This is such an interesting perspective. It sounds like you believe the diagnosis of autism is an obvious yes or no, and there is no journey toward diagnosis; no grey area, no 'maybe' before landing on certainty. May I ask how old you were when you were diagnosed?
I don't understand. Diagnosis is done by a medical professional with training to do so. It is yes or no.
I don't know what you mean by journey toward diagnosis. In my case, my primary care physician asked if I had autism and recommended that I get assessed by a professional. I did that and was diagnosed with autism.
There is "maybe" before and after diagnosis. Before diagnosis, there was no certainty at all. Doctors can be wrong about things so some uncertainty remains afterwards. What I said is that people should not attempt to diagnose themselves and say that they have autism. People cannot diagnose themselves with any condition, especially complicated neurological ones, because they lack an outside perspective and expertise. An assessment from a professional is needed to have any certainty at all.
As an aside, if you are surprised to see someone with autism failing to see "grey" areas that are obvious to you, I recommend that you look up black and white or dichotomous thinking in autism.
The author of this book seems to think that autism is not a medical problem, and is instead an identity to be adopted. They are against diagnosis by professionals. I don't agree with any of that.
In any case I regret posting my original message in this thread because I didn't even read all of the book. It made me mad before the end of the introduction and I stopped reading after a few chapters and threw it in the trash where I think it belongs. I also wish I hadn't posted a message that could antagonize half the people in this forum. There is no point in doing that and I really value the posts of a few members that are not officially diagnosed.
Since I have unwisely decided to post in this thread again, I will drop a couple of quotes from the introduction. (I went back to see why it made me mad).
“He confessed to me that he’d recently been assessed for Autism. I had just completed my PhD in social psychology, so he wanted to know if I had any knowledge about Autism Spectrum Disorder.
“Sorry, I really don’t know about that,” I told him. “I don’t study people with mental illnesses; my research is on the social behavior of ‘normal’ people.”
The author admits in the introduction that they have no relevant training for writing a book about autism. Definitely not for diagnosing autism in themself or others.
“When my cousin told me all this, I felt dread. I didn’t want any of it to be true because in my mind, Autism was a shameful, life-ruining condition. It made me think of people like Chris, an uncoordinated, “cringey” Autistic kid I’d gone to school with whom nobody had treated well. Autism made me think of withdrawn, prickly TV characters like Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, and the Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon. It called to mind nonverbal children who had to wear big clunky headphones to the grocery store and were viewed as objects rather than people. Though I was a psychologist, all I knew about Autism was the broadest and most dehumanizing of stereotypes. Being Autistic would mean I was broken.”
This is ableism. The author holds themself above others with symptoms of autism that they don't have. People that have autism symptoms that the author has described as dehumanizing stereotypes are unlikely to enjoy this book.
