Autism advocates call for alert system overhaul after Calgary boy found dead

Throughout my autism-addled life, I’ve occasionally been told with a tone of surprise and sometimes even a you-look-okay-to-me facial expression of doubt: “But you’re so smart”. Today, I would reply with frustration: “But for every ‘gift’ I have, there are a corresponding three or four deficits.” ... It really is crippling, especially on a social and competency level that affects employability. 

While my autism spectrum disorder could not be catagorized as high-functioning (I’m not functional enough to be normally employed or sociable), neither am I sufficiently unambiguously symptomatic to be perceived/noticed by the general public as having an ASD. Thus, I’ve seemingly always been largely seen and even (mal)treated as someone who’s inexplicably incompetent, and/or called something uglier via crudely inconsiderate profanity. 

Therefore, perhaps schoolteachers should receive training in (what I term) medium-functioning, as opposed to low- or high-functioning, autism spectrum disorder, especially if the rate of autism diagnoses is increasing. [By medium-functioning, I of course mean ASD diagnoses involving disability that could be described as somewhere in between low-functioning and high-functioning ASD.] There could also be an inclusion in standard high-school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating cerebral condition. 

Maybe elementary school students could also receive neurodiversity lessons, albeit not overly complicated or extensive. Such awareness might help reduce the incidence of chronic bullying against these typically vulnerable students. The lessons would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with medium-functioning ASD are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior really is not a ‘choice’. 

It would also elucidate how “camouflaging” or “masking,” terms used to describe higher-functioning ASD people pretending to naturally fit into a socially ‘normal’ environment, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase. And that this exacerbation is reflected in the disproportionately elevated rate of suicide among them.