I read the recent comments from Uta Frith suggesting that autism may no longer be best understood as a spectrum, and that the definition may have broadened too far. And I understand, to a point, where that concern comes from. When something becomes too wide, systems struggle. Services struggle. Definitions become blurred, and support becomes inconsistent. I see that every day in the work I do.
But I also live on the other side of that question, and from where I stand, the issue does not feel like the spectrum has become too broad. It feels like the world has only just become wide enough to start seeing people like me.
I was not identified as autistic as a child. I learned how to exist in the world by watching, copying, and adapting. I learned how to perform communication rather than instinctively inhabit it. I learned how to hold eye contact just long enough, how to respond just quickly enough, how to appear “fine” in environments that were quietly overwhelming. From the outside, it worked. From the inside, it came at a cost.
What wasn’t seen were the hours of recovery after social interaction, the need to lie in the dark to reset my nervous system, the delayed processing that meant conversations always felt half a step ahead of me, the shutdowns where language disappeared completely, and the sensory overwhelm that could turn something as simple as noise, light, or texture into something physically unbearable. None of that was new when I was diagnosed. It was just unnamed.
So when I hear that the spectrum may now include too many people, I find myself asking a different question. Not “has autism become too broad?” but “who was excluded before?” Because for a long time, the definition of autism was narrow enough to miss huge groups of people, particularly women, people without learning disabilities, people who masked, and people who coped until they couldn’t anymore. Many of us were not absent from the data; we were absent from recognition.
The increase in diagnosis is often framed as expansion, but from lived experience, it feels much more like visibility. And there is a difference between those two things.
I also understand the concern about services. When more people are identified, systems that were not designed for that demand begin to strain. Thresholds tighten. Support becomes harder to access. People fall between categories. But that is not a problem created by the spectrum. It is a problem created by systems that were built around a narrower understanding of need.
Right now, many autistic people sit in a gap that is rarely acknowledged. They are too autistic to thrive in neurotypical environments, but not autistic enough to qualify for specialist services. That space is where distress grows. It is where burnout happens. It is where people are told, often repeatedly, that they are “not quite enough” for support, but “too much” for everything else.
From that perspective, narrowing the definition of autism does not solve the problem. It simply moves more people back into invisibility. And invisibility is not neutral. It has consequences for mental health, for access to care, and for how people understand themselves.
My diagnosis did not change who I was. It changed how I understood what I had been living with. It turned years of perceived personal failure into something coherent. It allowed me to make sense of patterns that had repeated across my life—burnout, overwhelm, shutdown, and the constant effort of trying to meet expectations that never quite aligned with how my brain worked.
Without that framework, the only explanation left was that I was simply not coping well enough with normal life, that I was, in some way, failing at being a person.
So when we question whether the spectrum has become too broad, I think we need to be careful about what we are really asking. Because if people like me sit outside that definition, then we do not disappear. We simply lose the language that helps us understand ourselves, and the recognition that allows others to understand us too.
And after a lifetime of trying to exist without that understanding, I can say this with some certainty: the problem was never that the spectrum became too broad. The problem was that, for a very long time, it was too narrow to see us at all.
Georgina, Trauma Ambassador