> but personally I don't have an issue calling extreme autism a disease - people who have that usually can't speak and often can't feed themselves - that doesn'

> but personally I don't have an issue calling extreme autism a disease - people who have that usually can't speak and often can't feed themselves - that doesn't really have an equivalent in your analogies. People who take issue with autism being described as a disease would generally believe that most autistic people live close-to-normal lives and simply aren't recognised as being autistic. This comes back to the question of whether there ought to be a separate label for those who are severely disabled by their cognitive differences vs. those who are more able to function in general society despite similar cognitive differences. But it does seem to be the case that there is a large subgroup of society that thinks qualitatively differently to the general population (but similarly to each other), has to work hard to compensate for that in order to fit in, and often has social and mental health difficulties both due to the effort of maintaining that facade and because of the backlash they get when they fail to consistently do so.