Autism, Wing said, ran “from the most profoundly physically and mentally retarded person … to the most able, highly intelligent person with social impairment in its subtlest form”. But what unified everyone on the spectrum was what she and Gould called the “Triad of Impairments”: problems with social skills, reciprocal (ie give-and-take) language and “social imagination”, most obviously evident in children not understanding the concept of pretending while they play. Though subsequent diagnostic criteria have changed – it is now accepted, for instance, that autism usually involves sensory issues including heightened or lowered sensitivity to sound, light, texture, heat and cold – these ideas are still at the heart of what most people think autism is, along with a tendency to deep obsessions, or what the autism vernacular calls “special interests”.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/society/2026/nov/01/the-term-is-becoming-unrecognisable-have-the-experts-who-believed-in-a-single-autism-spectrum-changed-their-minds
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