Strong agree. I deal with a lot of self-diagnosed autism/ADHD in my work, and I would say that there's a wide variety of reasons someone will identify with a label, arguably more than the reasons for seeking a clinical dx. Sometimes the self-ID is just a “poor-man's diagnosis,” and frankly, the person is seeking (or would want to seek, if they had access to) a formal eval, and therefore the patient tends to treat it as one (i.e., behaving as if they have the diagnosis already). Alternatively, there are plenty of people who very much identify with one of these labels but have no desire to medicalize that identity, may not even agree with the standard diagnostic criteria for the label (or the validity of a clinical dx as the “proper” way of knowing who has a condition), etc. And every attitude between those extremes is also represented. Like Awais said, we have little-to-no data on actual impairment in these (sub)groups or whether they tend to actually meet diagnostic criteria (though in the studies I've done, rates of first-time autism diagnosis in a self-referred research evaluation population were about 30%; about matches the published rate in the Pitt adult clinic from Connor et al., 2019). So hard to say anything conclusively, other than many (the majority of?) adults who self-ID as autistic (and seek out a formal eval) probably have other diagnoses rather than ASD proper, though ASD is also not rare in that population.