"In the book, I talk about this where I said that I'm more of a fan of the term high support needs and low support needs, because I tend to think that functioning labels really flatten the experience. Because if you call someone low functioning, what it does is it gives a lot of incentive to almost patronize them or to say they're not going to amount to much, so we don't need to invest that much in them. Whereas I think that if you call people high functioning, it almost kind of erases the very legitimate needs that they have. That binary doesn't do anybody good, I don't think. A perfect example that I used when I was writing this book is that I profile a woman by the name of Aria. That's a pseudonym.
She's married, she has kids, all that, but she had trouble graduating college and she had trouble finding work. Whereas there's this young man I profiled, his name is Hari Srinivasan. He is non-speaking. He just graduated from Berkeley a few months ago. He's now started graduate school at Vanderbilt University. At that point, when you think about those things, you have to ask yourself, "Okay, by those standards, who's the high functioning and who's the low functioning one?" You realize that that binary just is... It doesn't work."
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