[faeriechangling]

First, I’ll say the APA defines mental disorders as a subset of mental illness which contradicts your definition [1]. In my experience, people tend to define these terms incredibly inconsistently and I don’t get caught up in the semantics.

Second, I would say I have both social and scientific objections to the concept of mental disorders.

Scientifically, the definition of what is considered a disorder is INCREDIBLY subjective. The DSM-V definition includes language like “impairment in an IMPORTANT area of functioning” and “reflects a dysfunction”. Being gay and transgender are two things that were considered disorders and no longer are. Generally the reasoning as to why these are not mental disorders is that being gay/trans does not make somebody intrinsically unhealthy and some of the things we see like higher suicide rates in those groups are a result of social stigma… which are ALL things I can rather trivially claim about many cases of autism.

Socially, it’s just unnecessarily insulting to call people dis-ordered. In the context of autism, it is well known it can present as a combination of strengths and weaknesses, but the mere existence of weaknesses gets the insulting label of “disorder”. This shows a condescending sense of superiority among the doctors who coined “Autism spectrum disorder”. I don’t feel medical language like disorder or illness is very nuanced at all, I feel it’s reflective of blasé and thoughtless generalization and the language mostly serves to stigmatize which is why people got mad about it being used to describe trans people.

[1] https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/what-is-mental-...