It's Autism Awareness Month, so let's bust a pretty common myth about autism.

"Everyone's a little autistic."

No hate if you've ever said this. But if you have, I hope you'll stick around for this. 🙂

If you think about autism as linear, where on one end of the line you have ""not autistic at all"" and on the other end you have "very autistic," it makes sense that someone who seems to have SOME signs of autism would be "a little" autistic. 

But that's not how autism works.

The reason autism is considered a spectrum is that every autistic person has a different variation of autistic traits that impact them... 

BUT the diagnostic criteria for autism very specifically define this impact as impairing a person's ability to function in their day to day.

So, simply put... if you're not impaired by the traits, you’re not autistic. 

But this doesn't explain what autism actually IS. So, let's talk about that for a minute.

[For context, I'm using the DSM 5-TR autism criteria for this description.]

In a nutshell, autism is a combination of social communication challenges and restricted repetitive behaviors, which show up in the following 7 ways...

1. Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity

2. Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction

3. Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships

4. Repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech

5. Insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior

6. Restricted, fixated interests

7. Hyper or hyporeactivity to sensory inputs (aka sensory sensitivities)

Now, a person has to show clinical impairment in ALL of the first 3, and in AT LEAST 2 of the final 4 in order to be diagnosed with autism.

And then there are support levels, which is a whole other aspect to this that I'll save for another post. 

But back to autism not being linear... each of the 7 categories I listed has its own spectrum.

So, there are really SEVEN separate spectrums within the overarching autism spectrum. 

And this is why autism is so complicated. 

But back to "everyone's a little autistic"...

If a person isn't impaired by the autism signs they think they have... they don't meet the criteria for being autistic. Plain and simple. 

So they're not "a little" autistic. They're just... not autistic. Period.

But let's say a person IS impaired by one or multiple of the autism criteria, but they don't meet enough of the criteria for an autism diagnosis...

That impairment is more than likely due to another neurodivergent condition (many of the autism signs are also signs of other conditions).

Something they'd probably benefit from looking into, actually.

But, no... everyone is not a little autistic. 🙂

I hope this clears up some of the confusion. Let me know if this explanation helped you understand autism better. 

And... happy Autism Awareness Month!  😊