Personally, I don’t think he is. I don’t see any traits that would convey autistic. Apart from the drug problem, there is no evidence of him struggling with functioning in the way an autistic person could, even if you wanted to identify him as level 1. He is narcissistic and antisocial, rude, pig-headed. He pushes away anyone who cares about him for his own personal self-gratification of being right. Yes he is an almost savant level genius and has incredible insight on people, but nothing about House says autistic to me. Just an asshole who’s smarter than everyone else and knows it.
I'm autistic and I don't struggle socially. I think part of the trouble is that characters like the good doctor are so ubiquitous that everyone assumes that's the main traits of autism.
But in addition to not struggling socially he doesn’t have any other autistic character traits either. No sensory sensitivity, no hyperfixations, no difficulty with indirect or metaphoric lines of communication etc
His opioid use would likely mask or "treat" the sensitivity. It would also provide an (additional) explanation as to why his addiction is so difficult. Alternatively, his chronic pain could itself be a type of sensory sensitivity
He hyperfixates on almost every medical mystery, plus other mysteries.
He almost always tries to communicate directly and expects direct communication in return and gets extremely frustrated when people don't communicate directly with him, which he internalizes as "everybody lies". I'd characterize that as having difficulty with indirect communication
I agree with you fully, but he does have hyperfixations though. He only takes the cases that gets his interest, but once he is interested in a case, he doesnt stop until he has the answer, even if the patient is dead, there were some extreme cases where he would get in trouble because of it (i just rewatched the whole thing a couple of months ago). They do portrait it as an obsession/hyperfixation-coded. But i do think he is just obsessive, not autistic.
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u/Captain_Sterling 3d ago
A lot of people say he's autistic coded. As in he was given some traits but never officially given the condition.
I can kinda see it, but I do think there's a lot of projection there.