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> I’m not a doctor or a researcher. I’m a 38 year old Autistic and ADHD software engineer. That means that I have 38 years of lived experience navigating Autist
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> I’m not a doctor or a researcher. I’m a 38 year old Autistic and ADHD software engineer. That means that I have 38 years of lived experience navigating Autistic and ADHD life. No neurotypical expert who has studied Autism or ADHD has a better window into the lived experience than I do, and no non-Autistic person can understand or relate to our culture in the ways that I can.
If you are a software engineer and are able to blog, you are really at the high spectrum of functioning. My guess is that the gulf between the author and people with autism who are less functional is greater than between a "neurotypical" and the author.
Neurotypical and autism isn't binary. It is a spectrum and even within autism, there is a huge spectrum. The author speaking on behalf of all people with autism seems not that much different than "neurotypical" people speaking on behalf of people with autism.
- mbilokonsky 5y ago> My guess is that the gulf between the author and people with autism who are less functional is greater than between a "neurotypical" and the author. Your guess is wrong. Research shows that people like me still die before 60 from heart attacks and suicide, largely because people like you make assumptions about what may or may not be true about me and then try to hold us accountable to those assumptions. Further: there is no "high end" of the spectrum, that's not what spectrum means. You're thinking of a gradient, which measures a specific value from 0 to 100 in some normalized sense. A Spectrum is a gradient of gradients, and "Autism Spectrum" does not refer to the range of "severity" (which as established does not actually exist) but rather to the diversity of presentations.