 Let's go with one from Yosemite Sam, someone who has been on the podcast before. Right, let's go for it. No, not on YouTube premium. Very commonly used, and yet remains a very misunderstood concept slash metaphor within the autiverse. The autiverse! After all, aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum? This term on the spectrum is a very polite term and has a waft of mildness about it. If someone says their child is on the spectrum, you just know they aren't talking about that real dirty autism. They use on the spectrum as kind of a buffer to smooth out the edges, avoid stigma maybe. And quite rightly, there is a lot of stigma around autism. But I think it's confusing because people don't really understand what on the spectrum means. So someone might say... Yeah, it's usually been the case in my life that when I've used on the spectrum, people have asked me to elaborate on that. And it is definitely like a way for some people to avoid like saying the word autism. Well, I'm on the mild end of the spectrum because I can drive, live alone, talk, dress myself. So let's clarify what it actually means. So just for everybody's knowledge, the podcast that I was saying about that I had you as Sammy Samon was the... I think we talked about demisexuality, which is quite interesting. It was like the first time that I came across something like that. This video is sponsored by Teemo, the visual planning app. Since it was first identified in the early 20th century, thought to be a form of schizophrenia. The term autism was coined by a Swiss psychologist called Oigen... I wrote this down... Oigenblurla. I had a lot of fun trying not to say Jürgen Blurla. Unpopularized or unpopularized by Leo Kanner and everyone's favorite, Hans Asperger, who were in their eyes talking about two different things. Classical or Kanner autism and... Yeah, it's really interesting. I read a book called Neurotribes, which I also had the person who wrote that on the pod, a guy called Steve Silberman. And he was talking about the back and forth that Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger had. It used to just be called Kanner syndrome and then Asperger syndrome. And they had some kind of beef with each other, which is cool to know. Asperger syndrome. And it was only as recently as the 1980s that a scientist named Lorna Wing established the concept of the autistic spectrum. In her own words, the autistic spectrum consists of a group of disorders of development with lifelong effects and that have in common a triad of impairments in social interaction, communication, imagination and behavior, narrow and repetitive pattern of behavior. The spectrum includes, but in wider than, the syndromes originally described by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger. So once and for all, the person who coined the term clearly says we are not all on the autistic spectrum. In case there was still any confusion about that. You've got to be autistic to be in the club, says Lorna Wing, although I still personally find her description of autism inaccurate and somewhat problematic. But this concept really changed things and started the gradual increase of diagnoses, otherwise known as the autism epidemic. As the result of the accumulation of findings from biologic, psychological and clinical research views of the etiology and nature of childhood autism have evolved and changed since Kanner, 1943, published his first description of the syndrome that bears his name. However, disagreements continue concerning the clinical criteria for diagnosis and the boundaries between autism and other conditions in which there are impairments of skills and abnormalities of behavior. Does anyone? Yeah, I think the thing with Kanner, I don't know if it was Kanner or not, it might have been a different psychologist, but I think they were wanting to patent the diagnosis so that they could make money from middle-class white people. Because it had such tight restrictions on what he considered to be autistic, to the point where it literally was just almost impossible to get the diagnosis. But yeah, we'll keep going with this. You guys just feel really bad about themselves every time you read this stuff. And these disagreements that she mentions are still ongoing within the psychological community over 30 years later. In fact, when the DSM was last updated in 2013 to the DSM-5, this was when there was so much confusion around who got diagnosed with what subset of autism that these subtypes of different disorders within the spectrum was just abolished, and the new diagnosis, autism spectrum disorder, was created. Side note, many autistic people, myself included, prefer the term ASC, autism spectrum condition. I haven't heard that before, although I do know about the different subtypes. It's interesting because they have removed a lot of different sub parts of autism, but they've replaced it with something that I'd probably say is equally problematic for most people because it's classified from ASD 1, 2, and 3. So because of that, it's really paying a lot of attention to functioning labels, I think, which I think could also be something problematic. It's kind of like they replaced one thing that autistic people don't like with another thing. Interesting. People, myself included, prefer the term ASC, autism spectrum condition. Not least, I would imagine the Dutch translation of it into a disorder, results in autism spectrum, which is a rather unfortunate acronym that is now in all my medical files. But if you were diagnosed using the older version of the DSM, which is the DSM-4 or the ICD equivalent, you would have been given a diagnosis of Autistic Disorder, Asperger's Disorder, Rett's Disorder, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. That sounds dangerous. PDD-NOS, which stands for Pervasive Development Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified, which is possibly the catchiest of all the names and is certainly no way confusing. And when I looked at the diagnostic criteria for all these so-called separate conditions, I really saw when they just said, screw it, because there is a lot of crossover and ambiguity and it's really open to interpretation, which is not what you want in a diagnostic document. And of course, we know that no two autistic people are the same. If you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person that is now so overused, it is becoming cliche. We know we don't like to be a cliche on this channel, so I don't say it anymore. But it is true, and the concept of the spectrum is a way for accounting for all these individual differences. However, there are still a lot of people who seem to think it's a linear spectrum going from a little bit autistic to super-duper autistic. First of all, that's not a spectrum, that's a gradient, isn't it? So let's just take the visible light spectrum, otherwise known as color. So you might go from a shorter wavelength to a longer wavelength, but that doesn't make red more colorful or more high-functioning than blue. In the same way, there is no more autistic. And that's something that is really hard for people to understand because... I suppose I'm a little bit confused about the... Because whenever I've seen it in scientific textbooks, it is from... Like the wavelengths do correlate with the color that you have. But I suppose not the actual intensity of the color, which I think that's what they're getting at. Some autistic people display their traits in a really obvious way or have commonly occurring comorbidities that people mistake for more severe autism. So of course, having these comorbidities like epilepsy or severe learning disability or apraxia, which is the cause of some autistic non-speakers inability to speak. Of course, this is going to have a significant impact on your life and presumably the lives of the people around you, the people who care for you. And I'm not trying to erase the lived experiences of people who need, for example, substantial care are more disabled by their condition or by society's inaccessibility to the... But I think the issue with this is that these autistic people that do need this level of care that they're talking about, they do tend to have learning disabilities. And that is true. And it's a co-occurring condition. It's not like an inherent thing with being autistic. That their autism presents. So you can really understand where people get this idea of severe versus mild autism. But people have this idea that some traits are worse to have than others or are more severe because they more obviously impact your ability to live independently or work. But when you think of us, very few of us actually live completely independently. So it's the problem really that some autistic people can't work. It's the problem that they are not useful under capitalism. This is what makes their autism severe. Hands up those who've been personally radicalized by bread tubes since the start of the pandemic. But I want to step away for a moment from the professionals and their bickering about labels and diagnostic criteria and instead try to explain the experiential viewpoint of the autistic spectrum as in from someone who is autistic, what does it feel like? And talking to other autistic people, how do we perceive the spectrum? Because actually we are kind of the authority in our own lives and some of us have a lot to say about it. So let's imagine the spectrum as this hypothetical color wheel and every autistic person has a different color or rather different color combinations. But they're all validly colorful, right? And some combinations affect our lives in different ways and in ways that make it easier. Some of them also are much more visible to people. Like if you have social communication or you struggle to find the words to communicate with people or you're non-verbal, it's obviously gonna impact the way that people see you a lot more than I don't know, perhaps trying to think of a good comparison there. Something else, something else that's autistic has having like a special interest. Like some people can be really like hyper focused on things almost to a point that it like causes them issues like to their detriment. I've had many situations like when I've had some kind of really big projects that I needed to get on with and do and I've been like really, really invested in it and really hyper focused from the moment I woke up to the moment that I went to sleep just constantly. And it got to a point where I actually like I got really dehydrated, like really severely dehydrated because I wasn't taking breaks and I wasn't really eating that much either. So I always had like a stomach ache during that time. So it's not, yeah, I think it's a lot like especially when trying to explain it to the general society, general neurotypicals than breadtuber where everyone made banana bread mid pandemic. Interesting, I wonder why that is. Harder to live in society. For example, someone who is able to mask very well may find it easier to kind of on the surface fit into conventional society at the detriment to their own mental health. And in this metaphor society is grayscale, I guess. So someone who has their traits in in kind of like the blues, the blues might blend in with the grays more than someone who is bright red and really is obviously not gray. And if you're blue, people might think you're just a funny shade of gray. Why do you feel the need to label yourself as colorful? Let's make it more concrete by looking at two actual autistic traits. Take, for example, stimming and someone who stims in a really obvious way, maybe loud vocal stims. That is something that really has a big effect on your life. It can be a barrier to employment, education, recreation. Everywhere you go, people will look at you and usually with negative expressions like fear, disgust or pity. On the other hand, let's look at extreme noise sensitivity, also an autistic trait. If for someone with this trait, being in certain situations can be extremely painful and or confusing. You might have to avoid certain places completely or at certain times of day. You might need to wear ear defenders or headphones or ear plugs to the detriment of maybe hearing important things that are going around you or even listening to what he looks like. Because in a lot of the situations where I would want to use ear defenders like or some kind of noise canceling thing, it tends to be in places where there's a lot of like, there's a lot of people talking and like conversations going on like in a group setting somewhere in public. Like I find that really difficult like to actually hear people. So sometimes it's literally just do I decide to like meet my own sensory needs in terms of not hearing all this crazy background noise or like actually be able to contribute to the conversation. That is that that is a big issue. I don't really know how to figure that out. I did I do have some some active noise canceling stuff. So it's it's kind of you know um it it's a that that was the reason why I got it so that I could like hear people. It didn't really turn out that way sadly. It's not it's not it's not good enough. JennyM says I have focus on drawing and painting and can forget to eat quite often totally. Yeah it's it's an issue um sometimes if my executive function is really bad and like I'm struggling to transition between one thing to another I can get into long periods of time particularly in the evenings where I'm just really focused in on something and it can really just prevent me from getting off to sleep so I forget to take my meds and I forget to like relax and not do work related things and just chill and it just doesn't work. I was totally wrong on that one then. Yeah it's it's not about making banana bread. It's a little bit different. So I'm trying to keep an eye on the chat but I'm also realizing that because of the way that my streaming software is set up at the moment it's becoming a little bit difficult to um sort out. Hello Angela why you no sleep? Because I'm a crazy person and I need to get some like some some live stream stuff done because I said that I was going to start doing it and I haven't been. So I thought I'd try a different time you know. I have a lot of period like I don't tend to go to sleep very early don't tend to wake up very early either so I'm a bit of a night owl so I'm cool with this you know. It'd be nice to like watch some videos check some stuff out play some games it's basically the way that I chill anyway. Boring ear defenders so you have theoretical person A and theoretical person B of course being theoretical some people will have both of these traits but neither one is more autistic neither trait is more autistic they both had different challenges which are different solutions and different accommodations within work and school they both occupy their own space on the spectrum and obviously autistic people don't just have a single trait each we all have so many different traits in so many different categories these unique combination of different traits can also become more or less pronounced depending on a variety of factors including stress. So using myself as an example I am five months postpartum at the time of filming and during these five months my noise sensitivity and general sensory overload has become very bad because I have so much noise and sensory input on a daily basis and because of this it doesn't take much to send me over the top I've had more meltdowns since giving birth and normally speaking I don't have a lot of meltdowns but this doesn't mean that I'm more autistic than before I had kids yes kids I had a second one it just me yeah I cannot I do not like I think I talked to the aspie world about their experience with having children it's um it's not something that I feel like I can tackle at this point in my life but maybe maybe in the future but yeah that the hormone your hormones can change after after you you know you could bear before you get pregnant it's um it's quite it can be quite a challenging time for a lot of people especially with like the postpartum depression thing that that happens. It means that I have more stress on my personal pressure points and so a lot of things that we think are autistic traits are actually reactions to pressure points and all our pressure points will be different and result in different outcomes and behaviors noise, light, change in routine, a global pandemic we all have different strengths weaknesses and sensitivities so it's just impossible to compare us and there's no reason to other than people really like to tell you how much you must not be suffering compared to this other person often a theoretical person or someone who is like the nephew of someone they know I don't know why it's always in it is it's always it's always people that that it's like the nephew all I know like someone within my family like not someone within your immediate family because they tend to be a bit more kind of chill but someone that you know loosely and and what they're like comparison really is the thief of joy because oh my god F you and this isn't to say that I think there is no value in categorization I'm autistic I love categorization but rather than attempting to create separate diagnoses it seems more valuable to me to try to determine different neurodivergent archetypes for example the autistic ADHD combo which you are most likely watching right now that's me although I don't have an official ADHD diagnosis yet how many emails from viewers do I need to get saying I think you're probably ADHD before it's official I mean really but it's funny because the autism ADHD combo which I can almost I'm getting pretty good at identifying other people now this combination separates me out from a lot of just autistic people and take for example those who really well I do get that impression from watching the content like it definitely seems that when when we were chatting that I don't know anyone who's autistic ADHD that I've interviewed they tend to be a bit more chatty like I don't need to fill in as much of the blank space I've got a pretty good rate of stuff like that but I think the thing is is like I'm trying to go for an ADHD diagnosis because I find that most of the issues that I have is around executive function and transitions and like I think the reason why I haven't gone for it so like in the past is because the medications that I'm on they're very much like a sedative medication so they made me feel very sleepy and tired most of the time um so I'm not really sure what that will look like probably going to be in like two years or so so gonna have to wait for that don't like change in routine and it really really stresses them out I don't do terribly well with last minute changes um and when I have my my personal pressure points like the sensory stuff stressed I do less well with these last minute changes go figure so the more stress I have the more my autistic traits kind of pop out but there is this other part of me that is a bit like change it change it we want the type of mean something new something new I get that sorry and my autistic self is hiding inside me quietly weeping so I've touched on a couple of things that I talked about in the previous videos maybe check them out after this one the algorithm likes that by the way and some of you may have spotted I have new merch if you want to check that out there is a merch bar underneath or you can just find my merch somewhere I'm sure be nice in the comments remember everyone's a human being apart from the bots and take care and I'll see you next time bye awesome check out the merch check out the merch I've got merch the problem with this is I'm just gesturing wildly at my that was cool that is a you a sunny sound I would highly recommend going and check out the the podcast um if that's something that you'd be interested in