#sincerely your local DSM swiftie

[mytearsrricochet]

to be clear, this all happened in March 2022 (with the DSM-5-TR). the change they made was that diagnosis now requires ALL of the criteria to be present, when it previously didn’t note a frequency of symptoms or how many criteria need to be met of the three.

you are right that this is definitely hindering diagnoses that are best explained by ASD but want to make sure people know this has been the diagnostic criteria for a year and a half, for those reblogging now!

For people who haven’t heard: this month, the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) are planning on updating the criteria for getting an autism diagnosis. On paper, this sounds like a good thing. It’s not.

The DSM is the handbook used by healthcare workers worldwide, for diagnosing mental disorders and the like. You may have read that the autistic diagnosis criteria is getting updated and, like many in the autistic community, hoped that this meant that it would be expanded, to make it easier for AFAB, transgender, and non-white people to be diagnosed (as it is notoriously hard for anyone except for white, cisgender men to obtain an autism diagnosis). However, they recently released a statement saying that they were not expanding the criteria, but were instead making it more ‘conservative’, as they feel autism is being ‘over-diagnosed’. (Which is, of course, bullshit for a whole plethora of reasons which I’m sure you’ve heard before.)

As-of my posting this, they have not released the official, updated criteria yet, so there is not much we can do right now. But there is one thing that we must agree upon: DO NOT SHAME PEOPLE FOR SELF-DIAGNOSING WITH AUTISM. Because obtaining an autism diagnosis is, quite literally, only getting harder.