Re: Is ALL online girl love just autism now?

In the past 40 years or so the definition of autism has been extended in a way that makes it more or less useless. 40 years ago, when I learned psychopathology, the statement "I am an autist" would have meant the person in question is definitely not autistic. It's a bit like the definition (or lack thereof) of schizophrenia in the US until the 1960s: under the influence of Freud ("a bad diagnostician", as Michel Onfray says in "Le Crépuscule d'une idole"), American psychiatrists did not use the strict diagnostic criteria laid down by Kraepelin, but diagnosed anything as schizophrenia that somehow looked like what they thought was schizophrenia (famous historical example: Charlie Parker's heroin withdrawal symptoms). I have the impression something similar is happening with autism today: lumping together all kinds of different conditions as a so-called "autism spectrum".