originally published October 26, 2013
Part 1: Losing Your Diagnosis?
Part 2: Diagnostic Criteria: Section A
Part 3: Diagnostic Criteria: Section B
Part 4: Diagnostic Criteria: Section C
Part 5: Diagnostic Criteria: Section D
Part 6: Diagnostic Criteria: Section E and Severity Levels
Part 7: Development and Course: Part 1
Part 8: Development and Course: Part 2
Part 9: Development and Course: Part 3
Part 10: (you are here)
After a pause to blog about other things, I’m back with some more examination of the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for autism and related discussion points. I’m still working my way through the Development and Course section, which has seven paragraphs. Today, I look at paragraph four:
Deafness may be suspected but is typically ruled out. During the second year, odd and repetitive behaviors and the absence of typical play become more apparent. Since many typically developing young children have strong preferences and enjoy repetition (e.g., eating the same foods, watching the same video multiple times), distinguishing restricted and repetitive behaviors that are diagnostic of autism spectrum disorder can be difficult in preschoolers. The clinical distinction is based on the type, frequency, and intensity of the behavior (e.g., a child who daily lines up objects for hours and is very distressed if any item is moved).
The reference to deafness is based on our reputation for not responding to our name when it is called out. I think the most common reason for this is that we can get so focused in on what we’re thinking about or looking at that we close off the senses we aren’t using. Or, if we’re using our hearing to focus in on something, it’s hard for something else to break through to us. We tend not to have the same kind of sensory filters that non-autistic people have, so many of us don’t have the “cocktail party effect” that makes voices stand out to us against a background of other sounds. I have seen research that tries to claim that human voices are “less important” to us than other sounds, but I don’t think that’s a completely accurate interpretation for how we respond (or don’t respond) to voices.
The article I linked to claims we aren’t “motivated” by human voices. I think they are mixing up cause and effect and the truth is more likely that we aren’t as “motivated” by voices because we don’t hear them as well. On top of everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph, many of us also have some amount of CAPD (central auditory processing disorder) which seems to most strongly affect cognition in the range of human voices. I know that I can listen to music with a finely-tuned musician’s ear and hear every little nuance of sound but someone speaking can get very garbled very quickly. I’m not so good with telephones but can usually do well in a one-on-one conversation on Skype with a headset because the sound quality is better and always coming straight into my ears. In the open environment of a room, my hearing ability quickly degrades, especially if there are multiple people speaking at once or a noisy environment like a restaurant with lots of piped in music, dishes rattling, etc.
I have surprised people when I have been sitting in a restaurant and started pointing out sounds to them — naming the song playing over the speakers above (“I didn’t even hear music at all!”) the sizzle of the grill in the kitchen (“oh! I hear it now that you point it out. But it’s so faint! How did you hear that?”) — yet I struggle to understand the speech of my dining companion sitting right next to me. I have no auditory filters — I hear EVERYTHING, all at once — and I have CAPD, so speech gets mixed up. (Think of CAPD as being something similar to having dyslexia of the ear.)
So, yeah, I probably have less neurological “pleasure reward” from voices, too. Even though I love the rich, chocolate sound of my boyfriend’s voice. Even though I can often identify people by their voice alone (a nice compensation for being blind to faces.) I’m not less motivated by voices, I just have a really hard time hearing and understanding the darned things!
So I suspect the actual issue with appearing deaf and not responding to hearing our name called is simply that we really don’t hear it. Some people seem to have a hard time understanding how our sensory perceptions work. It’s hard to fault them for that, since that ” how” is actually a very individual thing. There are some commonalities, yes, but the overall pattern of hyper-sensitivities, hypo-sensitivities, changing sensitivities? That is excruciatingly individual. Every single thing I ever say about how my senses take in and interpret the world? There are Autistic people just like that and there are Autistic people not like that at all. Take me as a general guidepost but not a perfectly representative map.
Again, we see a mention that autistic behaviors can become more apparent in the second year of life. This is significant because it correlates with some vaccination times and could cause confusion in people who believe that autism is caused by vaccinations. The amount of change can be really dramatic, though. Some Autistic kids gradually reveal their autism as they grow and don’t make milestones on the same timetable as their age peers. Other Autistic kids really do change a lot, though. I’ve seen the video and photographic evidence: before age two (or so) the child is speaking, smiling, laughing. After age two (or so), the child no longer speaks, no longer smiles, and exhibits a marked loss of emotional affect. Science still has a lot of exploration to do before it begins to understand the development and course of autism.
When I look back at my childhood photos, I see myself laughing and smiling at age one and two but mostly deadpan, sullen, mournful afterwards. In my case it’s really hard to determine what’s what, though. I definitely became less bubbly when I started school because of the stress of it. The further along I got in school, the more stressful it became and the more my default affect became that of a dog that’s been kicked one too many times. I also had a brother who spent most of my childhood dying and completed the task just before I turned seven. So it’s impossible to look at my childhood facial expressions and determine what might be a sign of autism and what is just a general sign of a miserable childhood.
I find it interesting that now that I am an adult, I frequently get asked what I’m angry about or what’s wrong when I’m feeling calm and peaceful and happy. I am definitely a sufferer of “Bitchy Resting Face.” Either my face developed the habit of looking unhappy all the time (except when I’m laughing or when I’m paying attention to making my face look pleasant) as a result of years of suffering or I really do have affect issues and my default, relaxed, no-affect face looks gloomy to others who are so accustomed to all faces having stories written on them that they are still trying to read mine even when it’s just a blank page. Or I could just have, you know, Bitchy Resting Face.
Another point the DSM-5 makes is that many of the repetitive practices of autism are common to all small children. This is an echo of what I (and many others) are often saying: that autism is not so alien. The things we do are mostly things all people do. We just do them more often and with more intensity. My sister is not autistic. When she was about two years old, she memorized every commercial on television. She is quite bright so she only needed to hear them once to have them completely memorized. She would gallop through the house on all fours, pretending to be a horse, singing commercial jingles at the top of her lungs. If you said something that had two or three of the words of a song from a commercial in a row, she’d start singing the whole jingle.
My sister was deeply obsessed with television commercials and repeated them all day long. But for a two-year-old, that is normal behavior. I used to know an Autistic boy who behaved the same way at age twelve. He memorized commercials and entire television and movie scripts. Almost everything he ever said was a line from a movie. The technical term is echolalia, but when you read about echolalia, so much of the literature claims that the people engaging in it are not making sense and are just randomly speaking nonsense. In my experience with “Kyle,” that was not the case at all.
Kyle was always communicating when he repeated movie scripts. If you looked past the fact that someone else had written the words he was using, you could clearly see that they were his words — he had made them his own. And he was always matching quoted phrases to the situations he was in. For example, if you were serving him at Thanksgiving and asked him if he preferred breast meat or dark meat he might answer by quoting Freddy Krueger from the horror film, “Freddy vs. Jason”: “How sweet! Dark meat!” (In the creepy Freddy voice and everything!)
Not everything Kyle said was so easy to interpret as that, but every quote he recited had meaning for him, regardless of whether those of us around him could accurately interpret it or not. All I can say about researchers and other professionals who claim that repetitive movie quoting is random and pointless is “what we have here is failure to communicate — some men you just can’t reach.” And, in case I’m not being clear the failure is on the part of the professionals. The “echolalic” is doing just fine . . . for anyone who is willing to really listen and presume competence and communication.
So there’s my take on paragraph four. I’ll be back with the next paragraph and on through the rest of the DSM-5 entry. I will probably be be returning to this DSM-5 topic (with interstitial side-tracks on other topics, including the upcoming Autistics Speaking Day and Autistic History Month essays) throughout the rest of the year because there’s so much in there and it’s so fascinating to me. I hope these ramblings are helpful to you, too.