Communication

Over the course of my lifetime, I have noticed a huge shift in the way we understand and conceptualise the autism spectrum. When I was formally diagnosed as Autistic, it was during the days of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV). I was classified as "high functioning" (whatever that means). As Rebecca Burgess illustrates beautifully in their comic titled “Understanding the Spectrum”, Autism used to be viewed as a linear scale based on perceiv