Comment by grayhatter

"Requires support" does not mean you are completely incapacitated without that support, nor does it mean you will always require the same support. If your life shifted from surviving ok-ish to thriving and improving when you found tools to help yourself, to me that sounds like you were meaningfully incapacitated before.

There are many conditions that a key point of diagnosis is impact to your life, and that's a conversation to have with the practitioner doing the diagnosis. It's a starting point not a bar, unfortunately nuance gets lost a lot once it's talked about in the social sphere/used as common parlance.

I think it's because it did kind of used to mean that. It described people that couldn't mask, couldn't totally function in society, couldn't have the kind of job depicted in the Autism Simulator. It's been expanded officially and colloquially which may not have been the right direction with the terminology. I think the DSM and the approach of trying to follow and fit in with more concretely diagnosable medical conditions may be considered harmful and too rigid.

For more mild and gray-area cases, it's really more akin to personality and it should be about understanding the particular combination of traits or symptoms of an individual. I wouldn't be officially diagnosed with OCD, or depression, or BPD, or maybe even ADD, but I can relate to all of those on some level and I feel like learning about them helps me understand myself better (with a grain of salt just like any health thing). It doesn't make me go around telling people I'm disabled and how they need to accommodate or support me, that's just narcissism.