Okay, so this video is for anyone who is interested in understanding more about what autism is, particularly in how it is diagnosed.

What I'm going to be reading is from the DSM-5-TR. This is the most current version of the manual as of 2025…

So I'm autistic, Level 1, and recently I started adding this to the beginning of all my videos.

And the reason I started doing that is because I feel like it's really important context to explain my perspective as an autistic person and the content that I'm sharing on social media.

And I've been getting a lot of questions about the levels…

So I’m autistic, level 1, and yesterday I posted something about how one of the main signs of autism, which is restricted intense interests, does not apply across the board to all autistic people.

And someone left a comment talking about the diagnostic criteria, and what they said was that a person, in order to get a diagnosis, needs to meet all of the criteria of autism, and that is one of them.

So in this video I want to explain how that isn't exactly true…

I think a big reason people have such a hard time understanding autism is that autistic people's reactions to things can change from one day to the next... and it can seem really random and inconsistent.

For example…

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…