Not even that necessarily, they just like to act as if a lot of autism diagnoses are made up or at least severely exaggerated.
shit like “bah you’re not autistic, you’re just an introvert, you just need to try harder!”
I’ve faced this myself from my mom’s SO, he was just fucking incapable of entertaining the idea that i’m autistic before i got my diagnosis, despite working with other neurodivergent people and accepting them! It’s maddening.
People still think of autism in like… Rain Man-terms.
As much as people like to think popular depictions (The Big Bang Theory, Abed in Community, etc) of autistic behavioral patterns are somehow furthering “the cause” (whatever that is) - ultimately, they amount to little more than vaudeville and can be incredibly damaging to people who don’t “seem autistic”.
It’s very tiring to assure people that yes, you are indeed autistic, when all they know is Sheldon Cooper and Raymond Babbitt.
Especially annoying if they think you’re some sort of genius, when the average autistic’s intelligence generally is lower than average.
Especially now that so many fucking lunatic autistics are committing atrocities.
If you’re obviously greatly disabled autistic=not threatening
High functioning autistic=liability
I was diagnosed 20 years ago, and even I had a very hard time recognizing and accepting that my own partner is also autistic (now diagnosed as an adult).
But then again, it seems to manifest dramatically different in men v.s. women, as well as there not really being any depictions of autistic women in media for the longest time.
And a gigantic part of autistic women no doubt went undiagnosed for a long time (and still are).
i’m curious where you get the part of autistic people on average having lower intelligence, afaik the opposite is true. Better pattern recognition and stuff like that, with the tradeoff of generally struggling more with social stuff.
There are a couple of studies on this, and the findings are admittedly kind of scattered, but here are some key points.
One study suggests as much as 50% of people on the spectrum have at least four (or more) comorbid conditions (a vast variety of things, e.g. ADD, intellectual disabilities etc).
Another study found that 95% of children with ASD had comorbidities.
Again, the rain man trope is rather strongly rooted in our sociocultural reality tunnel.
I’ve met a lot of people on the spectrum in my life (about 1% of the population are diagnosed, after all), and almost all of them have also had either ADD, intellectual disabilities, medical disabilities like Crohn’s disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, PCOS, hormonal or chromosomal disorders and/or other psychological conditions like schizophrenia or other schizotypal disorders BPD, bipolar disorder etc.
The fact is that a Sheldon Cooper is kind of a unicorn among autistics.
But truthfully, my observation that most autistics are below average intelligence is almost entirely anecdotal (yet with a rather sizeable sample pool), because admittedly I’m struggling to find any hard data on it.
Some figures I’ve seen say 32% have below 70, 25% have 70-84, 40% have 85-115, with only about 3% being above 115.
But here’s at least one study finding that 55% of autistic kids have an intellectual disability (below 70 IQ).
Not even that necessarily, they just like to act as if a lot of autism diagnoses are made up or at least severely exaggerated.
shit like “bah you’re not autistic, you’re just an introvert, you just need to try harder!”
I’ve faced this myself from my mom’s SO, he was just fucking incapable of entertaining the idea that i’m autistic before i got my diagnosis, despite working with other neurodivergent people and accepting them! It’s maddening.
People still think of autism in like… Rain Man-terms.
As much as people like to think popular depictions (The Big Bang Theory, Abed in Community, etc) of autistic behavioral patterns are somehow furthering “the cause” (whatever that is) - ultimately, they amount to little more than vaudeville and can be incredibly damaging to people who don’t “seem autistic”.
It’s very tiring to assure people that yes, you are indeed autistic, when all they know is Sheldon Cooper and Raymond Babbitt.
Especially annoying if they think you’re some sort of genius, when the average autistic’s intelligence generally is lower than average.
Especially now that so many fucking lunatic autistics are committing atrocities.
If you’re obviously greatly disabled autistic=not threatening High functioning autistic=liability
I was diagnosed 20 years ago, and even I had a very hard time recognizing and accepting that my own partner is also autistic (now diagnosed as an adult).
But then again, it seems to manifest dramatically different in men v.s. women, as well as there not really being any depictions of autistic women in media for the longest time.
And a gigantic part of autistic women no doubt went undiagnosed for a long time (and still are).
i’m curious where you get the part of autistic people on average having lower intelligence, afaik the opposite is true. Better pattern recognition and stuff like that, with the tradeoff of generally struggling more with social stuff.
There are a couple of studies on this, and the findings are admittedly kind of scattered, but here are some key points.
One study suggests as much as 50% of people on the spectrum have at least four (or more) comorbid conditions (a vast variety of things, e.g. ADD, intellectual disabilities etc).
Another study found that 95% of children with ASD had comorbidities. Again, the rain man trope is rather strongly rooted in our sociocultural reality tunnel.
I’ve met a lot of people on the spectrum in my life (about 1% of the population are diagnosed, after all), and almost all of them have also had either ADD, intellectual disabilities, medical disabilities like Crohn’s disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, PCOS, hormonal or chromosomal disorders and/or other psychological conditions like schizophrenia or other schizotypal disorders BPD, bipolar disorder etc.
The fact is that a Sheldon Cooper is kind of a unicorn among autistics.
But truthfully, my observation that most autistics are below average intelligence is almost entirely anecdotal (yet with a rather sizeable sample pool), because admittedly I’m struggling to find any hard data on it.
Some figures I’ve seen say 32% have below 70, 25% have 70-84, 40% have 85-115, with only about 3% being above 115.
But here’s at least one study finding that 55% of autistic kids have an intellectual disability (below 70 IQ).