Regular reminder that being an asshole is not a symptom of any form of neurodivergence. (You can replace “neurodivergent” with depressed, anxious, bipolar, etc. and the diagram works equally well)
ETA: social faux pas, awkwardness, and genuine symptoms of neurodivergence don’t make you an asshole. I shouldn’t have to say this? An “asshole” is someone who enacts a pattern of abusive, controlling, harassing, and/or harmful behavior with no remorse or concern for how other people are affected.
Self diagnosis is completely valid. I’m pretty sure NT people aren’t going around trying to be ND. At the end of the day if they relate to ND they probably are one. I think ND people are much more common than society wants us to believe
Prior to the 90s, I think your perspective is correct, that no one would go out of their way to claim a condition they did not have.
But the 90s blessed high functioning autism as Asperger’s, and a bunch of smart computer people at the same time started getting rich. The popular take away for the random person was that Asperger’s meant:
So now you had a condition that confers intelligence at a time when computer nerd was suddenly respectable, and a condition that allows one to fully cave to discomfort that almost everyone feels to some extent (though the intent was to describe people utterly incapable, the practical result has been a lot of people having normal levels of discomfort wallowing in it).
Plus the modern terminology of “typical” versus “divergent”, where people naturally want to be “divergent” (so long as they are divergent just like everybody they like) and people generally don’t like the sound of being “typical”.
Again, this is not the professional perspective, it’s the layman’s perspective that drives people to self-diagnose as a path to superiority and/or not dealing with fairly normal levels of discomfort when dealing with other people.