Like for most other concepts, we don’t have rigorous statistics and measurements showing that there is a natural clustering of autism symptoms, (there are some non-rigorous ones though)
When various schools of psychotherapy, psychiatry and pediatrics sorted children with behavioral issues together, they often ended up with an autistic group,
Each school has their own diagnosis on what exactly is wrong in the case of autism, and presumably they aren’t all correct about all autistic people, so to know the True Reason autism is “a thing”, you’d first have to figure out which school is correct in its analysis of autism,
“Autism” as a concept exists because the different schools mostly agreed that the kids in question had a similar pathology, even if they disagreed on what the pathology is.
My current best guess is that:
Like for most other concepts, we don’t have rigorous statistics and measurements showing that there is a natural clustering of autism symptoms, (there are some non-rigorous ones though)
When various schools of psychotherapy, psychiatry and pediatrics sorted children with behavioral issues together, they often ended up with an autistic group,
Each school has their own diagnosis on what exactly is wrong in the case of autism, and presumably they aren’t all correct about all autistic people, so to know the True Reason autism is “a thing”, you’d first have to figure out which school is correct in its analysis of autism,
“Autism” as a concept exists because the different schools mostly agreed that the kids in question had a similar pathology, even if they disagreed on what the pathology is.