[kareninoverseas]

I am probably somewhere on the spectrum.

I am probably also going to avoid actively going out and getting myself diagnosed, since as this article suggests, public and professional perception is such that it is extremely difficult to get someone to diagnose you, and that once diagnosed, people might not take the diagnosis seriously anyway.

I think that simply being aware that my brain runs on a different set of batteries--ones that make it easy for me to get hyperfocused on a task, and also ones that make me prone to overthinking--is one of the more useful outcomes of a formal diagnosis. Thankfully I can do that part by myself and with my close friends and family.

Unfortunately I feel that autism presenting in the way described in the article is simply too "loose" of a set of symptoms to have a formal diagnostic criterion which doesn't create a great number of false positives. Perhaps better time would be spent promoting awareness of the issue, as well as finding ways to thrive with a neuro-atypical brain (this is kind of in line with the article's message).