>pop psych

It is not "pop-psych", it is reality.

These are just labels we apply to buckets of symptoms. The underlying problems and biological differences that can cause these buckets of symptoms probably will be found, and then we can re-categorize things quite a bit. My bet is we do this within the next couple decades.

What causes difficulty is that actual symptoms of one of these buckets can cause behaviors and coping strategies that look like other ones.

Another issue is that these symptoms are not specific. What one neurodivergent person means by "I have sensory issues" is vastly different from another neurodivergent person, and your psych health provider will dig into those specifics and try and tease out which label fits the best, or whether it's even an example of that symptom. How those symptoms affect you is the entire point.

>I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.

And you have that same feeling towards "blind" or "deaf" right? Since a lot of blind people struggle to lead "normal" lives but there are accomplished blind software devs right here on HN

Consider how many people live life with some sort of mild delusion and yet are perfectly functional 99% of the time. The brain is complicated and cannot ever be reduced to single dimensions like that, and it is weirdly good at still functioning when part of it is broken in some way, like with Broca's area or Phineas Gage.

Yes, "syndrome" and "disorder" are vague labels that don't have hard cutoffs or any test you can objectively run. That's the point of those words. When you have a hard test you can run, it becomes a "disease".

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whatevertrevor a day ago | parent [-]

I also wonder if we kinda screwed ourselves by expanding pre-existing labels for disorders that appeared similar, instead of using a mixin pattern of describing the spectrum. So you could have a Photosensitivity and Social Inertness "Disorder" instead of people constantly debating whether your combination of symptoms is "bad enough" to be called Autism.

With Autism, as noted elsewhere in this thread, a general social understanding of it is required to help normalize environments that don't exclude autistic people. Having specific labels could, on the one hand, help bring focus towards the specific needs of those people. On the other hand, it's harder to convince people of a 100 different neurodiverse profiles than one...

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pcthrowaway 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Honestly it's difficult to expect people to communicate all the things in the bucket that might apply to them. Naming the bucket is easier for a lot of purposes.

	▲	whatevertrevor 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I get that. On the other hand, by making the buckets smaller, you're forced to specify the corresponding phenomena a lot more. Which might actually help people understand what applies and what doesn't, better. Understanding something is pretty much a prerequisite to communicating it. EDIT: I misread your comment earlier, ignore the above paragraph. I definitely get how exhausting it might be to list off everything. I suppose I feel the Autism label is too big at the moment to communicate effectively though. See the following, I think it still applies. It also helps people on the other end. If someone says they have "Misophonia, Aural sensitivity, and Rejection Sensitivity" I would understand a lot more about their situation than if they simply said they're mildly Autistic.