Multi-Level Marketing In Autism

Ann Memmott last month wrote a useful post essentially debunking autism “levels” as not especially responsive to the lived experiences of autistic people at the very least because autism writ large and autistic lives individually are naturally heterogeneous when viewed through such a lens, despite the “levels” paradigm itself not accounting for this fact.

As pointed out by Memmott, an individual autistic can move between and across these diagnostic levels in one area of autism or another, and that movement can be across a lifetime or even just a given week.

Also unaccounted for by the current clinical and diagnostic descriptors of autism is the fact that its therapeutically useless to diagnose (to take my own case) Moderate Impairment in Social Communication and Mild Impairment in functioning due to interference from Restricted Repetitive Behavior and Thoughts without defining the context. By which I mean: am I somehow inherently impaired in my social and functional aspects, or am I disabled by the mismatch between my neurology and what’s considered the normative neurology surrounding me?

Are my RRBs innately impairing and/or disabling, or are they in fact the adaptive strategies of my nervous system that only become a problem because they clash with surrounding behavioral norms, or when they occasionally misfire or misdirect?

I’m almost tempted to find or construct simple, lay language descriptions of what each level would mean for each aspect of autism, and then spend a month making a note every time I notice that my level for a particular aspect seems to have changed, and why. Just to make the point. There’s probably a way to use Shortcuts for this to make it fairly simple to log, but I wonder if I have the motivation.