{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,24]],"date-time":"2026-09-24T06:05:03Z","timestamp":1790229903476,"version":"4.1.0"},"reference-count":27,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,24]],"date-time":"2026-09-24T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1790208000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Psychiatry"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Social media increasingly influence how adolescents and young adults understand and communicate neuropsychiatric symptoms, including symptoms attributed to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This creates a particular diagnostic challenge in functional neurological disorder (FND), a condition in which neurological symptoms are genuine and disabling but are understood as arising from altered nervous-system functioning rather than structural neurological disease. Recent literature indicates that FND and ASD co-occur more often than would be expected by chance, although estimates vary substantially across studies and clinical populations. At the same time, autistic-like features such as sensory hypersensitivity, social difficulties, alexithymia, and altered interoceptive processing may occur across diagnostic boundaries and may therefore complicate differential diagnosis. The present case concerns a 17-year-old female patient with complex FND and prominent autistic-like phenomenology who attributed her difficulties to ASD largely through social-media exposure, while standardized assessment and retrospective developmental history did not support an ASD diagnosis. The case therefore provides an opportunity to examine two related but distinct questions: how genuine ASD may co-occur with FND, and how autistic-like experiences may arise in patients with FND without a developmental basis for ASD. We further consider whether, in a subset of patients, such phenomenology could represent a functionally mediated cognitive-behavioural construct shaped by predictive processing, interoception, alexithymia, and exposure to diagnostic narratives.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3389\/fpsyt.2026.1952291","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,24]],"date-time":"2026-09-24T05:44:45Z","timestamp":1790228685000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Case Report: Autism-like phenomenology in functional neurological disorder in the social-media era: over- and under-diagnosis of autism as a bidirectional clinical problem"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"17","author":[{"given":"Pavlina","family":"Danhofer","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Paediatric Neurology, University Hospital Brno and Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University","place":["Brno, 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