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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No. They're in line with the new, lower thresholds for diagnosis. My husband and son have more classic autistic traits, with socio-communicative impacts, and my daughter and I have the so-called "girl autism", which means we have a greater capacity for social integration and communication and major social anxiety, and fit the other ASD criteria at a minimal level.

Which is not to say my daughter's recent diagnosis, at 15, didn't come as a surprise - I didn't think her symptoms were sufficient to cross the threshold, because I was stuck on my son's earlier diagnosis from years ago. But when the psychologist explained all the criteria, I was convinced. And it was very apparent during that meeting that I, too, am on the mild end of the spectrum. [/quote]

Do you feel like your and your daughter's "girl-autism" requires professional intervention, or is it something that you both can manage without outside support?

I wonder if the diagnosis bar has been set so low that anyone who falls outside one standard deviation of the mean for social skills ability gets an ASD diagnosis.[/quote]

I did ask the psychologist what she thought of the lower threshold, and she said quite honestly that the entire umbrella of autism was unwieldy, but that it wasn't in the power of her field of psychology to break it up into categories, given that the criteria applied are all the same. They tried in the past, with Asperger's, to identify a threshold between high-functioning and more profound autism, but could never agree on where the threshold was! As a geneticist, I told her that new 2025 research has identified 4 main groups of genetic variants plausibly linked to autism. I think genetics might be the next big tool to break up the autism spectrum into distinct categories.

My daughter and I have rather severe anxiety. Right now my daughter is not under treatment, but she might be in the future. I've tried both meds and therapy, and neither have worked great, so I've had to right-size my life to cope with my anxiety. Right now I am the talking-through-it point person for my daughter, and I don't think that we need outside therapy specific to self-awareness and social skills, because that has been part of my own personal self-help focus for years (without knowing I was autistic!), and I've coached my husband and son through their social blindness issues. My adult son would probably benefit from anxiety meds, but he has yet to try them and is usually resistant to seeing doctors and mental health specialists of any kind (as is my husband... who is a doctor himself!).

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