My take as a psychologist. Myth #1: It is partly a diagnosis issue but that will not be solved by waving a spectrum wild-card. Strictly all mental-health disor

My take as a psychologist. Myth #1: It is partly a diagnosis issue but that will not be solved by waving a spectrum wild-card. Strictly all mental-health disorders are present in a normal state in the general population. That goes for mania, depression, oscillations between the two, lack of empathy, anxiety, and even psychosis (e.g. it would be very unhealthy to not be somewhat paranoid these days, dreams are necessary hallucinations). The inability to fluidly shift among these many ways of dealing with reality, following the circumstances is, in my own personal book, the problem. Past a certain degree of rigidity, that itself fosters behaviors, we have a problem and often the person is aware of that. That ties in with Myth #2. In my experience, it's not lack of empathy but a deficit in the ability to intuitively project into an other. A very large proportion of our interactions and behaviors rests on intuition and subconscious processing. I often compare autism to flying instruments. Try it and you'll very quickly get a clue of what it feels like to lack this intuitive processing. The sad and hard thing is that autistic people do suffer from that and are often driven crazy not by the autistic thing but by the, secondary, suffering. For adolescents. it's even worse: they fly instruments in a storm. Myth #3: So it really isn't about normalizing but about increasing flexibility. And reducing suffering is pretty much a pre-requisite towards that. Even in Aspies, this suffering is sometimes so great that it reminds me of homosexuals before the invention of the "coming out".