Depends on how many of the quirks fall within the same diagnosis. It's been a pretty wide, gray area from our own experience.
Same here. The school staff in DS's life insist he has autism and the doctors all agree (vehemently) that he does not. Turns out the school staff are focusing on behaviours and characteristics and the doctors are focusing on diagnostic criteria.
At the end of the day, he's still the same kid.
I just finished reading "Lost at School" by Ross Greene, and one of the things I liked about the book was that he put "labels" aside and referred instead to individual lagging skills.
Consider this... when a child has some but not all of the lagging skills associated with a label and they don't meet the dx criteria, the remaining skill deficits are sometimes shrugged off: "oh, well he doesn't have autism after all - I guess we don't need to pursue that."
Whereas... if our system was set up in a different way: If individual skill deficits were each assessed, recognized and funded/supported individually in lieu of the existing "A total of six (or more) items from (1), (2), and (3)" etc etc in order to qualify for support, then the OP's original question wouldn't matter.
Wouldn't that be better? (What am I missing?)
