For some people these diagnoses will be a very good fit with clear predictive outcomes. But many of us have a grab-bag of traits from several categories and still mostly get along in life, maybe with some assistance particular to one of these diagnosis but no more help overall than anyone else needs otherwise.

The diagnostic models suck. They are too broad here, too narrow there, misunderstood by professionals. I had a psychiatrist (mis)diagnose me as bipolar based on a 45 minute appointment when I was in some sort of crisis in my early 30s and that ended up haunting me years later when applying for a job with a security clearance. I didn’t even know about it at the time. This was one of the top rated doctors in a major metro area. What a sham.

The field is a mess. It has a terrible history of horrific abuse. Some autistic children still receive involuntary-to-them ECT. I think we should be supportive of research into these topics while also being critical of the very obvious problems with them.

To be sure, clinically, thresholds are useful because services, insurance, and research all rely on clear binary classifications, in our current society. But outside that context, it isn’t obvious that everyday language needs to mirror that line. Self-identification can be a way of making sense of one’s life, not an attempt to claim a clinical label.

But at the same time, the spectrum includes people with very high support needs, and there’s understandable concern that broad or casual uses of the term can hide those realities in ways that impact care.

To me, none of this means people are wrong for wondering about autism. And I do not have the experience to advocate for or against "anxiety disorders" being weighted more heavily in clinicians' priors than they currently are (as the OP article heavily implies with its length). I mean only to highlight the mismatch between a binary diagnostic system and a very heterogeneous spectrum, and the need for language that acknowledges self-understanding without flattening anyone’s experience.

Don't underestimate TikTok. You can find all sorts of weird fad mental illness there. For a while tourette syndrome was all the rage and the platform was filled with kids faking tics. There are fake epileptics faking seizures too. OCD is another common "cool" self-diagnosis and there are online quizzes to tell you how OCD, or ADHD or bipolar you are. It wouldn't surprise me at all if schizoid or schizotypal caught on.

I think some people are looking for the self-validation that can come with a diagnoses, an explanation for why they are the way the are, feel the way they do, or why they struggle with certain things. Others are just looking for views, attention, or a community to belong to.

While it can be fairly harmless the ability for mass sociogenic illness to spread via social media is interesting and a bit frightening.

Also see specialisms WITHIN Autism that are different to the mainstream Autism

The one I know most about is

PDA: Pathological Demand Avoidance [1]

PDA presents differently and needs very different strategies to mainstream Autism.

Main signs… kids under 12 attend school. However they explode at home or in private. At school the PDAers are masking (pretending to fit in) which is draining. When they get home the pent up frustration is released (explosively). So the family at home see a very different kid to the one that school/extended family witness. If this is an A-Ha! lightbulb moment for you or your child, see the questionnaire at the PDA Society[1]

[1] https://www.pdasociety.org.uk/what-is-pda/

At a bare minimum, it will give you a fresh perspective on things you already knew. In my experiences, there will be things you didn't realize about yourself.

They aren't going to tell you what the solution is to all your problems; that's for you and your doctor to figure out. They will give you everything you need to make well-informed decisions, and that's priceless.

Somewhat related, "Health Secretary Wes Streeting is launching an independent review into rising demand for mental health, ADHD and autism services in England." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8q26q2r75o

Working in IT I've came across lots of extremely smart people with their quirks and eccentricity (not exclusive to smart people of course), I guess there's just a higher proportion of _quirky_ smart people in IT. A lot of the time it just seems to be introversion- it seems lack of interaction with society has to be justified.

But the one thing we know for sure it's that the world is more complex than even this set of 10 pigeonholes. These are more like good insults for people. Haha, a loner, that guy's a schizo! The clinical coldness is almost a perfect mirror for the way we express personal cruelty to others. To reduce them to a factoid, an epithet. It's no wonder people want to reclaim these words as terms of identity, of pride, of nuanced meaning.

Having your own ideal and philosophy and not sheepishly following corporate and government propaganda (so called "trend") is what every other person should do.

“I suck at small talk.”

“I have rigid routines.”

“I hyper-focus on my hobbies.”

“I am always fidgeting.”

“Social interaction exhausts me.”

“I really bad at making friends.”

“I don’t fit in; people find me weird.”

I never considered it althought I'm ticking all the buttons (bad gear ? [0])

[0] https://youtube.com/@audiopilz?si=g6iGJK3ygnCWESWW

It appears when someone sees a smarter person and cannot accept that fact, proceeding then to look for any sign of awkwardness so that gap can be explained by "autism".

Not medically relevant, but probably one of the most common uses of the word.

Autism and schizo- spectrums have a common base/mechanism: impairment of psychic functions (lack of empathy and non verbal commun, shallow feelings, social distance and similar). Their difference is autism starts at early childhood (maybe birth?), before any intelligence, language, soul and personality has evolved, while schizo/psychosis starts later (after teen age) when all these are fully developed.

The impact of each disorder on behaviour is different due to the different state it finds the rest of the brain. The maturity in schizo, for example, is the cause of its "positive" symptoms like hallucinations/delirium because the brain is full of images and words. On the other side autism heavily blocks social and verbal skills because it kills any "motive" of the brain to develop further from a very early stage.

Which is to say, not really. I say this as someone who has been diagnosed as autistic, and identifies as autistic. All of these diagnoses are presented as clear, well defined constructs that exist in the world, but in reality they’re fictions that that committees have drawn around a vast gradient of human traits.

No individual human truly fits any single diagnosis. For example, I have two family members that depending on how you frame their behaviors could be described as either autistic or narcissistic, yet these are supposedly completely different disorders. Prior to being diagnosed as autistic, I’d been diagnosed with some of the ones suggested in the article as well. Was I misdiagnosed? I don’t think so. None of those constructs are real either. So, they’d not even wrong. For a time, some were useful. Some were harmful. But seeing myself as autistic has been a lot more useful.

What matters to me about identifying as autistic is that it allowed me to find other people who experience the world similarly to me. Until I found other autistic people, I felt like I was a single alien stranded on Earth, alone. Finding other autistic people was like finding out that there were millions of other aliens like me hiding in plain sight.

I hope that someday we can move beyond the 1950s-style nosology of the DSM and have a more rigorous science of mental health, but right now, it’s what we’re stuck with.

Adhd 5-10%, autism 0.5%, cluster b 5%. The rest is quite rare. Adhd has the highest comormobility.

I'm more dubious of clinicians who like to pick random dubious rare disorders that people can't even agree about the basic description of like schizoid out of the DSM like the author of this article.

> Social awkwardness refers to social ineptness without meaningful impairment

Isn't social awkwardness sort of inherently impairing in social relationships?

Often times it seems like the “soft diagnosis” of a condition can be used to hedge against less-than-desirable personality traits if the person is held in high enough esteem. If they aren’t held in popular regard to some extent or if there’s other factors that can be used to explain their behavior (e.g. the stereotypical “German coldness” or whatever) then they don’t get those benefits. Characteristics like their political views may also negatively affect the likelihood of this “psychiatric hedging”.

At what point do idiosyncrasies become subject to pathology.

I so strongly agree with this and it's not just based on my own experience, but many people I know.

Growing up broke and in sketchy places with sketchy people will induce plenty of anxiety. Then I managed to get out of all that as an adult and starting a career.

The anxiety never fully went away, but it now presents itself the way one would expect instead of "weirdness". Maturing and having a more stable life happened to my friends also and nobody says "I think I'm autistic" anymore like we did in high school and college. Now it's hard to distinguish if we were saying that to ourselves as a slur in self-deprecation, or if we really believed it. Young people are just awkward and too many people get older without letting go of the things they told themselves a long time ago.

Make of that what you will. I know my story is super common, but the only reason I bothered to write this is that it doesn't get said enough.

"They haven’t seen any cool TikToks about being schizoid. No one’s offering them quizzes about being schizotypal." I'm eagerly awaiting the Great Meme Reset of 2026 when people will stop using memes as their shared knowledge. I even know a pediatrician who does this to support her anti-vax practice so meme culture has reached frightening levels.

Therapy-speak has become weaponized by people who are not well meaning. Please don't go around diagnosing people. If you say someone is bipolar, a lawyer can use this against them in court. I urge people to identify the sources of their (mis)information and humble themselves before offering diagnostics.

That feels important

Do you have a "mind's eye" - that is, can you close your eyes, and voluntarily visualise mental images?

If you can't, you have a condition called "Aphantasia"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

When I found out about aphantasia, I was fascinated. I'd always imagined that "mind's eye" was a metaphor. I never knew it was literal, and that most of the population are able to visualise imagery in their head.

Could there be a link beteen aphantasia and autism?

Since I'm unable to visualise the faces (and thus expressions) of people, maybe this contributes to my lack of empathy and ability to predict other people's emotional state.

If you have autism, do you also have aphantasia?

This seems to be targeted campaign. I urge people to not be fooled by ill-researched blog posts. Listen to autistic people. Listen to researchers that represent the scientific consensus.

Any diagnosis for autism will first consider whether the symptoms can be explained better by another diagnosis. This is why you fill out a lot of questionnaires and the like when you get your diagnosis. This is the state of art.

Also women are systematically underdiagnosed when it comes to autism, they often get labeled with boderline and the like. The idea that someone is labeling everything as autism is silly.

My niece has a disibility that they haven't really been able to diagnose.

If it is Autism, there is all kinds of free care available.

Usually when you follow the money, you get answers.

I think it’s safe to say that if someone appears “weird” to the hive mind of a community, that person is more likely to be correctly diagnosed.

There are people who desire a diagnosis for special treatment, but if the first time you find out about a person’s diagnosis is after knowing them as “weird” the whole time, then they’re not acting weird on purpose, or saying they are X for attention or special treatment.

Disabled people, mentally or otherwise, usually like to keep their business to themselves, unless they absolutely don’t need to. Some mentally disabled people might even forgo getting special treatment via disability services at their colleges, or getting parking permits for disability because they’re not interested in bringing attention to their difficulties or differences, or using these issues as a cause for special treatment. Though, I’d advised that people who need accommodations should get them.

I also saw a comment about disability becoming normalized due to late stage capitalism, which sounds like a thesis out of postmodernist thinking. The fact is that group behavior has always isolated “weird” behaviors and put undue negative attention on them, but it just happened to be the case that that weird behavior was evolutionary helpful, which is why it has persisted for millions of generations of humans across their evolutionary history.

This only applies to high-functioning categories of behaviors. But I’ve found that more often than not, it’s the social reaction of groups that is the problem for high-functioning autists, and less the autism itself. Maybe neurotypical behavior or neurotypical mindedness is the disease because I don’t understand why or how some people find it so hard to think differently. Are they not individuals, are they zombies?

I personally believe that "normal", when it comes to people's behavior, social interactions, and the way their mind works, is a completely broken idea. All of these attributes are completely fluid, depending on the when, where and who with you happen to be.

On that premise, the whole idea of neuro-divergence and the idea that you can classify people in arbitrary categories such as ADHD, Autism, etc ... and that this classification will lead to a way to "fix them" is complete and utter BS.

Part of the motivation also seems to be that we've fetishized disorders; having or claiming to have disorder X is a weird way to feel "special" or exceptional. Another part of it is that it functions as a kind of instrument for uptight people to gain a sense of exemption from social norms - real or merely perceived - that they feel burdened by or live in terror of "violating", but who are incapable of or unwilling to ignore them, because what would people say! "Oh, I'm weird, because I have disorder X. Can't help it, sorry! Can't judge me, because then you, not me, are the asshole!"

Needless to say, it's not very rational.

Which is not to say various disordered conditions don't exist.

Someone with Autism can act out and people will be like "That's OK, he has Autism". But when I act out, there is no understanding.

What is missing in the article is there does exist overlap in these condiations, not only symptomatically, but also genetically. As far as genetics, just take a look at the calcium channel gene CACNA1C:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31805042/

I would probably had an Asperger's diagnosis when I was a kid, but most of my Autism was beaten out of my by my older brother's and kids in school. I mean, I was so deep into astronomy when I was 10 and I would not let go if it even though everyone teased me about it and I talked about it all the time anyway.

I am in my early 60's now, homeless, living in a Minivan, driving around, researching my genetics obsessively to the point where I communicate with some leading specialists in the United States, but still no one cares.

So yeah, do I wish I could say I had clinical Asperger's? Yes. Yes. Only so I can be accepted for my neurodivergence.

So I'm going to flag these posts for now because the goal in the current US climate is pure eugenics. RFK is at his core a eugenicist, as are all high-level anti-vaxxers. Anti-vaxxers seek to blame the diseased for their disease, on such factors as "poor diet", "lack of exercise", or in the case of autism, "having your child vaccinated", against all scientific consensus, and would prefer people suffer and die of horrible and completely preventable diseases like measles and polio since they somehow "deserve it". Governments like the current one have plenty of plans for people they deem unworthy.

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5256614-autism-communi...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5391310/kennedy-autism-...

[3] https://mjhnyc.org/blog/autism-and-disability-in-nazi-vienna...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder which causes and contributes to various psychiatric disorders.

The author is not seeing the forest for the trees, which is incredibly ironic.