#auspec

This flag represents those who are on both spectrums (schizophrenia spectrum and autism spectrum). Although autistic schizophrenia (also known as schizophrenic autism, or Bleuler's autism 4A's symptoms in psychopathology) is its own concept, this is not the exactly same.

Hey anon!

That’s really interesting, I’ve never heard of anyone using auspec for autism spectrum. Thanks for weighing in on this, it’s always good to get a few different opinions, especially from the people this actually effects. 

The CDC claims that, in order to qualify as being on the autism spectrum, one must have social or communication deficits, among other things (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). This is a widely accepted manner of understanding autism, especially in medical contexts. Many ordinary, neurotypical or allistic people come to understand autism this way as well. However, in recent years, a new idea gaining credit is the idea of the double empathy problem.

An idea proposed by Dr. Damian Milton, the double empathy problem suggests that any social pitfalls for autistic people are due to a mutual lack of understanding between autistic and allistic people (Milton, 2012). This idea runs in opposition to currently accepted assumptions about autism. It suggests that the previously established social deficits do not arise from being autistic, but instead from interactions between autistic and allistic individuals. It suggests that allistic people are equally as responsible for these deficits as autistic people are. Consequently, the idea has yet to gain widespread acceptance. In spite of the resistance to such a new, different idea, there is now evidence supporting the idea of the double empathy problem.

In 2019, a team of researchers led by Dr. Catherine Crompton of the University of Edinburgh established that the conveyance and clarity of information suffers not when autistic people interact with each other, but when autistic and allistic people interact with each other (Crompton et al., 2019). This directly supports the premise of the double empathy problem by establishing that the issue is not necessarily the problem - that the problem is two groups with different understandings of people and information. Though such a new study has yet to receive the verification of older, replicated studies, it sets a precedent for future research into this subject.