[AlexandrB]

> "if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism"

Isn't this true for just about any condition? It's not like people with ADHD or depression all behave exactly the same. I understand the urge to avoid categorizing people too broadly, but at the same time making the "taxonomy" of a condition hyperspecific is contradictory to having the label in the first place.

If saying "I have autism" has no descriptive power because this could mean a million different things, it seems like the term needs to be retired or narrowed to a specific set of behaviors/challenges.

[crisply5706]

Keep in mind that the current state of our knowledge of autism and other neurological conditions is still extremely new. Just 30 years ago, you would have been told that only young white boys exhibit autism.

There is debate within the autism community about ditching the catch-all term "autism", but I don't expect it to go anywhere. Broad labels like that are useful. I can tell a random person that I'm autistic and they generally understand that my "abnormal" behavior is innocuous. It's less useful to give a stranger a 30 minute lecture on my individual needs and challenges.

Read up on the controversy around asperger's and the "high/low functioning" dichotomy. These were standard measures for a long time and have only been dropped in the last ten years or so.

[ZeroGravitas]

I've heard it used exactly that way for ADHD.

But more widely, there's a bunch of conditions of varying severity that might be caused by being in a car crash. That doesn't make "I was in a car crash" a bad answer to "what happened to your leg/eye/speech", it's just a fact.