It's also worth noting - the concept is bottom-up, practitioner-driven, while the experiments that get at theory of mind are top-down, academic-driven. Theory

It's also worth noting - the concept is bottom-up, practitioner-driven, while the experiments that get at theory of mind are top-down, academic-driven. Theory of mind would exist even if it stopped showing up in academic papers, only because it makes sense to have a shorthand for "my patient keeps complaining about uncomfortable social situations, and after I dig in, it turns out they were missing important social cues". That was known by therapists long before we started trying to operationalize theory-of-mind issues for experiments. It's really, really tough to design an experiment for this, because it's not super easy to design a multiple-choice questionnaire that will predict if you'll have difficulty understanding subtle social cues. It's a thing that a face-to-face interview would uncover, but not necessarily someone's written output. You can also run experiments where an investigator interviews the person and records when they miss a social cue, but even then lots of high-functioning autistic people would be able to pass that even if they genuinely have trouble interpreting social cues on a regular basis.