I'm a nuclear engineer, who has an interest in psychology. I also have moderate to severe OCD. My friend's little brother has moderate to severe autism. This may seem to be completely unrelated, but the more time I spent over at my friend's house with his brother, the more similarities I noticed. It seems that he exhibits much of the behavior that I exhibit during an episode of OCD. After noticing the similarities too often to pass them off as just coincidence, I decided to do some research of my own to make sense of the situation. My preliminary results seemed astounding to me.

It seems that autistic individuals have a much higher than normal level of serotonin in their brains. Individuals with OCD have a much lower level. In fact it seems that most of the symptoms of autism can be explained by the increase in serotonin. In addition, most of the new age "cures" that people develop for autism are unknowingly based on reducing the amount of serotonin in the body. These "cures" don't focus specifically on the brain, resulting in more adverse side effect than necessary. Tianeptine works to specifically increase serotonin re-uptake to reduce the amount in the brain. The only problem is that Tianeptine was only tested on children with autism but was proven to only have an effect on serotonin levels of people over the age of 15.