In some cases yes, they are expensive - years of person on person specialized therapy, and specialized environment/education. Depending on how much difficulty they have functioning.
It’s much easier to pretend it’s all a scam and not do anything, or penalize/force people to ‘act normal’. At least for insurance companies, teachers, employers, and often parents.
Which is why a lot of folks with ‘actual’ ADHD/Autism have a lot of PTSD from their childhoods. (And no, not a joke.) Severe, triggering, legit PTSD. Objective, causes the same physiological symptoms as those in war zones type PTSD. Except for it being around ‘weird’ things like school, childcare, interactions with their parents, teachers, peers, instead of when their buddy got blown up by an IED.
To make things even more complicated, persistent and repeated traumatic events that a person is powerless to prevent (usually in childhood, but not required) tends to cause Complex PTSD - which has a lot of overlap with ADHD and Autistic symptoms. Like 80-90% depending on which set of definitions one uses.
A really good way (in my experience) to get Complex PTSD is to be around someone like a parent/caregiver/partner with Antisocial Personality Disorder/NPD/BPD and suffer repeated adverse events because of it that they can’t escape. Something that if it’s a Mother doing it, Society will actively prevent someone from escaping.
Fun times, eh?
As to how to stop or get out of this? Who knows. A big underlying problem (and why society defers to the Mother in most cases here) is that there is no chance there will ever be enough resources to actually figure out the underlying truth for most of these situations.
That is because the real problem cases fundamentally work via manipulation and hiding abuses, so good luck. It would require an objective, unbiased expert (if such a thing is even possible) to follow the kid around 24/7 to see what is actually occurring. For months, or even years. And frankly, in my experience a large portion of scientists, engineers, medical doctors, nurses, police, special forces, and firefighters have backgrounds like this. So maybe this kind of thing is actually essential for society to function.
And regardless, solving this may be like solving the obesity crisis by getting everyone to run on treadmills and get fit or the like. That just ain’t happening.
Look at every thread about the subject on these boards: it's filled with people claiming to be "on the spectrum" (aren't we all?).
>nerfing autism...is a way to demonize effective interventions so insurance companies won't have to pay for them
What a bizarre conspiracy. Are treatments even expensive?