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Why I Hesitate to Describe Myself as Having “Low Support Needs”.
I feel like I am always walking a tightrope.
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I’m not about to give you yet another rant about strong verbal skills as a huge red herring and what was wrong with the DSM-IV’s way of doing autism, though that certainly is a pressing issue some folks face, and in a way that can really destroy some people’s quality of life. Given that I pay my own rent, talk, drive, work, have a degree, got formally diagnosed as an adult, “don’t look autistic”, and can type endless sentences into the internet void, I most certainly have all the trappings of LSN in a broad colloquial sense, but as with any attempt to phenotypically classify autism, particularly when trying to shove the sheer complexity of it all into two or three broad categories, it gives me some amount of pause. I also promise this won’t be just hair-splitting as to why terms like LSN and HSN are “better” than terms like “high-functioning” or “low-functioning”, nor is it a plea to return to more archaic terminology.
The fear of losing support
As you may be aware, I currently qualify under the autism category of my state’s developmental disabilities funding scheme. Historically, the scheme was…
