I wonder if there is anyone who could be considered 100% "normal," if you examined every single tendency that person had.

I suspect that integral to the human condition is the need by each and every human being to struggle against various dysfunctional tendencies. We all have dysfunctional tendencies. I suppose a case could be made for any human being that this particular human being is living with some form of a disorder.

That even seems to be a direction we are moving in - this attributing every difficulty a person has in life to that person being affected by some diagnosis. There was a time when we believed that all men were sinners and that all encountered difficulty in life due to that. Medicine is replacing religion as the provider of a rationale for human shortcomings and failures. Your kid is the worst reader in the 2nd grade? Then he must have "dyslexia," a fancy sounding term from Greek that simply boils down to mean difficulty reading. So he has difficulty reading because he has "difficulty reading disorder." Oh . . . what an insight! That's way preferable to your kid being a little slow, or maybe just not liking reading. We want everything deficient in our natures to be the result of a clinical syndrome. I've always tended to be late for appointments. Am I disorganised or lacking in self-discipline? Heck no! Those would be character flaws. I prefer to conceptualize my chronic tardiness as "procrastination disorder." It has to do with neuronal synapses in my brain and the neurochemicals bouncing around in there. I probably deserve applause for managing to show up anywhere at anytime. What we're doing is engaging in tautology, whereby we imagine we have some deep insight that isn't really an insight at all. It's a word game.

I'm not opposed to identifying some problems as clinical syndromes. Obviously, some kids truly are "retarded" - a perfectly decent word that originally simply meant "delayed," as in "developmental delay." But we have elasticised diagnostic categories to the point that just about anyone can qualify for at least a few diagnoses. (Nobody has just one anymore. If you've got one, you probably have some "comorbid" conditions.)

My point, germane to the O.P.'s original query is this: What, Clairerobin, is your point. Suppose we all agree, just for the sake of argument, that - yes, your husband probably has an autistic spectrum disorder. What are you going to do with that finding? If you search hard enough, I'll bet you could find a clinical analyst somewhere who will concur in bestowing that label upon your husband. Then what? How would that be useful to you? I'm genuinely interested to know where you are looking to go with this.