Heh. Well, if you call it "suffering"... I know, I know, figure of speech; but I take these things literally and personally I think the vast majority of any suffering comes from a hostile world, not from the autism.
There are a lot of people with what you call "subclinical" symptoms; that is, people who have a lot of autistic traits but can't be diagnosed because they don't have significant problems in life that are due to those traits. (Mind you, I said "problems" not "suffering"; there's a difference...) Anyway, I bet there are probably about ten times as many broader-autism-phenotype cases as there are diagnosable autism cases. So, that is a possibility even if you're not diagnosable.
This is me taking out some of the doctorspeak from the DSM criteria:
Quote:
Simplified AS criteria:
To be diagnosed AS, you must fulfill all of these five requirements:
1. You have problems with socialization that show up as at least two things on the following list:
-----You're really bad at using (or don't use) gestures, eye contact, body language, etc.
-----You're really bad at making friends your own age
-----You don't seek out contact with other people to share your achievements or interests
-----You don't mirror other people's emotions well, or don't keep up your end of a friendship
2. You show at least one of these behaviors:
-----Special interests, unusual in that they're either very intense or very narrowly focused
-----Sticking to strict routines that most people would consider "nonfunctional"
-----Repetitive physical behavior, like rocking, flapping, foot-tapping, etc. a lot more than most people
-----Focus on the details of objects, like parts of a toy; or focus on the details to the exclusion of the big picture
3. You are significantly impaired--have problems more than most people can be expected to have--in your social life, at work, or in some other important part of your life.
4. You have no speech delay--you used single words by age two and phrases by age three to communicate your own thoughts.
5. You don't have any developmental delay except in the area of socialization. Developmental delay means being far behind the average at doing things like taking care of yourself, learning the skills that most kids learn, etc. You were curious about your environment as a child, rather than being withdrawn.
If you fulfill all five criteria, then you can be diagnosed with Asperger's.
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There are, of course, other autism variants that cover things like what's mentioned above--speech delays, developmental delays, or just the PDD-NOS category for a random grab-bag of symptoms that doesn't fit into a specific diagnosis (PDD-NOS is the largest autism category currently) but still cause impairment.
The way I see it, if there's not significant impairment, then chances are you're BAP or else just old enough to have learned to compensate, and don't need a shrink for autistic traits. If there is, then you probably need help and should go ask for a diagnosis. The only time when I'd say significant impairment doesn't need a diagnosis is if you're already getting the help you need for some other diagnosis--say, ADHD, for example, or social anxiety disorder (both commonly found together with autism, incidentally).