"Autism" winds up being a catch-all category for all kinds of social challenges. The label is frequently a means to largely write someone off because real help would be too much work.
One thing you frequently see in severe cases is faceblindness. Faceblindness is itself seriously socially impairing. All other things being equal, a faceblind person will have greater social challenges than a non-faceblind person.
If you can identify the myriad specific things going on with a socially impaired person and address each of them, that's usually more effective than calling their social impairment "autism".
An interesting thing I picked up on recently when I attended a conference by and for professionals working with autistic people (mainly children):
There was a study which was comparing autistic people to children with attachment disorders. The study seemed to show that the two groups of children did indeed exhibit some similar symptoms.
The analysis given by the person giving the talk (which I thought was pretty insightful) was that most of the children with attachment issues had gone through traumatic experiences (abuse, neglect, etc) earlier in their lives. Most of the children in the autistic group had not obviously had such traumatic experiences. But that perhaps the autistic children were showing similar symptoms because there were aspects of everyday life that they found traumatic or difficult to deal with.
My dad was 40 when I was born. He was literally old enough to be my grandfather and he was, in fact, a year younger than my ex husband's paternal grandmother. My ex and I are the same age and graduated high school together.
My dad grew up on a farm. He lived for a time in a log cabin with a dirt floor.
When I moved home with my two teenaged sons during my divorce, my parents' house was much quieter than we were used to. My parents expected things to be quiet at night so they could sleep. No, they weren't going to buy a white noise machine or something.
No one ever suggested my parents had sensory issues or anything like that. They were merely old and grew up in quieter circumstances and no one acted like their expectations were maladapted or pathological or something.
I've arranged my life to be a lot quieter than it used to be. My sons are much more able to function "normally" now that our lives are quieter. I sometimes forget how poorly they handle noise and crowds because we are so rarely in such situations. Then we go to a restaurant or something and they can't deal and I'm reminded again of just how difficult they can be.
I have come to believe that the world has changed and human children weren't designed for the busy, noisy, crowded world full of sensory overload that is our new norm. But instead of recognizing that the world has changed, we label children as defective who don't deal well with this noisy, crowded, busy, crazy world that didn't exist when my father was growing up less than a hundred years ago when most people lived and worked on farms.
It is in the lifetimes of my children that this statistic changed and now most people live in cities. But that's very new. For the vast majority of the history of the human race, we were mostly tribal or agrarian. City dwellers were the exception, not the rule.
There's a book called The Reason I Jump written by a non-verbal autistic boy (dictated by pointing at a printed keyboard), where he describes being able to understand most things (except at times where he is overloaded by sensory stimuli), but is often unable to control his response as he wishes.
This has lead me to believe that sensory-motor differences may be the primary difference between autistic and neurotypical people.
Yes. I wrote my thesis on creating a piece of autism technology to teach people what it was like to have Autism. And through my work I came to the same conclusion.
Many people on the autistic spectrum find their sensory issues traumatic. I've interviewed a fair few of them and it sounded awful. It wouldn't surprise me if there's correlation. Because the two are quite possibly linked, especially for DTD rather than PTSD.
One thing you frequently see in severe cases is faceblindness. Faceblindness is itself seriously socially impairing. All other things being equal, a faceblind person will have greater social challenges than a non-faceblind person.
If you can identify the myriad specific things going on with a socially impaired person and address each of them, that's usually more effective than calling their social impairment "autism".