But now at 7 she doesn’t have ANY of those symptoms anymore. I don’t know if it was due to early therapies (sensory based OT and social/play therapy) or if she simply outgrew them. She still has several “quirks”. She still cries 1 – 2 times a day at school (although not for too long) and she’s still awkward in social situations. But she would probably not get a PDD-NOS diagnosis if she were to be evaluated now.

I’d like to think that services and supports aren’t a zero-sum game, as some seem to be suggesting here. Of course more disabled individuals deserve support, but so do so-called “higher functioning” individuals. We shouldn’t think of it as one group taking resources away from another. I think the truth is that diagnosis is fuzzy under the current system, and some degree of misdiagnosis is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to somehow ration diagnoses, or “undiagnose” people.

My partner was sort of “undiagnosed” with autism around the age of 5 or 6. I don’t think it was anything formal, just that his family seemed to think he’d grown out of it or something. Much less was known about the spectrum at that time. He was diagnosed with AS about fifteen years after that. Had his family realized the permanence of autism, maybe things would have been easier for him. I don’t get the need to “undiagnose” autism.

Disability Living Allowance in the UK is calculated not upon ones diagnosis but according to the degree of difficulty one has with various daily living tasks.

The diagnosis really only exists to give some foundation to the claim as to why such needs occur.

playing a game of who is worst is riducolous. I walk with a cane, that creates a different set of difficulties to someone who requires a wheelchair, but in each instance there is something that requires adaptation.

My mum for instance discovered at a certain point that using a wheelchair gave her more mobility and funtion than struggling on two crutches.

As I have pointed out, would anyone deny a diagnosis of diabetes to someone who was well controlled or epilepsy to someone who has not had a fit in years because the medication they take prevents it. The medication has not cured there epilepsy has it?

Epilepsy is perhaps even more invisible than HFA, in that most of the time there is no diminution in mental or physical capacity whatever, one is indistinguishable from ones peers, and yet epilepsy has a huge stigma about it.

A great number of people have autism traits, but does this mean that they all have a disability? The concept of neurodiversity suggests that they don’t.

Because a diagnosis is a passport to services (of limited availability) there needs to be some mechanism of deciding who is in most need.

Simon Baron-Cohen has put forward the extreme male brain theory of autism and some people think all men have autism traits. Should all men have a diagnosis?