[loceng]

I'm curious what your background and experience is to classify the Autism spectrum as a mental disorder? I believe a better classification would be a developmental disorder - which I personally prefer to state as developmental blocks, which makes the spectrum of symptoms/behaviours and sets of behaviours as symptoms become easier to understand; and depending on when (and perhaps how) the developmental block started, will in part dictate where along natural evolution and brain development they are.

Pharma of course wants to classify it as a mental disorder so then doctors will be allowed to prescribe medications.

I'm curious too what you mean by several dozen dimensions? I wonder if you mean the same thing as I do when I say "set of behaviours?"

And yes, the industrial complex with pharma has learned how to indoctrinate the medical and educational system, and fine-tuned their marketing/advertising. I get sick to my stomach when I go to the US and put TV on, the constant flood of ads for medications that are all fluff information being presented.

[jrq]

I didn't diagnose anything.

Don't take my personal opinion and make it accountable to a professional one. I'm not a doctor. But before doing finance I used to do some basic tutoring and teachers assistant stuff for a place filled with kids with "autism" and there was a very wide array of personalities there.

As per dimensionality, yes that's what I was saying. Each symptom or descriptor exists on its own spectrum, not the entire disorder/illness/whatever it is medically classified.

Anyways, yeah. I don't know what's an illness, what's a disorder, I don't particularly care what the medical industry uses to distinguish those two words, but I've spent a chunk of time working with autistic students, and its close to my heart.

[loceng]

The wide array of personalities is why it's considered a spectrum - so either saying autism or autism spectrum is referencing the same thing. There are certainly severities of what behaviours and the level that they will present - they all fit within an evolving framework and understanding of autism though. Things can be difficult to diagnose, primarily because there can be multiple causes of symptoms. Someone with anxiety might be eating a food that makes them anxious, or they have unhealed PTS, etc.

A problem with taking the pharma approach to treatment of someone with autism is that, imaging being super hypersensitive to touch - the constant agitation from contact by clothing may make you constantly anxious right? So do you treat anxiety as a symptom of the sensitivity? It doesn't really make sense to do.