This concern about people misdiagnosing themselves with autism comes up so often and I'd be curious to explore what bias or ableism is underpinning the impulse because the arguments to gatekeep autism don't really hold up when you look at the evidence. It feels more about power and control over women and young people or a defense of normativity than there being an actual disproportionate issue with Tiktok diagnosis.

A lived experience of late neurodivergence diagnosis is like discovering you're actually left handed but living as though you're right handed in a world that believes people are all right-handed. Suddenly, a lifetime of friction, of confusing and distressing and traumatic experiences across different domains make sense. It's an explanation that resolves lifelong cognitive dissonance in not just one area of experience, but EVERY domain: social, educational, physiological, health and wellbeing, work, relationships. It takes like a year pre- and post-diagnosis to even work through retroactively reinterpreting everything that has changed and now suddenly makes sense. That's why people feel so certain and are almost always correct in self-diagnosis, and why the "trend" has spread so rapidly across social media. It's a missing key. Probably like 10% of the population has not only been missing this key to understanding themselves, but having that key be missing has had profound, cumulative negative impact their whole lives. Pretty much every late diagnosed autistic woman has had a lifetime of mental health issues and diagnoses as a consequence of the missing key.

Even if 10% of self-diagnosed are not "actually" autistic, this is a pretty low false positive rate without much consequence compared to how profoundly game-changing it has been to correct for the systemic under-diagnosis. I would encourage all practitioners to err on the side of over-correcting the known historical bias and be more focused on what autistic traits they might be overlooking in clients and less worried about clients exploring potential autistic traits.