Not everyone needs the diagnosis, says Bob Seymour, while another reader says that denying individuals the label can be ignorant and dangerous
Matthew Belmonte is correct in decrying the autism label, but he does not go far enough: it can be a very serious handicap to be so labelled (Letters, 21 December).
Advancement in employment is generally easiest for people who are team players with interpersonal skills. When I discovered my own autistic traits 20 years ago, initially through identifying with Liane Holliday Willey’s book Pretending to be Normal, I soon realised that my 38-year career to that date had been critically dependent on cognitively superimposing neurotypical layers over my behaviour as far as possible.
