ASD is not a Disorder

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” -widely attributed to Einstein

This quote often gets tossed around to help people on the spectrum cope. Don’t let this quote fade away after a moment of feeling superficially vindicated, because believe it or not, this goes so much deeper than we realise.

The Big ‘D’ In ASD Stands For Disorder

In the years after owning up to my late diagnosis, after years of denial, accepting it, growing into it, learning what it means, and finally realising I’d prefer to be this way than being neurotypical, something hit me like a tonne of bricks… the fact that this gift is considered a disorder at all pisses me off. 

Disorder? How does the word disorderly describe the most systematic, pattern-driven, hyper focussed, intellectually driven group of people on earth? 

It doesn’t. Disorderly describes irrational, emotions-first, unpredictable people. Disorderly describes how I see a lot of neurotypicals. But, because we:

1. Look at things more deeply than NT’s, 

2. Don’t have the energy to coddle them non-stop with contradictory, polite lies,

3. Because we go all-in with our interests and hobbies, enjoying them to the fullest, and

4. Communicate information as directly as possible

We’re the ones with a “disorder”. 

I don’t buy it. Do you?

The Proof:

The study most often cited for showing that autistic people can communicate and operate better with each other compared to interactions with neurotypical people is “Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective” by Crompton et al. (2020). In this study:

 

• Groups were formed as all-autistic, all-non-autistic, and mixed (half autistic, half non-autistic).

 

• Participants played a structured storytelling/communication game where a story had to be relayed through group members.

 

• Results showed autistic people shared information with each other as effectively as non-autistic people did in their own groups.

 

• However, when autistic and non-autistic people were mixed, information transfer sharply decreased, and participants in mixed groups reported lower rapport.

 

• The authors argue these findings challenge deficit models of autistic social skills and support the “double empathy problem,” which suggests communication challenges are bi-directional and context-dependent, rather than due to a unilateral autistic “deficit”.

Other studies and reviews further support these findings, including observer-rated and self-rated measures of rapport, which found better social connection and greater ease within matched neurotype interactions (autistic-autistic and non-autistic–non-autistic) than in mixed neurotype pairs.

The Crompton et al. (2020) study is the landmark experimental work that first systematically demonstrated this effect with clear, direct data.

Flipping The Script

Imagine an alternative world, where the overwhelming majority of people were on the spectrum, and only a small minority were NT. Imagine the culture, infrastructure, and etiquette of this world is built around ASD, with a few NT’s sprinkled in.

This is a world where honesty is the norm, eye contact is rude, small talk is pointless, and loud noises are banned. How would we treat the minority NT’s living here?

We’d probably feel bad for them, and offer them supports to “adjust and cope” with “the way things are”. We’d give them a label to help identify their needs, like ‘Irrational Spectrum Disorder’ with the most severe cases needing lifelong support, and the ‘higher functioning IRB’ being the typical, friendly NT we all know, but in this world they would be advised to mask and be more like us, struggling with identity and direction.

The NT’s would suffer higher than normal levels depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, like we do, because they’d feel like outcasts or failures compared to “the norm”, like we do.

The point I’m trying to make is in both worlds, there is no disorder. It’s a matter of perspective who has a disorder.

We’re not a failure of genetics. We’re just built different and then compared to people built for other purposes, simply because they outnumber us.

I disdain hearing phrases like “Fake it til you make it.” or “It’s not that bad, chill out.” or “Have you tried just paying more attention?” or worst of all “I can’t trust you if you don’t look me in the eyes.”

Maybe I’d pay more attention if you tried being better at talking. Maybe I shouldn’t trust you because you’re forcing me to do something uncomfortable.

Well-intentioned, condescending copes and platitudes from NT’s delivered to help us feel better, with a tone of annoyance and pity attached like we’re less than. 

I don’t feel less than NT’s when I don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. I feel less than when I pretend to. 

Bizarrely, giving less fucks and politely saying straight up to people that I have ‘no idea about X’ or ‘no interest in Y’ makes me respect myself more. 

I believe in fearless honesty, a trait abundant in the ASD community and severely lacking in Western NT circles.

The ASD exceptions to being real are the ones unable to unmask, or worse, unaware of their own masking. We run the risk of getting so deep into character we don’t know how to tell the truth anymore because we don’t even know which personality we are.

This was me for most of my life. I’ve recovered but it was rough.

The Neurodivergent Masking Identity Crisis

I believed I was NT for 23 years, so when I would mask (bullshit my way through life) like everyone else, then felt especially hollow and sore about it, I thought I must be broken or something. But it was just my system rejecting the wrong program I was trying to run. 

I unknowingly masked for two decades, thinking I was the mask. Thinking something was wrong with me for feeling taxed and exhausted for every second I acted ‘normal’.

At 18, instead of pursuing my real passions, I took it upon myself to find the missing pieces and “complete” myself through exposure therapy by interacting with as many people as I could in high-pressure customer-facing commission sales roles.

Basically everyone I knew told me not to do it, but I had to. Nobody knew I was autistic, not even me, but they knew enough to know it “wasn’t for me”. I knew they were right, which is exactly why I had to rip the band-aid off and do it.

What happened was my mask and my confidence got major upgrades. It was an addictive and immediate self-improvement feedback loop. I could talk to anybody, but I still felt like a fraud.

I once had a girl on the sales team ask me straight up if I was a psychopath. When I asked her why she thought that, she replied “Everything you do or say seems so perfect and calculated, like you’re not real.”

Her tone was genuine, friendly, and little concerned, but my 18 year old brain took it as a compliment, a sign that I was on the right track but needed slight adjustments to be a little more natural, so I did and slipped deeper and deeper into a new persona.

It should’ve been my sign to stop and rethink my life, but I couldn’t have been more unaware of how closely she came to hitting the nail on the head, and how far from a happy existence that misplaced ideal of ‘being normal’ was.

I went on to become so normal, even charismatic, that nobody suspected me, not even other autists. I got everything I wanted but it was miserable.

Now I tell people I’m autistic if I’m going to be around them a lot. I’m less afraid to be autistic, and I put zero effort into being funny or cool. If it happens, it happens naturally. I’m comfortable being odd, quiet, getting lost in a new interest, or info dumping on people.

I’m glad I went down this path so I could see it was all a lie, instead of wondering and regretting, but I am not the same.

The First Step to Freedom: Being Real.

I am painstakingly allergic to bullshit, especially when it comes from my own mouth, but the silver lining after years of sales, decades of masking, and thinking it was all just something everyone did is this:

I speak NT bullshit quite fluently… and as the saying goes, I cannot be bullshitted anymore. 

Not in the least by the lies keeping us held back, but better yet and most importantly; I can no longer bullshit myself.

I write these anon posts so I can speak the uncut truth, beginning with the most important one:

ASD is not a disorder. It never was. Stay Sane.

-Patient Zero

Sources:

Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V. M., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), 1704–1712. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286

https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/149282333/1362361320919286.pdf

Double Empathy Problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

Milton, Damian E. M. (2012). “On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’.” Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2012.710008.

https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62639/1/Double%20empathy%20problem.pdf