Exactly how many ways are there to get an autism diagnosis?

There’s a saying in autism circles that I really like: “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism”. I reckon I’ve met a few hundred in my time, and I can vouch for the fact that people with autism are a pretty mixed bunch.

This has a big influence on the way I think about autism and, increasingly, the way I conduct autism research. Rather than just trying to determine whether or not X (whatever X is) happens to be impaired in autism, my colleagues and I look at our group of participants with autism and try and work out which individuals have problems with X and what makes them different from the individuals with autism that don’t have a problem. This seems an eminently sensible approach to us. One that might actually tell us some useful stuff. But it doesn't always go down very well.