What I understand about both illnesses, they seem very similar to me. The social withdrawal, the dissociate view of the world, the tendency for delusions of grandiosity, the high suicide rate. What are the differences exactly and can schizophrenia be considered a subtype of the autistic spectrum?
I think I have elements of both, though I’m fairly functional and aware of my issues. I haven’t always been however. It seems to me like the difference between the two is largely that autism is (falsely) seen as a childhood specific disorder and schizophrenia is something that affects adults.
This is the only mention I could find on schizophrenia related to the autism spectrum from Wikipedia.
ASD can be detected as early as eighteen months or even younger in some cases.[47] A reliable diagnosis can usually be made by the age of two.[48] The diverse expressions of ASD symptoms pose diagnostic challenges to clinicians. Individuals with an ASD may present at various times of development (e.g., toddler, child, or adolescent) and symptom expression may vary over the course of development.[49] Furthermore, clinicians are required to differentiate among the different pervasive developmental disorders as well as other disorders such as intellectual disability not associated with a pervasive developmental disorder, specific developmental disorders (e.g. language), and early onset schizophrenia,[citation needed] as well as the social-cognitive deficits caused by brain damage from alcohol abuse
Both of them are terms for categories of human behavior that we’ve clumped together because we observe a recurrent pattern but don’t know the cause or mechanism of it. The fact that we perceive a recurrent pattern creates a confidence that there is a “there there”, an underlying mechanism of some sort that will explain the phenomenon.
Because these are human behaviors that we’re talking about, there’s a very high rate of interpretive projection at work; the people who study them and the people who provide direct services to those diagnosed or afflicted with them and the people who suffer from and/or are labeled as having them all bring their own human experience and their own personal history of interpreting other people’s behavior into the puzzle-room.
So in a not-too-limited sense it’s a bit like saying “Egotism and megalomania seem very similar to me”. Or “It seems to me that viciousness and meanness appear to be be related”.
You aren’t alone in seeing similar patterns in the different labels that are in use. See also the descriptions for “schizotypal personality disorder” for additional overlap.
Me, I think there’s a tendency to treat the labels as if they mean we know more than we actually do about what it is that we’re talking about. It’s like when I go to the doctor to get something to deal with my congestion and I describe my symptoms: “my nose is red and runny and I’m sneezing a lot and my head is all clogged up”. The doctor nods and writes down “rhinitis” and recommends staying warm and drinking soup and citric fruit juice like orange juice and writes me a scrip for an antihistamine-decongestant combination. I go home and tell my partner “The doctor says that I have rhinitis, that’s what’s causing my symptoms”. Well, no it isn’t, actually. Rhinitis is just a restatement of my symptoms. It is useful in medicine (and elsewhere) to recognize a recurrent pattern and give it a name, but that process is not, in and of itself, an explanation of anything.
No. Although we still don’t know what causes these disorders (not goddamn vaccines though), but we have a good idea of what the brain looks like in people with these disorders, and they aren’t similar at all. Functionally, they aren’t similar unless you are grasping at straws.
The search term you are looking for in regards to disorders occurring together is “comorbidity.” And if you are looking for something that seems like a halfway point, if not due to any actual relation, check out schizotypal personality disorder.
I have worked with a couple of people with schizophrenia and several people with various levels of autism. I can’t say that I found any great similarity between the two groups.
Schizoid Personality Disorder, which is not schizophrenia, does have Autistic Thinking as part of the phenomenological profile. That is quite a stretch from the question in the OP though.
Anecdotal experience, autism lacks the fantastical and disjointed thinking common in Schizophrenia.
Like a guy with it told us how he sensed something out of the way spiritual about a dumpster behind his apartmment, that he realizes it was a conduit for god to speak to him and the message as he interpreted it was to convert to islam(he claimed to be an atheist before).
Common symptoms of schizophrenia include delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking and disordered speech. Symptoms of autism include inability to relate to people, lack of communication (as opposed to disordered communication) and repetitive behavior. The guy who babbles incoherently about the government controlling his thoughts is likely to be schizophrenic. The guy who stares at a light switch while ignoring everything people say to him is likely to be autistic.
I’m painting with a broad brush here. There are forms of schizophrenia and autism that aren’t as severe (or stereotyped) as the examples I’ve given.
As for schizoid personality disorder, it really has nothing to do with schizophrenia other than sharing the root “schiz-”, which means “split.” Schizoid personality disorder is characterized by a lack of interest in social relationships.
Jeff Lichtman addressed that sometimes a name is just a name, but also in this case, “autistic thinking” should not be construed to mean that it has anything to do with ASD.
Among other things, schizotypals develop normal language skills.
:smack:The next line of my post is a typo, it got transposed I meant to type:
So yea what you said. Although the now dropped diagnosis of Asperger’s also used to include normal language development, normal language development used to be the differing detail between autism and AS. Now both are under the autism spectrum disorder diagnosis.
I don’t agree. I have Asperger syndrome and I suffer a lot of the sensory and thought disorders that supposedly only affect schizophrenics. Autistic people shut out of the world because things seem too intense for them and they aren’t able to focus or make sense of it.
What’s called schizophrenia seems to be adult autism plus delusional thinking and hallucinations caused by errors in time perception. The popular perception, unfortunately, seems to be that schizophrenics are “crazy” and autistic people are “heartless” which is based solely on the ways the conditions look from the outside. In reality autistic people find it hard to connect to others, and often find that others abuse and mistreat them because of their difficulties in understanding others’ needs. This is perceived as autistic people only caring about themselves and autism being a criminal mindset/personality disorder, which is inaccurate.
Schizophrenics, I’d argue, aren’t crazy but rather are getting mixed signals from their sensory and linguistic mis-integration.
There are similarities between them. For instance, children who grow up to develop schizophrenia tend to present with soft neurological signs–ones similar to the ones exhibited by children on the autism spectrum.
Schizohrenics often have repetitive movements (tics, stereotypies). They are vulnerable to catatonia (extreme stupor, agitation, echophenomena). Autistic individuals also display these signs.
Many schizophrenics have obsessive-compulsive symptoms, if not full-blown OCD. So do many autistic folks.
They also have similar genetic legacies. Individuals with ASD are much more likely to be closely related to individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder than non-autistic folks.
Finally, it cannot be ignored that the two are often treated with the same drugs. Does this mean they are the same disease? No. But it does indicate some significant overlap.
I think the safest answer is that we don’t really understand the two disorders well enough to say anything very confidently. One hypothesis I’ve encountered is that schizophrenia is an adult-onset version of autism. But this isn’t very satisfying, since children can develop schizophrenia too. And also, schizophrenia isn’t normally the permanent condition that autism generally is.
(Apologies for not providing cites. I will add them when I get home).
Good points! Yeah, I’m not saying they’re exactly identical either, I’m just saying there is this idea that they are completely different things, in particular that schizophrenia is a mental disorder and autism is a personality disorder. In reality I’d say they are firstly sensory disorders and secondly thought disorders. The reason autistic people and schizophrenics can be violent in some cases and appear uncaring is because of blunted affect and rage driven by sensory (and often physical) pain, not because they are full of anger and hatred.
My guess would be that schizophrenia could be consider a subtype of the autistic spectrum. I don’t know if I agree with the popular consensus that schizophrenia is not a lifelong thing. Autism also waxes and wanes over a person’s life and I would imagine that schizophrenia isn’t something that develops suddenly but rather gradually accumulates, perhaps even before birth.
I can get to the rest later, but yes it almost certainly is permanent. It involves permanent brain morphological changes, as does autism, although very different in appearance. And while the positive symptoms (hallucinations and delusions) are the “sexiest” symptoms, it involves a number of cognitive traits. The positive symptoms are more treatable than autism symptoms (not always without difficulty in every individual, including due to compliance), but many less immediately apparent hallmarks of schizophrenia can still be present and testable.