Transcription: crude line drawing of a young goofy person sitting in a school chair. They have mid-length straight red hair, messy and needing a trim. They are wearing a hoodie of GIR from the cartoon show Invader Zim. That character is a pet-coded green alien dog with a goofy long tongue. Dialogue: off screen character saying “She has Aspergers” main character thinking: “ha ha ha ass burger” Thought bubble of a very crudely drawn pair of butt cheeks and a hamburger. End transcription.
To add to this, it isn’t only the origin of the term that is a problem, it is the whole idea that “levels” of autism exist, which leads to such nonsense as functioning labels which are harmful, and worse, lateral ableism in the form of “Asperger’s supremacy”
This, I make this point to another commenter in this thread because it’s really important. Pitting autistic people against each other at diagnosis is awful.
I just had a look in incognito (I’d blocked that person, so didn’t see their or your reply), and well said.
I hate how society almost depends on individuals feeling superior to other individuals, as if it isn’t the system just playing us against each other for the benefit of those in charge. It’s so frustrating.
I’ll be honest, I was initially diagnosed with Aspergers and didn’t truly grow out of the mentality until I graduated from high school. It wasn’t until I learned the root of it that I really reflected on the damage it caused both other people and myself. I was mean to the people who I fit in with more when I was in high school because I prioritized being part of the main social ladder so much, and it was a really big mistake.
As upset as I am with myself over it, I also understand that this used to be a greater structural issue that started whenever people were diagnosed. I was a kid and grew out of it by the time I was an adult, so I can’t judge myself too harshly. But I can stand loudly against the conditions that made me side with neurotypical people who abused me over neurodivergent people who didn’t hate themselves as much as I did.
Don’t be hard on yourself, we’re all socialised from birth in an ableist world, so when we’re identified as part of the “other” (or become ill, or have an accident), it isn’t surprising that those feelings we were taught to have about autism and disability carry over and end up aimed at ourselves (or others like us).
I was only diagnosed as an adult and for a while I would say I was “mildly” autistic, mostly because that’s what I was told (you’d think even if you don’t know what masking is, that the professionals would, but no…) but also because I didn’t want to claim something I didn’t feel a part of, but with time, and learning about autism from actually autistic people, I realised just how much of my life long and daily struggles were autism related, and (with the help of others sharing information) that actually functioning labels were simply not reflective of reality.
No one knows everything, we all learn different things at different points in life, and that’s fine. The important thing is if and once we learn something we do harms other (or ourselves or both), to do our best not to do it again (and be willing to be held accountable if we do, because no one is perfect and everyone occasionally messes up). You can’t do more than that.
Nuance is needed here… The terms high- and low-functioning are definitely problematic, because they’re too reductionist, and lead people to assume things. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that autism having “levels” is bad - the DSM-5 (as horribly flawed as it is) contains two sets of three levels each for determining level of support needed by an autistic person, with the two sets being related to socialization and life-skill functioning. Given that autism is a spectrum, and some autistic people aren’t disabled by it at all, being able to categorize people by their needs is useful - we just have to make sure that it’s qualitative, rather than arbitrary labels being picked by how the doctor is feeling that day. And it’s something to be kept in medical records, not used for self-identification.
I understand this thought process, but us in the schizophrenia community are very familiar with this change. Schizophrenia went from having 3-5 categories based on symptoms to just being the umbrella term for everything. The names for schizophrenia categories aren’t particularly negative, but because it’s more of a spectrum, categorization of people lead to worse treatment. It locks down an idea of how those symptoms should be treated, and that’s the issue.
I’m not sure that the labels themselves are the issue in either of these cases. It’s worth remembering that we’re talking about historical periods of mistreatment as well. From my experience, Psychiatry as a whole has historically had its favorite diagnosis for the ‘bad and unwanted’ people in society. Hysteria is the obvious reference, but that shifted towards labeling the ‘undesirables’ as schizophrenics (and later as borderlines). It wasn’t (and in the case of BPD, still isn’t) uncommon for people to receive these labels purely to communicate to other doctors “I don’t like this patient”/“They’re faking”/“They deserve mistreatment”.
Let’s not forget that the label of schizophrenia started as a combination of the idea of early-onset dementia and stigmatization of behaviors that do not fit into society. The latter half is covered up by history, but the initial ‘symptoms’ of a schizophrenia diagnosis included things like not making small talk and having strong beliefs about politics. The list of symptoms read half of what you’d expect in terms of psychosis, and half like it was copy-pasted from the ‘symptoms’ of Hysteria. That’s why these additional labels were harmful - some of them were associated more with not fitting into society than actual pathology.
It’s no coincidence that when this general issue of mistreatment and over-diagnosis was being fought against, Psychiatry was busy switching over to using Borderline as the new maligned diagnosis. The schizophrenia labels were removed during the wider push for humanizing treatment of schizophrenics, but I don’t think the labels themselves were a significant part of the issue - the bigger issue was the inherent power imbalances and patient abuse present within Psychiatry. After all, BPD was previously unnoteworthy, but now has become the new stigmatizing label, and all the mistreatments of schizophrenics are being shifted to borderlines. After all, there’s now a “quiet borderline” label - for people who clearly aren’t borderline, but psychiatrists want to give the ‘bad diagnosis’ to anyway.
Autism is adjacent to Psychiatry, but the story is the same. Autism is currently maligned by society, and the fact that people are so hostile towards autistic people is the real problem, not the labels they’ve made up to ‘justify’ their hostility. Getting rid of the labels doesn’t remove the hostility, because the hostility is just looking for an outlet. That’s why my only focus is making sure that labels are medically useful - because managing societal and medicalized hate of disabled people is another issue altogether.
The linked article was an interesting read. I recommend other people scrolling by to also take a look.