Common And Dangerous Misconceptions About Autism You Should Leave Behind Right Now

Nearly everyone will have heard the word "autism" by now — but very few people understand what it actually means. Once you know that research has found that non-autistic brains tend to be very similar, while autistic brains differ not only from neurotypical brains but also from other autistic brains, being highly individualized, it's not hard to see why. 

Let's do some debunking!

'Autism is a debilitating, devastating, illness'

Dictionary.com defines "illness" as "unhealthy condition; poor health; indisposition; sickness", and "disease" is usually used as a synonym. Autism doesn't fit into this definition — it's a genetically-based neurological variation, a different kind of brain wiring. It's permanent, and lifelong, but it doesn't make a person unhealthy (though some autistic people will definitely have physical illnesses) or defective. It does make them different.

The fifth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders covers it in its chapter about neurodevelopmental disorders. It shrouds the diagnostic criteria in terms like "deficit", "failure", "abnormal", "restriction", and "lack", and requires people to experience significant daily struggles to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Autism can indeed produce disability — the sensory and social struggles some autistic people deal with can be debilitating. 

Being an autistic person in a neurotypical world can be hard, confusing, and painful at times, but being autistic doesn't have to be devastating at all — autistic people can and do thrive, offering unique things to the world around them and successfully self-actualizing.

'Autistic people can't feel love and empathy'

The ideas that autistic people cannot feel love and lack empathy are, unfortunately, quite widespread, but these characteristics better define two different diagnoses. Those would be narcissistic personality disorder ("lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others" is one of the diagnostic criteria) and antisocial personality disorder (lack of remorse and reckless disregard for others are both part of the diagnostic criteria). 

Here's what you do need to know:

• Some autistic people have alexithymia, which is a state of finding it hard to identify what emotions they are experiencing — something that isn't, by the way, the same as having no feelings. 
• It is not uncommon for autistic people to miss or misunderstand the non-verbal signals non-autistic people send out. This can mean that autistic people may not realize that someone else is, for instance, feeling sad, down, bored, or irritated — and this ability to "read people" is referred to as cognitive empathy. Challenges in this area doesn't mean that a person doesn't care. Once they know what you are going through (saying so in a direct, clear, manner helps), autistic people are more likely than not to experience compassion, concern, or happiness on your behalf, in a kind of empathy called affective empathy. 
• Some autistic people have "too much empathy". This kind of hyperempathy is sometimes referred to as being an "empath", and it means intensely, and sometimes even physically, feeling what another person does. It's no surprise that that can of experience can become so overwhelming that you'd just have to seek refuge and get away from it all!

'Autistic people can't be fully functioning members of society'

This one actually covers a wide spectrum of misconceptions that may include:

• Autism means intellectual impairment. 
• Autism means being non-verbal. 
• Autism means a person will never live independently, hold down a job, or manage their daily affairs on their own. Their parents will have to make decisions for them their whole lives.
• An autistic person is inferior and can't be considered my equal.
• Autism means across-the-board impairment, to the point that I just can't really take "someone with autism" seriously. 
• Autistic people shouldn't have children.
• Autism means someone just sits around rocking and staring into space all day. 

I'm sure there's more where that came from, and this misconception can also manifest as "oh, you're just not really autistic (enough)", if an autistic person someone carrying this dangerous myth around encounters doesn't, in fact, embody their narrow ideas of what autism is supposed to look like. 

To counter this a bit, autism can be diagnosed with or without language or intellectual delays — and autistic people exist across all possible IQ levels and linguistic abilities. (Statistically speaking, many are probably smarter than you.) Some autistic people are non-verbal or minimally-verbal. This shouldn't, in any way, indicate that they cannot communicate or understand everything you say. Many non-verbal autistics are gifted writers, for instance. 

Presuming anything but competence is insulting and offensive. Remember that some of the most gifted people in history had strong autistic traits and would likely have an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis if they were alive today. Different does not equal less able, less human, or less entitled to common human decency. 

'Autism can be treated and beat'

Some autistic people intently study the behaviors of neurotypical people around them and in the media and learn, over time, to mimic them and pass as non-autistic, for shorter or longer durations. They can mask so well that others read them as neurotypical. 

Being able to seem non-autistic doesn't make a person no longer autistic, and putting on an often exhausting act much of the time can have its own mental and physical consequences. Autism cannot be cured, "overcome", or "beat". That's OK, because autism isn't a bad thing. On that note, supporting autistic people as they self-actualize — reach their potential in a way that is fullfilling to them — sounds like a better goal than attempting to make them indistinguishable from their peers, right?

'Vaccines cause autism'

The dangerous idea that there is a link between vaccines and autism, which countless people still wax on about today, should really die. 

On the one hand, this well-and-truly debunked myth promotes non-vaccination, which puts the children of anti-vaxxers as well as everyone around them at risk. And, as as microbiologist and SteadyHealth author Boris Popovic put it: "Even if vaccinating did cause autism, would you rather see your child on the spectrum, or in a casket?"

On the other hand, it falsely reduces autism, a neurological variation closely linked to genetics, to something a previously typically-developing child can just "catch" upon a brush with a researched-to-death to be safe environmental trigger.