A Symptomatic and Cosymptomatic Picture of Autism

This article introduces and attempts to summarize some descriptive clinical-medical aspects of the autism condition. The purpose is to give a common knowledge base of what are pathological symptoms, characteristics of autism and secondary and related pathologies. In this picture, it will become clear that no symptom is single or isolated but the damage concerns a circuit, a higher function, a more complex system. Focusing on one aspect, one symptom and a single set of symptoms distracts from a general, overall picture. We have chosen not to unify them in order to also allow an articulated understanding of the characteristic, symptomatological, and psychological-emotional picture. We have chosen, methodologically, to describe, as and when possible, all these aspects in the words of autistic persons, leaving them to tell not so much the clinical symptom described from the outside, but how that symptom is experienced and described by the person.