> Like generally there's a lot of disability chic or identity these days; but moderate autism makes it incredibly hard to act in daily life in the same way moderate OCD does.
Are you familiar with the concept of broad autism phenotype (BAP)? A person who has more autistic traits than the average person, but not enough traits (or are not sufficiently impaired by those traits) for an ASD diagnosis, has BAP. Someone who thinks they–or someone else–has ASD in the absence of a formal diagnosis–if they are wrong about the person having ASD, they probably are actually picking up on the person's BAP traits.
And how does the experience of BAP and ASD differ? Well, they are just different positions on a continuum–people with BAP have similar experiences to people with ASD, albeit with less intensity and/or less impairment. And the line between them is unclear and subjective, different clinicians draw it in different places–whether you end up with the diagnosis can depend on factors that have nothing to do with you personally, such as the diagnostic practices and clinical culture of the clinicians you end up seeing. (And the line is moving – a lot of people diagnosed with ASD today would not have received that diagnosis if they'd presented with the same symptoms 20 or 30 years ago.)
Stressful environments often exacerbate people's autistic traits and interfere with their own strategies for managing them. A series of stressful life events can lead a person to a situation in which they end up being diagnosed, whereas if their life had taken a more leisurely turn they might never have been diagnosed – even if their innate traits are exactly the same in the two scenarios. One of the key criteria for diagnosing ASD (criterion D) is clinically significant dysfunction, and dysfunction is highly environmentally determined (unsupportive environments result in far more dysfunction than supportive ones given the same underlying condition)
> If it's significant enough, it's not just someone being brisk or unempathetic in the same way OCD doesn't mean being a neat freak.
BAP is subclinical ASD. Subclinical OCD is also a subject of study, although unlike BAP it doesn't have a distinctive name. A lot of "neat freak" people may actually have subclinical OCD. And subclinical OCD and clinical OCD are on a continuum with each other, with a subjective and varying dividing line between them, just as subclinical and clinical ASD are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26537443
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451328
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26312895