I'm sure this is meant to be humorous, but it's a real thing. My son was diagnosed as "being on the spectrum" at the age of 3 (!?) because he was a huge nerd. Let me define that for you: he could read and understand complex technical manuals and apply the concepts, he could do double digit addition and subtraction in his head, he set all our DVRs for his shows, balancing hard disk space... I'm not some crazy parent who sits there trying to drill crap into a 3yo head, it's useless, he just was like that. What he would not do, however, is talk in any "normal" way. He would answer your question with a simple word, but never initiate. He would not talk about things he liked, or stuff he wanted to do, etc. He took toys apart and put them back together, but he didn't really have any fantasy activity with them. All these are warning signs on your yearly checkup list at the pediatrician.
So eventually we were "compelled" to take him to a specialist, and she diagnosed him. We were very reluctant, we knew there wasn't anything wrong with him, but we were getting that "or else we'll call CPS on you" vibe. So they diagnosed him as ASD: PDD-NOS, doctor speak for "fuck if we know". They prescribed a bunch of therapy which we declined, and miracle of miracles, like a light switch was turned on he started talking. And when he started talking, he started talking in long sentences, with big words and complicated ideas. He was "cured" and somehow manages normal life as well as any kid, but he still doesn't behave the same.
Autism has become the dumping grounds for any social behavior that lies outside the first standard deviation of the bell curve. It's especially obnoxious since it's being diagnosed lately with sociology, rather than actual science. No one did a brain scan or anything like that, it was all based on proto-pavlov dog experiments. The downside here is that, having grown up around autistic people, there really is such a thing and those people are not being well served by all this distraction. Money is being misspent on "easy' cases, rather than helping people who are really suffering.