Do I see autism as a disability or not?
The answer is “yes” AND “no”.
There are several perspectives of this (and this is ofcourse only my view on this right now, there are countless of others out there, and my may also develop over time).
I would like to start with breaking down the word itself; DIS-ability, where DIS- is a prefix that means “lack of”, “apart”, “away” or “opposite of”. So what we are talking about when we use the concept “Disability” is really the meaning “Lack of ability”, which is basically not true. A more accurate word, in this sense, would be “Dis-norm-ability” or “Less-norm-ability”. I would argue that no living individual on this planet “lack” ability but many of us have “less normative” abilities.
Being done with the literal meaning, let´s look at the metaphoric meaning of the (existing) word;
Now we are talking about a way to label people as different, having deficits etc, i.e. the more pathological perspective. In a perfect world this kind of label wouldn´t be needed but we will not end up with a perfect world so we need to work with what we have. In this context I think that “Disability” has a purpose and pathologically autism IS a disability. Looking at autism as a deficit is the foundation of the neuropsychological assessments. If you are lucky though, you may get a psychologist who is extra kind and also give you some positive feedback on your ways of functioning during the assessment process. Side note; Going through the autism/ ADHD assessment process can basically be like being in a boxing ring and over and over again being knocked out by hits in the head of how “wrong” you are… Needless to say, there is room for improvement in this area… (becoming irritated by writing about this and reminding myself to focus on the topic I started this post with and not running away to another one).
The pathological label of you being disabled IS needed, according to me. Not because of the individuals themselves, caring this label, but for society (health care, school, workplaces etc) to understand what support may be needed for the person to survive and (if lucky) also live and thrive. There may be acccommodations needed to be able to work or make it through school, systems where there is often not room for differences in functioning, as a simple basic human fact that we ARE different. Society is mainly constructed for the very narrow normative ways. That´s why we need a term like “disability”.
In reality, outside of the pathology, I don´t see autism as a disability. I see it as a natural, diversified, development of the brain that happens to be in minority and that is not very well understood. Therefor we autists need to live in a world that is often very challenging (since it is made for the majority way of neuro-functioning).
Do I FEEL disabled?
Most of the time the answer is “no”, at least in my personal life (outside of work).
Sometimes, though, the answer is “yes”. That´s mostly when I experience barriers, non-acceptance, non-inclusion (I prefer this term before “exclusion”) and that the struggle needed is too exhausting or too predominant.
However, no matter in which area of life, I definitely do not lack ability…
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