Nowadays if a child is fidgety and energetic people (teachers, psychiatrists etc) want to get them tested for ADHD and put them on ritalin to fix the 'problem', whereas previously we'd just view it as a quirk and make sure that kid had some time to tire themselves out.
I'm not sure why we're less tolerant now, my guess is an overworked education system and teachers (in the UK anyway). It's harder to just ignore quirks when you've massive class sizes.
Stonewall was 1969; gender-fluidity, androgyny, "glam" etc were a big part of 70s and early 80s pop. I do agree that there's a big fight between second-wave feminists and trans people going on at the moment.
Look at photographs of secretly female soldiers - to the modern eye it is obvious enough to serve as documentation but then her comrades didn't know until after injury or death because they expected women in skirts and dresses not uniforms.
For people with mental illness, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to hide their symptoms and appear "normal" in public. It's almost a prerequisite to be able to hold down a job or even go out in public without being ostracized. The original article refers to this as "masking".
What happens is as the underlying condition worsens, the victim simply expends more and more energy into hiding those symptoms. To outsiders, there is no perceptible change to the victim's behavior or condition. When the victim finally reaches the point of exhaustion, the collapse appears to come out of nowhere, or even to be faked.
Basically, the public expects to see a set of symptoms that are steady, or increase gradually over time. What you see in practice looks like normal, healthy behavior for months or years at a time, punctuated by dramatic breakdowns. (Or, in an effort to mask to the very end, the victim may abruptly disappear into hiding with or without notice until their symptoms are manageable again.)
If there's a TLDR for this, it's that, from the outside, mental illness looks very different from what you've been conditioned to expect, and it's not surprising that you interpret it as a form of hypochondria.
Blaming moms for autistic kids is how it used to be done. It did not helped kids nor moms. Kids and moms being silent and accepting blame did nothing to solve their problems.
Why would someone "raising victim flag" bothered you?
By percentage, of the people out there claiming ASD? Negligible. It's not a fun diagnosis. Nobody's going to play it up for fun. They'll pick something easier to fake and more rewarding, like cancer or allergies, maybe autoimmune.
Standard line treatment for ASD is "Good luck, I hope your life goes okay, I'm here if you want to talk about it".
In DSM-5, the diagnostic manual published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013, this disorder is listed under 300.19 Factitious disorder. This, in turn, encompasses two types: Factitious disorder imposed on self – (formerly Munchausen syndrome). Factitious disorder imposed on another – (formerly Munchausen syndrome by proxy); diagnosis assigned to the perpetrator; the victim may be assigned an abuse diagnosis (e.g. child abuse).
When your neighbors get laid off it is because they are lazy bums. When you get laid off it is a recession or mismanagement. It is easy to understand why it is so common - it is so much easier emotionally to pretend the world is just except when it would imply you are at fault.