[skissane]

> It's not exactly what I meant. If you have the traits, you may not wish to describe yourself as autistic. Some of that comes down to the stigma. If you don't have autistic traits and you claim to be autistic, that's just being dishonest.

I have a different perspective. What makes some traits "autistic" and others not? Okay, there is some positive correlation between them - but lots of "non-autistic" traits are positively correlated with "autistic" traits too. How big is the difference in correlation between different "autistic" traits on the one hand, and between "autistic" and non-"autistic" traits on the other? Is that differene in correlation big enough to provide scientific validity for the distinction between those two sets of traits?

Lynn Waterhouse argues that autism originated in a couple of related but distinct scientific hypothesises – Leo Kanner's "early infantile autism" and Hans Asperger's "autistic psychopathy" – both concerning a cluster of postively correlated traits in certain children, which displayed some similarities to those traits displayed in adults with schizophrenia which Blueler had labelled "autistic". As those related hypotheses evolved, they were eventually merged into a single hypothesis "ASD" – which however, is so vague and amorphous as to be essentially unfalsifiable. Waterhouse argues that Kanner's and Asperger's hypotheses were perfectly legitimate for their time (the 1940s), but have never been confirmed, and the best interpretation of the available evidence is that "autism"/"ASD" (in all its versions) is a false theory, that should be filed in the annals of the history of science next to phlogiston and the luminiferous aether. But, like Ptolemy's epicycles, rather than abandoning a scientific dead end, people keep on fiddling with theory to try to keep it alive.

But, even if Waterhouse is right, and "autism" is an inescapable scientific failure - it has had enormous cultural success. And that's what I mean to say it is a culutral construct. Indeed, its cultural success is arguably a major factor stopping people from moving on from it, even if (Waterhouse argues) that is the right thing to do from a purely scientific perspective. And to be clear, while Waterhouse denies that "autism" is anything other than an arbitrary grouping of traits, a label based on history rather than the best current science, she doesn't deny for a minute that sometimes these traits can produce significant impairment–and even if we judge it a failure as a scientific theory, that doesn't in itself answer the separate question of the benefits or harms of the cultural construct that theory has sprouted.

Laurent Mottron's perspective [0] is less radical than Waterhouse's, but has some overlap. He argues (contra Waterhouse) that it is too early to declare the narrower 1980s/1990s idea of "autism" (and even its cousin "Asperger's") a scientific dead end. But, he thinks we've blown up its boundaries to the point that it has lost all scientific value, and so at that point he agrees with Waterhouse that 2020s ASD is a scientific dead end. However, rather than Waterhouse's proposal of abandoning the concept entirely, and looking for complete replacements, he wants to go back to a focus on the older narrower concept (which he labels "prototypical autism"). I think he'd agree with Waterhouse that the current concept is largely a cultural construct riding on the back of a failed scientific theory; but they disagree about the scientific value of its prior iterations.

[0] see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aur.2494 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9054657/

[h0l0cube]

What was once autism is disintegrating into the neurodiversity movement, which I don't disagree with. I suppose it just becomes unwieldy when certain traits cluster frequently to say one has, by example, Sensory Processing Disorder, Dyspraxia, Inattentive ADHD, Social Anxiety Disorder, engages in stimming and regulating behaviours, avoids eye contact, occasional meltdowns, etc. etc. Autism was a shorthand for a kind of fuzzy classification of this clustering. I can see the merit to the opposing argument, but I speculate that there will be some neurological commonality that is found, and this fuzzy classification will have been fruitful.

There's growing evidence of neuroanatomical differences between ASD and control populations in (replicable) studies, and I think further neurological study can be the only path forward to settling this debate as to whether autism needs to fragment, change shape, or be abolished as a concept entirely.

[skissane]

> There's growing evidence of neuroanatomical differences between ASD and control populations in (replicable) studies

I'm not sure how many of those studies actually have been replicated. My impression is that most of them fail to replicate.

And even those which do replicate, have two serious issues: (1) they only establish group differences not individual differences-even if on average people with ASD are more likely to have X, some ASD individuals will lack X and some non-ASD individuals will have it, meaning we can't actually say X=ASD; (2) most of them are flawed in only considering a single diagnosis (e.g. ASD vs "typically developing"), not multiple diagnoses (e.g. ASD-only vs ADHD-only vs OCD-only vs two or more of the above vs "typically developing"), which renders them incapable to answer questions about the scientific validity of the boundary between ASD and its related diagnoses

[h0l0cube]

Don't take it from me, take it from the first link on a cursory google search:

> Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are a heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental disorders that are diagnosed solely on the basis of behaviour. A large body of work has reported neuroanatomical differences between individuals with ASD and neurotypical controls. Despite the huge clinical and genetic heterogeneity that typifies autism, some of these anatomical features appear to be either present in most cases or so dramatically altered in some that their presence is now reasonably well replicated in a number of studies. One such finding is the tendency towards overgrowth of the frontal cortex during the early postnatal period.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5192959/

My interest in this thread is exhausted, so I'll agree to disagree with you on the biological deterministic aspects of autism, and let you dig down that rabbit hole.

My guess is that either you have no lived experience with autism, don't know many people in the autistic community, or have a lack of sensitivity to the very real nature of the disabilities it entails, even in the undiagnosed cohort—enthusiastic misdiagnoses aside. The difficulties from dyspraxia are of very real consequence, regardless of social interpretation. Stimming and regulating behaviours are a real thing, regardless of whether or not it is frowned upon in a social context. Meltdown, i.e., the consequences of not being able to regulate congruently to one's environmental stimulation and fatigue, is a real thing, whether it is accommodated for or not, in the same way that an epileptic fit is a real thing. One could say that a majority of the population is affected by this, and it doesn't change my argument. One could say that some people are so barely affected by their meltdowns, and it doesn't change my argument; they are still real adverse effects of real consequence experienced by people—actual disability—and no amount of equivocating makes them go away. There's perhaps people who are slightly hypochondriac and are looking to pathologize themselves, but this doesn't change my argument, because they aren't autistic, they're just making false claims. There's perhaps some practitioners who are either incompetent or corrupt, and this doesn't change my argument, because they are misdiagnosing.

> ASD-only vs ADHD-only vs OCD-only

Strictly my opinion: the kitchen-sinking of ADHD, OCD, ASD, dyspraxia, meltdowns etc. is due to the gaining traction on the idea that there's a neurological commonality that drives these behaviours, and their attendant comorbidity. Occam's razor.