So, I'm autistic, level 1, and I recently started opening my videos with this. 

And the reason I started to do this is because I realized that a lot of the things that I was talking about, particularly as it relates to my personal lived experiences as a neurodivergent person, represents a very specific type of lived experience, which has to do with the level of support needs a person has.

So for a while, I was talking about autism, but really, I was only talking about what autism looks like from the perspective of someone who's level 1 autistic, which I am. 

And I was getting some comments from people who have kids that are higher support needs, essentially saying that I'm not talking about the experiences that their children have.

And so I feel like it's just really important context to anything that I have to say on the matter.

With that said, let me just quickly explain the levels.

So when it comes to an autism diagnosis, as of right now, in 2024, the way the DSM breaks down the levels is as follows.

Level 1 indicates that a person has support needs. That means that in order for their autism to not impede their daily functioning, they require some support.

Level 2 indicates that a person requires substantial support, according to the DSM.

And level 3 indicates that a person requires very substantial support.

Now, there's one more thing I want to call out, which is that in the DSM, they don't assign a level for the entire diagnosis. The diagnosis for autism is actually broken up into two main categories.

The first category being social communication challenges, and the second category being restrictive, repetitive patterns of behavior.

And so the way the DSM breaks down the way the levels are applied is that a person would get a designation, a level designation, for each category. So someone might get a level 1 designation in one category and a level 2 or a level 3 designation in another category.

For me personally, my diagnosis was level 1 for each of the categories.

Now I do want to address a misconception that I sometimes see come up in comments, which is that the levels have to do with a person's functioning, which is just not the case.

Some people will refer to an autistic person as high functioning, which I'm not going to talk about right now in this video. But as of right now, in 2024, the way that autism is diagnosed, these levels represent how much support a person needs, not their level of functioning.

I hope this clarifies some things a bit, and feel free to ask questions in comments. I'll try to answer them.