The Autism Spectrum: Explained

the idea of the autistic spectrum is very commonly used and yet remains a very misunderstood concept slash metaphor within the ortiverse the ortiverse 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 oh 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 [Music] this video is sponsored by teemo the visual planning app developed specially for autistic and adhd brains teemo helps you manage your day set routines keep track of the time spent on tasks and remember things freeing up space in your day to concentrate on the bigger stuff with a unique focus on visual processing teemo is completely customizable and can be shared with up to five family members on one account if you want to learn more please check out the link in the description box below autism has gone through a lot of changes 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 oregon i wrote this down oregon blur i had a lot of fun trying not to say jurgen jurgen blur and popularized or unpopularized by leo canna and everyone's favorite hans asperger who were in their eyes talking about two different things classical or canna autism and asperger's 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 is wider than the syndromes originally described by leo canna 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 gotta 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 kanna 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 else 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 not least i would imagine the dutch whose translation of it into a disorder results in autism spectrum storness 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 dsm4 or the icd equivalent you would have been given a diagnosis of autistic disorder asperger's disorder rhett's disorder childhood disintegrative disorder that sounds dangerous pddnos which stands for pervasive development disorder not otherwise specified which is possibly the catchiest of all the names and is certainly no way confusing as and when i looked at the diagnostic criteria for all these so-called separate conditions um i really saw why 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 it 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 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-speaker's 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 way 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 is 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 tube 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 or 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 greyscale 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 um and if you're blue people might think you're just a funny shade of grey 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 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 earplugs to the detriment of maybe hearing important things that are going around you or even you know eliciting funny looks if you're wearing 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 have different challenges which need 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 combinations of different traits can be 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 sense 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 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 a nephew and this isn't to say that i think there is no value in categorization i'm artistic 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 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 uh 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 dopamine something new something new sorry and my autistic self is hiding inside me quietly reaping so i've touched on a couple of things that i've talked about in 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 in a link somewhere i'm sure it'll be there 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 check out my merch check out my merch i've got merch the problem with this is i'm just gesturing wildly at my boobs the whole time which is dangerous on the internet i have to say i kind of like it when my face is lit up like this this this color scheme is what my friend karina calls inside a unicorn's uterus the next video my son already told me what he wanted me to do you wanted me to do green and yellow because they are the colors of john deere practice um so but actually i'm already i'm filming that one a second but then i'm going to change that now but yeah so it's actually you've already seen them but yeah whatever cut change [Music] i'm being a neuron i'm available to rent out to your birthday party [Music]

Channel: Yo Samdy Sam

Views: 150,743

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, autism spectrum, the autistic spectrum, what is autism, yo samdy sam, yo sammy sam, yo samedy sam

Id: paX6IcPZPjM

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 23 2021