Autism and General Disability Support Needs Aren't the Same as Autism Levels in the DSM
So, i have been seeing people online share their confusion surrounding the differences and the similarities between the support needs labels and the official autism levels as seen within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or in the DSM for short. These people have been equating support needs to the official DSM levels system for autism, or equating autism levels as support needs labels. The two are not the same, however, there are some similarities but those similarities are vague and small.
The most important thing that gets people online and offline confused about these two terms, are if doctors can diagnose both of them. Doctors can diagnose an autistic person with a level, but the support needs terms are not diagnoseable, as they are not used officially by doctors like autism levels are. Support needs are actually a community term that the autistic community came up with, in order to fully yet quickly describe their needs for support surrounding autism, but the term later expanded to explain how much support any person with disabilities need. Autism levels are strictly for autism, and no one else can describe their level of support or their level of severity within the wider autism community.
Other than that, there used to be a myth that your autism support needs also correlated 1:1 to your autism level. But that has been discussed to not be fully accurate. For example, one could have level 1 autism while their support needs could be low, medium or high as well due to a variety of factors such as if they have any other disabilities included as well. But, that doesn't mean that your autism level doesn't exactly match your support needs at all, it can match in your support needs being one level lower or higher than your actual diagnosed autism level. This could be due to factors such as having another, or a couple other, disabilities that make certain things, especially activities of daily living, harder for you. This is because that support needs aren't only met for those with autism, people with other disabilities can use the support needs labels to describe their disabled realities, like people who are physically disabled as well for instance.
Due to this, some people would rather prefer to use support needs over using their autism level, especially because some think that levels do not contain the whole picture especially regarding how much support someone needs for activities of daily living, and not just support needed for restrictive behaviour and for social communication like how the DSM autism levels work. Or it could be different, and someone likes to use the autism levels instead of support needs for a variety of reasons.
