Gifted, Autistic, or Both?

This week US Autism is featuring a video I recorded with Dr. Linda Silverman, the world’s leading expert on the topic of autism in the gifted. As we at US Autism know, autism presents with remarkable differences in its degrees of ability and difficulty across the wide autism spectrum. For this reason, we specifically choose to use the term “divergent” rather than “neurodiversity” because we know that autism is also more than a difference in neuro-cognition, it also comes with co-occurring physical attributes. Ranging from those who are severely affected, have multiple health and/or mental health challenges, and require lifelong care to those individuals we might think of as “high functioning” and/or even “gifted,” autism, perhaps more than any other condition of divergence is unique for its extreme degree of presentation. But this week I’ve been thinking a lot about our current use of “levels of functioning,” our definitions about “impairment,” and the true definition of “giftedness.”

Many of you already know that I specialize in the field of twice-exceptionality or gifted with disability. Through the years, while about 25 percent of my practice has focused specifically on autism in the gifted, the other 75 percent has dealt with those who were identified as gifted but also had some other area of deficit that affected learning, attention, social-emotional functioning, and/or behavior. This means that I’ve seen it all. To an outsider, including those individuals with “severe autism” in my twice-exceptional practice might have seemed like too big of a range. But guess what? I’ve learned across my clients of approximately 4500 that even for those with severe autism-related impairments, the differences between those with autism and those who are identified as “gifted” are a lot less prominent than you might think. In fact, some of the most “gifted” individuals that I have ever met fall into the category of non-vocal autistic.

This has left me with the question: What is the relationship between autism and giftedness? As perhaps one of the only people on the planet asking this question, I’ve personally concluded that autism is much more prevalent in gifted families. Why is this? I can also say that even for those who are considered intellectually disabled, I almost always see certain attributes and characteristics of “giftedness” that are not present in other populations. In my experience the majority of those we consider “highly to profoundly gifted” also frequently have a number of autistic traits. Last, when I ran my school (Brideun School for Exceptional Children), over two decades ago, the strongest and most long-lasting friendship formed to date among my students were those between students diagnosed across the autism spectrum and those who were identified to be the most intellectually gifted. We know that as humans we are drawn to those who share our innate intellectual abilities, so why do so many autistic people relate best to those who are gifted (this is true even for many of those who are non-vocal). I’m not claiming that all autistic individuals are intellectually gifted, although ALL autistic individuals have their unique gifts. But I think beneath whatever this thing we call autism is, there lies an unusually high inherent potential for gifted levels intellectual functioning, although for some, injury to the brain may have permanently altered the manifestation of that inherent intelligence.

Given the possibility of some relationship between inherent giftedness and autism, I believe it is imperative that we ALWAYS take the position of presumption of competence when we interact with anyone who is anywhere across the autism spectrum. For decades, we assumed that everyone who suffered from cerebral-palsy was also intellectually disabled — for how someone with that much physical impairment could not be intellectually impaired also. But then we discovered, with horror, that many with cerebral palsy had normal or even high intellectual ability and were simply trapped beneath a physical body that didn’t allow for the expression of that intelligence in typical ways. What if individuals across the spectrum, like those with cerebral palsy, are similarly trapped? In short, we do tremendous disservice to anyone who cannot make their body do what they want it to do to assume intellectual impairment. We simply can’t go wrong when we presume that underlying intelligence, possibly at a level that his higher than most, is “in there” somewhere.