Mild autism?

Although autism is not a health, a mental health or a behavioural condition or disorder, many still think of it in these ways. When it comes to health conditions ‘mild’ means ‘not serious or dangerous’. It’s essentially saying that when an autistic person is classed in this way that they only have ‘a mild case of autism’ and their life is not seriously or dangerously impacted. Mild autism would be considered Level 1 where an autistic person is seen as having ‘some need’.

Seeing autism as mild or profound means we are seeing it as a health or behavioural condition or a disorder a person has (as the DSM-5 and ICD do) and this means we are essentially describing a broken human, even a broken neurotypical person. As with all the things that are described by these manuals, it’s kinda dehumanising really. Because surely humanity is wonderfully diverse in so many ways? so it makes perfect sense that there will be naturally occurring variety in brains, minds, ways of being, expressing and experiencing life. That variety is natural and not wrong and therefore not a disorder.

The only reason autism is seen as a disorder or a condition is because going right back in time even before we had the word ‘autism’, autistic and other neurodivergent people have never fitted the standard of ‘normal’. Autistic and other neurodivergent people have always been and still are the spanner in the normative works. The disrupters (thanks Kristy Forbes for that inspiration). Neuronormativity (a bi product of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism) doesn’t like different, disruption, divergence or anything that is outside of what is considered by systems as typical. Capitalism prefers standardisation as that is far better for productivity, there isn’t time for different ways of being. Divergence slows down the machine.

The problem with harmful descriptions such as mild or profound autism is that since 1911 when the word autism (autos) was first introduced by Eugen Blueler (who at the time believed it was a symptom of schizophrenia), autistic people have been pathologised, categorised, labelled, stigmatised and reduced to less than human. The mild and profound labels reduce an autistic person to someone who has degrees or a percentage of autism in them. Autism is not a disease and a person cannot have a little bit of a different brain and mind, they are either 100% Autistic or they are not.

An individual who is autistic has differences and might have profound differences ( in skills, abilities and functioning) but they don’t have autism and they certainly don’t have degrees of or a percentage of autism.

Many who would be defined as having mild autism are those who would be counted in the following statistics in the UK:

• Appx 92% of autistic girls, women and people AFAB have experienced sexual abuse and domestic violence (Carly Jones)

• Appx 55-89%of autistic people have experienced being victimised by someone they know (Rose and Pearson)

• 1 in 4 autistic people have made an attempt to end their life compared to 1 in 37 people who are not autistic (Papyrus Prevention of Young Suicide).

• Autistic people are 7 to 9 times more likely to die by suicide, with autistic women being 13 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population National Autistic Society)

• Out of all the children unable to attend school because of school trauma, 85% are autistic (Mullally and Connolly)

• In one survey 80% of autistic people reported having experienced autistic burnout

None of these statistics seem mild to me, these seem to describe people who are seriously impacted. The impact is not that a person is autistic but is mostly about how neuronormativity impacts autistic people.

Autistic people deemed as having a mild case of the tism are usually surviving hard- because they have to, in a world that has mistreated them and tried to rid the world of them. Many of the men involved in studying autism have historically been and still are eugenicists. I am not going to name names but some might know who I am referring to. They saw autistic people as objects to poke and prod, to experiment upon, ridicule and abuse. They looked for cures, labelled our innate ways of being, our stims, our intense emotions and our deep fascinations as disordered, in order to control us and make us get in line.

Because being authentic so often makes an autistic person a target, many autistic people spend most of their lives shape shifting and merging in with the background, not to fit in but to avoid being perceived. Our sensitive nervous systems respond to neuronormative environments that are so often essentially toxic for us- the ones we might spend countless hours in too often experiencing feeling that we are odd, and that something’s wrong with us, so often rejected, bullied, victimised, gaslit and ending up crashing into burnout.

What might look like mildness on the exterior, and might look like only having some needs, smiling, and laughing for the camera, doing small talk and joining in, is due to an autistic nervous system that has learned to keep everything all inside in order to stay safe. Because divergence is not acceptable in neuronormative society.