bulldg4life: Most of them were just your standard geek/nerd, but one or two were off the wall.

...and that's why it's called a "spectrum disorder". By the way, is everybody on Fark aware that a great many mental health professionals think that DSM-5 is a crock of shiat? It medicalizes a lot of perfectly normal behavior (like grieving the death of somebody close) while discarding established, valid diagnoses like Asperger's.

Pretty soon, the psychiatric profession is going to look even more stupid than it does now as its diagnoses increasingly get overtaken by real science, replacing the subjective nonsense and grand theories with the actual neurological, physical and chemical correlates of mental disorders. It's going to turn out that in a lot of cases, distinct diagnoses turn out to be different manifestations of a single underlying problem; while other common diagnoses turn out to be several different disorders that happen to have similar external manifestations.

And in the future we're going to look back on the last half-century of psychiatric diagnosis and practice with the same disdain that many people regard the half-century before that.

FirstNationalBastard: However, it's also the Kim Kardashian of psychiatric disorders... everyone has it, and it's all over the place, especially if you go on the internet looking for it.

This. When smart, middle-class parents have a child who, let's be kind, reverts to the mean, they often look for a diagnosis. In my generation it was "dyslexia", which was suddenly rampant. And of course, in exactly the same way, this doesn't diminish the fact that there are people who really do have dyslexia, and that it often goes under-diagnoses. Which brings us neatly to...

filter: No- mental health pros actually READ and understand how the DSM works. If 5 of 7 symptoms need to be present....

...the problem with psychiatric diagnosis right there. It depends on externally-observed symptoms, often vague, often subjective, often required to be present to a certain degree (the words "clinically significant" or "pervasive" turn up a lot, with no objective definitions) and to persist over an extended period of time, sometimes self-reported, to be considered a symptom, and in many cases the weasel get-out clause at the end "and it's not some other equally vaguely defined disorder". Is it any wonder that "mental health pros actually read and understand how the DSM works" and still regularly can't agree on a diagnosis, let alone the most effective form of treatment?

For example, here's the DSM-IV criteria for Asperger's. The very first word is "Qualitative", and the entire diagnosis is subjective. Do some people clearly have Asperger's? Yes. Do a lot more people fall into a grey area where "mental health pros" will reasonably disagree where 2, 3 or more symptoms are present or absent? Also yes.

/I was in therapy for a while. Then I quit and got a proper job.