By Jillian Enright: For Complete Post, Click Here…
Challenging stereotypes and describing some lesser-known Autistic traits.
A lot of non-conforming and marginalized people are misdiagnosed in healthcare, (including mental health) and psychological diagnoses.
This includes female-presenting people (including cis-women), transgender folks-basically anyone in the LGBTQIA2+ community — people of colour, people impacted by poverty, and many others.
Identifying someone as Autistic can be difficult, especially if they mask well, because autism is a behaviour-based diagnosis: meaning, it’s identified based on clinical judgement, behavioural assessments, self-reported behaviours, and observations.
Unfortunately, many clinicians still hold out-dated, stereotypical ideals about what it means to be Autistic. This further perpetuates the difficulty in identifying people who have atypical presentations of autism.
Also, the DSM-V criteria for Autism sucks, so it’s easy to see how clinicians are being poorly trained to properly and accurately identify autism.
Autism is different for every single person, but sharing a common neurotype means we do share many common traits.
I recently came across an old tumblr post from 2015 outlining some atypical Autistic traits, and I identified with it so very much.
As people who haven’t really felt seen or understood for much of our lives, it can be extremely validating and comforting to realize so many others share similar experiences.
I made some updates to the original post and am sharing it here since it meant so much to me, I am hoping others will also find it helpful.
There are four categories of atypical Autistic traits described:
