On the contrary, my experience with autism is interventions which simply treated me as if I had a mental age which was maybe 5+ years behind my actual age. Sin

On the contrary, my experience with autism is interventions which simply treated me as if I had a mental age which was maybe 5+ years behind my actual age. Since about age 7, I was actively resisting my autism treatment, and by age 9 I started to do so in a more deliberate way where I tried to appeal to the bureaucracy, to no avail since the school had no legal right to deny me the treatment that I nominally needed. It was scaled back only by age 11, and never totally stopped until adulthood. "Autism" as a diagnosis sort of prescribes people be treated in standardised discriminatory ways from early childhood for their nominal best interests, rather than simply giving you a set of advice you can pick and mix from. This is likely to result in homogenous and harmful treatment in practice. I'm also DEEPLY sceptical of autism I.E. clinically significant differences in social behaviour all being caused by some unified biological cause, given the decades long failure to find this smoking gun, my conclusion is that DSM-V categorisations are a social construction which don't map 1:1 with what is going on biologically. The more I learn about the sheer variance autistics really have in symptoms, and how we see clusters of symptoms like insomnia or digestive issues which don't even appear on the DSM-V at all, the more convinced I get that autism is really more than 1 thing. We even know about things like fragile X syndrome, which most autistics don't have, but which reliably causes a high incidence of autism. The project which seems to have the most momentum in overhauling DSM-V taxonomy is the RDOC framework. I honestly think that autism is multiple overlapping conditions is downright obvious, and I think the main reason it isn't taken more seriously is that Autism has become a useful brand.