I think autism has become the IBS of neurodiversity, and will be retired someday just as the diagnosis of “hysteria” was retired as a catch all for women’s issues a century ago.
If we get a better understanding of what autism actually is, I'd expect we'd also establish more specific and accurate terms for it. I don't see any reason why it would just go away as a concept, though. It seems like it's pretty well established at this point that there is a collection of characteristics that some people have that fit the current understanding of what is meant by "autism". I'm not an expert in the area, though, so if you think that's not true it'd be interesting to know why not.
I expect it will be understood to be several separate things, which express themselves in vaguely similar ways, but are quite different both in origin and treatment.
(Adding to this) Similar to how depression, anxiety, PTSD, and a few other manifest similarly, but are labeled, diagnosed and treated as separate issues.
> I don't see any reason why it would just go away as a concept, though. It seems like it's pretty well established at this point that there is a collection of characteristics that some people have that fit the current understanding of what is meant by "autism".
The caveat being that this category exists within the current framework. The same could be said about "female hysteria", and pretty much all psychological conditions that have been left behind as symptoms of the zeitgeist.
I'm sceptical the concept of "autism" is tenable in the long term either, it's such a catch-all "spectrum" with diverse underlying causes which present in behaviour which is similar yet broadly defined enough that two people can be diagnosed with autism with entirely different symptomatic presentations with zero overlap.
At the same time, regardless of what you think the social conceptual juggernaut that is "Autism" is not going away overnight or even this decade, nor are the rest of DSM-V disorders. They serves a useful function, such as telling bosses to force their employees to attempt to work in a noisy workplace with flickering lights and off-gasses to fuck off. At this point the concept of autism has become tied up with peoples social identities, with the law, and with a whole lot of money on a massive scale and one doesn't simply unwind that all by going "This whole thing is dumb". One needs to start from the fundamentals, which is why was the social need for the concept of "Autism Spectrum Disorder" created in the first place and why was the concept promoted so readily by so many different interests?
Autism has a few biological sequelae so I don’t think this is gonna be the case. For example their brains grow faster than normal for the first few years of life but slower thereafter. And you can see differences in their brains under a microscope. Or at least that’s what I read in a book recently, I am not an expert.