Absolutely everybody with maybe the exception of some well-sorted zen monks is crazy. It’s one of those things we learn in the wacky ward (or in my case, a partial-hospitalization program). Imagine a line going from healthy-brain to maximum-damaged brain (where ASD folk at the high end of the spectrum fall), they run:

• 0. Healthy
• 1. Neuroses (personal conflicts: I like ice cream but I also want to be lean). The best of us are here. But that’s few.
• 2. Personality disorders (APD, BPD, NPD, Being Donald Trump, probably). Note this is not too damaged, just in a way that makes psycho-killers
• 3. Psychosis, not to be confused with psychopathy which is not a psychology term but a forensic term. This is where BPD, Major Depression and so on go.
• 4. Schizophrenia, which literally means fragmented mind
• 5. Autism, according to the 1990s (pre-DSM-V) model, when it was called Autism and not ASD.

Since (according to my psychiatrists, ASD is a symptom of a high density of neurons that lead to crossed wires a lot, called kindling. When it takes place in the motor-function part of your brain, you end up with epilepsy.

ALSO: In since the industrial age and the end of extended family homesteads and the beginning of nuclear families, our resilience to domestic abuse has plummeted. (When there were aunts and uncles and grandmas around to run to when dad got drunk and handsy, it helped us manage our mental health as kids. Now we don’t have that support, and parenting has gotten worse as industrial and clerical jobs demand more of our time, so that by the 1970s, no one is actually around to parent (or to do research for civic duties). So we all are suffering from intergenerational insanity. At least it is my hypothesis.