Azeen Ghorayshi

I mean, it was supposed to, but then Kathy does this research that attempts to look at how people are actually being diagnosed.

And she finds that Asperger's in particular is a really squishy diagnosis.

What determines whether a child would get diagnosed with Asperger's had more to do with, you know, what clinician they saw than what criteria they met.

It made clear that these definitions are still not specific enough and they're not reliable.

Diagnoses matter because diagnoses are the key to getting the specific medical attention that you need, to getting the specific services at school that are going to help support you.

A diagnosis is also key for insurance coverage, for behavioral therapy.

And then they also matter at the level of how

a person and their family conceives of who they are and what they're struggling with.

And so that led to the medical community rethinking once again how they are defining autism.

And so in 2013, Kathy was actually on the committee that made this change.

Basically, what they decided was these lines that we're drawing are not reliable.

They're not consistent.

And the way that they decided to resolve this issue was to fold everything together under one single diagnosis, so autism spectrum disorder.

And that meant that the kids who were severely disabled, the kids who maybe couldn't speak or maybe had an intellectual disability, had the same diagnosis as someone who would have formerly been diagnosed with Asperger's.

And it's being recognized as a single tent.

You know, before I think there was recognition like these things are related to each other.

Now it's being viewed as one thing, one group of people.

And sort of in parallel to the changes that we've been talking about, there was also the growth of what became known as the neurodiversity movement.

This movement was really about beginning to view autism through a different lens and rejecting the idea that it was a disease in need of a cure.

Often the advocates in the neurodiversity movement like Temple Grandin were on the milder end of the spectrum or, you know, would have formerly had an Asperger's diagnosis.