I think most things exist on a spectrum, though it is better modeled by a much higher order feature space and the spectrums we talk about day to day are stereot

I think most things exist on a spectrum, though it is better modeled by a much higher order feature space and the spectrums we talk about day to day are stereotypes made to easily explain this, because a 1d scale going from 'no x at all' to 'so much x they can't function day to day' is much easier than a 3000d space with different factors that barely map to common everyday concepts. Any attempt to diagnose mental disorders is an attempt to create simple classifications that don't really exist. Much like how species don't exist. Pick yourself and any animal out there. Now imagine a chain of you holding hands with your mother who holds hands with her mother, going all the way back to a single common ancestor. Many species exist along these chains, but these are all fictional groups we use to classify the N number of creatures, with no guaranteed way to map all N to their species. It isn't like atoms, where any atom, even theoretical ones which might one day be created in a lab, can be directly mapped to a single element (maybe as an isotope, but still belonging to that element). It has been fun watching AI discussions in feature space start to give more rigor to these ideas, as I've questioned them going back to when I first learned about the Kinsey scale and asked "why does it go from 1 to 7 as natural numbers instead of from 0 to 1 with any possible real number, and why only 2 dimensions instead of many more". Or was it 0 to 6. I've done forgot the details.