I mean, there is no "neat freak" trait; that's something people who don't have OCD use because they think that's part of what it is. It's more intrusive thoughts about contamination, and there isn't a spectrum of those traits. Like you can't really "train" yourself to not be contaminated, in the way autism people talk about training to deal with social conditions. Trying to argue against it reinforces the behavior. It happens despite you knowing its totally irrational
I think I get BAP if you mean "the condition isn't severe enough to significantly impair your life," but I can see similarities between my checking behavior and people suffering the same but worse; I'm just fortunate enough that it doens't occur frequently. The talk about autism though is a different kind of talk; the moderate or severe sufferers are different.
Like the person I mention never got better or could use coping stuff; he would if anything just end up unable to talk possibly because he was medicated sometimes. I understand I'm not a clinician, but there's a lot of "spectrum" behavior in things now; you have gender spectrums, sexual spectrums (asexual, demisexual, sapiosexual), and I'm not sure the concepts aren't just medicalizing normal variation or individual temperament. I wish i could be doing this for me, if anything.
There is a continuum of intrusive thoughts – the continuum of frequency and intensity of those thoughts, the continuum of how easy it is to move on from them, etc. And a single individual can move back and forward along that continuum over time, in response to life events, development/maturity/ageing, and other factors. We say they have OCD if (a) they have enough frequency/intensity/etc of those intrusive thoughts, (b) the intrusive thoughts are sufficiently impairing in their everyday life, (c) there isn't some other disorder which better explains those intrusive thoughts. We draw a line on the continuum, and say this side is "OCD" (or maybe some other disorder), and the other side isn't, but that line is inevitably a subjective clinical judgement call
> The talk about autism though is a different kind of talk; the moderate or severe sufferers are different.
You mention "moderate" and "severe" – what about "mild ASD"? I guess what used to be called Aspergers syndrome?
> Like the person I mention never got better or could use coping stuff
You can't draw a lot of conclusions from a single person. You can't say that people with milder, less noticeable symptoms don't exist.
Are you familiar with the concept of broad autism phenotype (BAP)? A person who has more autistic traits than the average person, but not enough traits (or are not sufficiently impaired by those traits) for an ASD diagnosis, has BAP. Someone who thinks they–or someone else–has ASD in the absence of a formal diagnosis–if they are wrong about the person having ASD, they probably are actually picking up on the person's BAP traits.
And how does the experience of BAP and ASD differ? Well, they are just different positions on a continuum–people with BAP have similar experiences to people with ASD, albeit with less intensity and/or less impairment. And the line between them is unclear and subjective, different clinicians draw it in different places–whether you end up with the diagnosis can depend on factors that have nothing to do with you personally, such as the diagnostic practices and clinical culture of the clinicians you end up seeing. (And the line is moving – a lot of people diagnosed with ASD today would not have received that diagnosis if they'd presented with the same symptoms 20 or 30 years ago.)
Stressful environments often exacerbate people's autistic traits and interfere with their own strategies for managing them. A series of stressful life events can lead a person to a situation in which they end up being diagnosed, whereas if their life had taken a more leisurely turn they might never have been diagnosed – even if their innate traits are exactly the same in the two scenarios. One of the key criteria for diagnosing ASD (criterion D) is clinically significant dysfunction, and dysfunction is highly environmentally determined (unsupportive environments result in far more dysfunction than supportive ones given the same underlying condition)
> If it's significant enough, it's not just someone being brisk or unempathetic in the same way OCD doesn't mean being a neat freak.
BAP is subclinical ASD. Subclinical OCD is also a subject of study, although unlike BAP it doesn't have a distinctive name. A lot of "neat freak" people may actually have subclinical OCD. And subclinical OCD and clinical OCD are on a continuum with each other, with a subjective and varying dividing line between them, just as subclinical and clinical ASD are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26537443
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451328
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26312895