Comment by Aurornis
It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients.
Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.
> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.
Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.
> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
You are grossly over-diagnosing.
When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.
A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.
People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.