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But is there not an element of benefit from the reduced possibility for misinterpretation or miscommunication of thoughts? The professional diagnosticians don't get to follow you around everywhere, and don't know your every thought and emotion; thus, they have to rely on what you tell them, plus whatever relevant characteristics can be detected through current brain scanning technology. When you consider that one of the autistic hallmarks is a significant deficit in interpersonal conversation skills, the external diagnosis process has it's own noteworthy faults as well. On a more proverbial level, people have enthusiastically and empirically self-analyzed themselves throughout history, regardless of whether or not they had an all encompassing term to describe their observations. Does someone really need a doctor to tell them they have greater attention deficits than their peers, or that they're experiencing a major depressive episode, or that they have a drug problem? Same shit, different category.
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Reduced possibility for miscommunication? You hold your brain in too high regard, which is amusing given your insistence that it has particular problems. The human brain is rife with ways of getting things wrong.
How often does someone we know tell us to stop fidgeting or grinding our teeth or some other peculiar activity that we don't even notice we're doing? How frequently do they point things our about ourselves and/or our behaviour that even we had not noticed? Our perspective of normality is not only skewed, but almost entirely blocked from our view.
We know what we think, or at least, we think we do. I don't know how any of us could possibly prove that. But we have nothing to compare it to at all. Trained professionals don't know what we think, but they can determine the way we operate through various means, and since that's from the outside they
can make comparisons. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'll hang my bets on it being a damn slight more useful than a self-diagnosis of cognitive disorder. Doing so is the same crap people did for years before the advent of science, and continued doing afterwards mistaking it for science.
No one is adept at deceiving us than ourselves. Perhaps you want this to be true, to hang your problems on an explanation, or you don't, but you're sufficiently pessimistic or hypochondriac to see all your problems in that diagnosis. I don't want to say that either of these are true for you, nor that you don't sit far enough along the autistic spectrum to warrant a diagnosis. But I am saying that there is a great deal of confirmation bias present in the way you reached this conclusion. A conclusion that may be right, but you should not be satisfied reaching any conclusion through faulty means.
Get a proper diagnosis, and let them know when you do that you have read up on this stuff. You're in a position to artificially skew some of the results now.