You Need To Accept "Highly Sensitive Person" Is Autism

Because the rhetoric around this alleged "temperament" is harmful to HSPs and autistics alike

Photo by Hiki App on Unsplash

The Highly Sensitive Person is an Ableist Sham

The Highly Sensitive Person profile is a controversial soft diagnosis. It is not in the DSM-5 TR and for good reason because it shares many traits with autism. The two conditions share so many traits that many folks in the actually autistic community believe the ongoing insistence that the HSP concept is a separate condition is so very amateur hour.

In other words: It’s masked autism.

Upon preparing to write about HSP, I considered that perhaps my belief that Highly Sensitive Person is autism in disguise could be swayed once presented with some hypothetical evidence contrary to the contrary. That was not the case because the so-called “evidence-based” research was flawed.

I read several articles and studies online that claim HSP is a bona fide diagnosis, but it is blatantly evident that the criteria for HSP is just repackaged autistic traits.

One of the articles I read in Psychology Today referenced a study by Dr. Bianca Acevedo of the Neuroscience Research Institute of the University of California. Both distinguished HSP from autism by comparing the HSP traits to an outdated profile of autism, demonstrating a fundamental lack of understanding and knowledge about the existence of the masked autism profile.

The studies that back up the HSP diagnosis are spearheaded by researchers who adhere to the stereotypes of autism: we lack empathy, can’t learn social skills, lack perception, and can’t read facial expressions under any circumstances.

But as some autism researchers have realized over the last 5 to 10 years, it is possible for masked autistic folks, who grew up believing they were neurotypical, to learn a variety of social skills and how to read facial expressions through employing our keen pattern recognition.

The clinical research psychologist who created the concept of HSP (and first wrote about it in her book back in 1997), Elaine Aron,