She Thought Autism Explained Her Loneliness. Friends Showed Her It Didn't.

During the COVID lockdowns, Emma Camp was a lonely college student who had never quite found her social footing. By her own account, she had been an unhappy teenager, and like many students at the time, she was laid low by isolation.

Camp decided her loneliness had a medical explanation. She concluded that she had Asperger's, which she understood as a form of autism, and she found someone to diagnose her.

The search was entirely self directed. No parent, professor, or campus clinic sent her, and she has described the process as 100 percent her own idea.

At first, Camp said, the diagnosis felt like relief. She said the problems were "not my fault," not because she was "fundamentally weird or off-putting," but because of "this thing that was written in the stars."

She now uses that experience to make a broader point about therapy culture. She argues that American culture labels every form of distress, on the assumption that psychic pain cannot be taken seriously without a diagnosis.

That name brings what she calls validation, the rush of finally having an explanation for missed homework or missed jokes. But a diagnosis is supposed to be permanent, as fixed as eye color, and she says it often gives a permanent name to a temporary problem, like trouble adjusting to college.

Then, Camp said, the problem disappeared. Almost as soon as she had adopted "this identity that was supposed to explain a problem I was having," she hit her stride socially and found a group of friends she liked and who liked her back.

Even the traits she had taken as symptoms faded. Camp said she "no longer felt awkward around people," no longer felt that she missed jokes, and became, as she put it, a more socially competent person.

Over the next year, the conclusion settled in. The label did not make sense, and as Camp put it, "I just kind of needed to grow up a little bit."