Making up autism: can reading philosopher Ian Hacking help us with the neurodiversity and overdiagnosis debate?

Summary Philosopher Ian Hacking noted that people respond to being placed in categories – setting up an iterative process that leads to (sometimes radical) changes in the features used to diagnose group membership. Hacking called this process making up people, and the interactions that were its underlying mechanism he called looping effects, which he saw as an important means both to advocacy and overdiagnosis. Hacking was sceptical of the idea of an autistic spectrum, not least because it carried a risk of overdiagnosing people with few symptoms. These are important messages for the current debate about diagnosis in autism.