About SPCTRM
The Problem
The current "spectrum" model of autism is a single horizontal line — less autistic on one end, more autistic on the other. This is reductive and harmful because:
- It collapses dozens of distinct traits into one axis
- It enables dismissal ("you're not autistic enough")
- It makes late-diagnosed adults illegible to those who only see high-support-needs presentations
- It creates hierarchies of suffering rather than maps of experience
- It fails to explain how someone can be "high-functioning" in one domain and profoundly struggling in another
The Approach
SPCTRM replaces the single line with 15 dimensions organized across four domains. Instead of asking "how autistic are you?" it asks "what does your autism look like?"
Six dimensions capture core traits: social communication, sensory processing, repetitive behaviors and interests, executive function, emotional regulation, and motor/physical experience.
Four meta dimensions capture what modifies visibility: masking capacity, the authenticity gap, environmental fit, and the gap between support needs and their visibility.
Four experiential dimensions capture what clinical models miss entirely: trauma refraction (how an autistic nervous system holds trauma differently), manufactured agency (creating controllable crises to experience mastery), legibility hunger (the flood when someone is finally readable), and institutional illegibility (being gatekept not for lack of ability but for not performing competence in expected ways).
One temporal dimension — variability — acknowledges that none of this is static.
Novel Constructs
Five of SPCTRM's dimensions are novel constructs developed from lived experience research rather than existing clinical literature:
The Authenticity Gap
The paradox where the more genuine you are, the less genuine you appear. Effort is visible, and visible effort reads as performance to people who don't need to try.
Manufactured Agency
Creating controllable crises as a way to experience mastery. Not recklessness — the opposite: authoring danger because that's the only way to also author survival.
Legibility Hunger
The intense response when someone is finally readable. It can look like "falling in love easily" but it's the relief and joy of legibility itself — and the vulnerability that creates.
Institutional Illegibility
Being denied access or recognition because your presentation doesn't match templates of seriousness and competence. The system has no slot for what you're actually doing.
Trauma Refraction
How an autistic nervous system receives and holds trauma differently. The lens doesn't replace the old one — it adds to it.
Methodology
SPCTRM uses a Likert-scale self-assessment across 92 questions (5-8 per dimension). Responses are averaged and normalized to a 0-10 scale for each dimension. The tool captures context (mood, energy) at the time of assessment and supports longitudinal tracking to reveal patterns over time.
Pattern recognition uses Pearson correlation across multiple assessments to identify which dimensions move together in an individual's experience. This requires at least 3 assessments over 2 or more months.
Guiding Principles
- Nothing about us without us. This tool is shaped by autistic voices and lived experience.
- Complexity over simplicity. The single-axis spectrum failed because it was too simple. Don't repeat that mistake.
- Explanation over judgment. Help people understand why, not label them.
- Validation is the baseline. If someone doesn't see themselves in this tool, it has failed.
- Practical utility. Beautiful visualizations mean nothing if they don't help people navigate their lives.