.

Thanks for answering that, I now see where you are coming from.

Low functioning peers can't participate and high functioning peers shouldn't participate. So all discussions about autism should include only non-autistic people? Weird logic doesn't compute!

But what if low functioning and high functioning peers share many symptoms, but at different intensities? Won't that make the 'high functioning' peers more capable of understanding and thus speaking for their low functioning peers? In fact, there is a specific term for this - 'the double empathy problem'. Perhaps you should try a less 'ablist' approach to autism.

How does high functioning autistic people speaking up for the autistic community "pollute" the conversation?

First of all, the reason this registry isn't going through is because autistic people who are functioning enough to speak out did so in solidarity with the entire autistic community. So far from polluting anything we are advocating for ourselves and our peers.

Secondly, this "high functioning low functioning" dichotomy is wrong so your framing it as a "us vs them" situation is off. It's a spectrum not a binary.

Third, presumably if they can't speak for themselves, and "high functioning" autistic people are discouraged, then the only people speaking for them are allistic people speaking about what's best for autistic people. When that happens, you get bone-headed characterizations like autistic people "never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." and suggestions of registries, wellness farms, and soon enough genetic cleansings.

Finally, it's autistic acceptance and awareness month, and the autistic community has been under attack for a week. You're spending your Sunday calling autistic people "selfish" and characterizing their input as "pollution". Have some compassion please.

It's cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. The societal damage that the anti-autism measures do are much, much greater and sinister than whatever the high-functioning autists could ever do.

Basically, only completely healthy people should be allowed to talk about themselves. Those with milder issues are selfish when they talk ... and those with large issues cant anyway.

So, the only people allowed to talk about autism are people like you - those who do not have it.

Autism is seen as a large and wide spectrum of many different symptoms all called "autism". Using terms like "high functioning autism" is probably not a helpful way to talk about some color on the spectrum, however.

Source: I am the parent of a child with autism.

Can you clarify? How should one talk about and differentiate between the frequencies?

Because it creates a binary when a) it's a spectrum and b) high/low functioning dichotomy is not a constant. Every day needs can be different. Sometimes people are low functioning during child hood and become more functioning into adulthood. Sometimes high functioning autistic people become low functioning later in life. Some people can function very well when they had adequate support but the can't function at all when support levels fall below a threshold.

Reducing the conversation to high/low functioning also limits people's understanding and compassion of autistic people. The sibling commenter to you said they believe high functioning autistic people don't deserve to have a say over matters concerning autistic people, which is incredibly troubling because that just becomes and avenue for silencing autistic people; if having the ability to speak up for yourself means your opinion isn't valid, then that gives license to use and abuse a population, as autistic people often are.

I believe there is a methodology for distinguishing high and low functioning autism. Level 1 is high functioning. Level 3 is most severe.

Thanks. I much prefer "typically low support needs" because high functioning removes the imperative that I need help at times.

The high functioning folk are supposedly >6x more at risk of suicidal thoughts... and they're the folks society gets something back from.

I'm all for shaking our heads at young high functioning people flaunting it, but nobody gets the labels by having a good time. It's very rarely beneficial to disclose, even if disclosure is a choice.

They look like average introverts. Would it be some overdiagnosis like ADHD?

"Actually, it's good they're registering every autistic persons in the country in a national database, under a president who is overtly eugenicist [1]."

No it's not. At minimum this is a horrible invasion of privacy, that I can't believe anyone on HN would defend. At worst this is straight Nazi shit, preparing the ground for extermination.

[1] https://time.com/7002003/donald-trump-disabled-americans-all...

> I can't believe anyone on HN would defend.

On this site, you can hold pretty much any opinion you like as long as you coach it in the most neutral-sounding "Modest Proposal"-esqe language you can.

To expand on what you said - you can post some grotesque things here as long as you don't provoke flagging or offending the ~90th percentile into down-voting your comment in the first 24 hours, and language plays a big part in this, such as hiding bigotry behind big words and playing into confirmation bias. Low-level down-voting can be countered if you can get <1% of HNers, who may be fellow-travelers in the fringe ideology to vociferously agree & up-vote your comment.

I think this is a side-effect of HNs voting rules, what counts as "adding to the conversation", and the limited window for voting down comments and unlimited time to vote up.

Very much so, HNers pride themselves in this "enlightened centrist" aesthetic, while giving extremely fringe analysis and opinions on any subject under the sun.

Everything that touches to genetics or education is a sight to behold.

I'm glad to see I'm not alone in recognizing this. I've had literal holocaust denial and neo nazizm show up in comment threads before and I end up the one warned about "maintaining a spirit of curiosity"

I usually only lurk anyway as a physicaly disabled autist but this thread made me have to push thru typing pains.

There isn’t a definitive test for autism. High functioning autists would have been considered quirky or odd in the past. We label everything now though

> We label everything now though

Are "quirky" and "odd" not labels? How about "weirdo" and "creep", are those not labels?

These romanticized ideas of what autism is (or used to be) hit a brick wall when you consider that 2/3 of people with autism have contemplated suicide and 1/3 of people with autism have attempted it. Most of it could probably be attributed to social rejection, exclusion, and isolation perpetuated by people who don't suffer from these disorders.

The amount of condescension in this thread is astounding. People who have zero experience with autism have decided to split the autistic community into 'high-functioning' and 'low-functioning' groups and declare that the former is perfectly fine. I don't even understand what their problem is.

We also just used to chain the "weird" family members in the attic and pretend they didn't exist.

For a while, the popular treatment was mulching their brain matter through their eyeball. This was done to a lady kennedy for being too weird. The doctor who suggested we scramble people's brains if they had certain diseases that were hard to treat in other ways got a Nobel Prize.

"high" or "low" functioning is not a constant. I'm autistic and I've been low functioning and high functioning. I can hold a job and had a wife at one point. But sometimes circumstances in my life change my ability to function. Sometimes I will go periods where I can't speak, and this caused me to almost lose my job... but for the fact they knew I was autistic and had compassion for me.

I understand that sometimes people want high needs autistic people to be the only ones who are visible, because it perpetuates the (false) narratives people have about autistic people -- that we can't function in society, we are essentially children, we need to be "cured" to "save the children", but people need to realize this is a) a spectrum and b) your place within the spectrum is always in flux. Low functioning autistic people can become more high functioning with support, and high functioning autistic people who are abused can become low functioning very quickly.

About a fourth of kids diagnosed with autism have IQ at 75 or below.

How well would your IQ score reflect your actual intelligence if you were to take an IQ test in a language you have trouble understanding and expressing yourself with?

It's well agreed that multiple factors contribute to IQ score. What I'm trying to convey is how much burden is predicted by the autism diagnosis.

You're yet to establish the link between IQ score and " burden.

That said, valuing people by their economic output is sick to me, and is a page from the Eugenicists playbook. How much of a "burden" are injured veterans, those who suffered horrific work-place accidents, or those with mental health challenges due to burn out?

Yup, these people are perfectly fine. They don't need to identify each other and band together. No one is targeting them[0]. They need to stop making mountains out of molehills[1]. It's not like anything bad has ever happened to these 'high functioning' whiners[2]. I mean who cares if they are 'treated' by withholding food to force them to pretend to not be traumatized[3]. They should understand that if they stop identifying with the label or as oppressed victims it will be better for them[4]. Just like all those people with drapetomania[5] who don't realize what's best is a tough hand to guide them. Don't you miss how things used to be?[6] Back when there was more tough love[7].

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0: lol

1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-h...

2: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9087551/

3: https://autisticadvocacy.org/policy/briefs/intervention-ethi...

4: citing a source for this one would be an insult to the reader's intelligence

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_pot

7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dully