schizotypal personality disorder? Aspergers? Help please?

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Roman, Thank you. In this day and age unless a person is directly affected by a disorder, normal people don't understand that it is often difficult for us to accept things getting " lumped together."
I personally as a person with StPD (Schizotypal Personality Disorder) find it frustrating that normal people would co-mingle Asperger's with StPD and say stuff like they are the same. Clearly they are not. I would have to go as far to the point of saying it is ignorant for normal people to do this and I personally find it "offensive" when they do this. Normals have done this to people with ADD/ADHD too and clearly these are in a similar situation. ADD/ADHD are two separate disorders as well and though they "overlap" a lot just like AS and StPD do, they are uniquely distinctive and are separate conditions. Normal people have to understand that and stop lumping it all together. We are black and white (not a racial reference here) and they live in a gray world.

Doesn't mean you are an a-hole. Maybe the other people are.

I don't think that you are an A**hole at all. I mean as a Schizotypal, I can understand how you can decompensate into having those feelings and the truth is that those are real feelings, but only you can decide if you want to be that or you want to be more. So many norms want to try to join people with Schizotypal and Asperger's at the hip as if it were a Siamese twin and it's wrong. Naive and arrogant. I find that to be totally offensive because though we are similar we are not the same. We need to join up with those who have Asperger's and unite because our voices are the ones that get stifled and not heard. We for the most part are afraid to voice our opinions because the norms will say we are weird . We our own people and though we are differenet than norms we must be able to find and strike a fine balance because we have to live and walk in their world. I can't promise you that the norms will ever accept us for who we are but we have to learn to manage our own individuality, our uniqueness and our gifts. We are going to come up short in some areas for sure but we are going to come up strong in others. We are paranoid about that and we know it. Though our Asperger's brothers may have difficulty looking it in the eye, we can look it in the eye and we can face it and we need to face it together.
As Schizotypals, we share so much in common with Asperger's, that an untrained eye would not really know how to differentiate us apart. Combined with their arrogance, egos, naiveness, they tend to get off by trying to be "polite" and just saying that Schizotypals have Asperger's just like they say that about those with ADD/ADHD . I got news, I got ADD too and I sure as heck am not hyper. Sure I can be provoked too. I can get hyper but it's not going to be without reason or cause. We are not the same as our brother's with Asperger's as far as our conditions actually go but we are the same in that the norms treat us the same and that's usually pretty poorly because they are to wrapped up in their own cushy lifestyles to take the time to try to understand us, StPD & AS folk alike.
Yes I'm ripping into the norms. I can accept that I have StPD and I'm managng to live with it. What I know is that like many of the other disorders that can come under the same spectrum of disorders as Schizophrenia is that we can decompensate if our situation is allowed to persist to depression. Hmmm. Depression could be another provocative trigger that we as schizotypals don't understand that causes us to remain socially awkward. Hello?! McFly! Hello!! ! Things like this only bring us down further because some of us really do feel pretty hopeless in that this type of thing will never get corrected or get better. The system sure is no help either. Not every one of us who has this has money to go see a therapist so we can come up with a plan to get better. I think that's crap on the part of the system. It's not so great. No money ='s no help period. That's how it is in the United States. You will find we are not so united on this front.
I can focus, I can get motivated, and I even get pretty steamed under the collar sometimes but how long does it have to go on? I mean the people sweeping us under the rug, ignoring us and trying to be "polite" in this case being "polite" is rude.

While ADD(inattentive type) and ADHD(impulsive/hyperactive type) aren't the same thing, their in the same spectrum and are commonly seen together which is diagnosed as the combined type. The combined type is the most common type. I was also wondering, are episodes of having an increase of cognative problems as well as very breif episodes of psychosis symptoms of schizotypal. Most the time the schizo symptoms do not bother me and are very mild. I have read that schizotypes do not have any psychotic episodes. I am wondering because I have had different diagnoses on the schizophrenia spectrum with schizotypal being the most recurrent opinion of psychologists.

As Schizotypals, we are prone to have psychotic episodes which are usually mild but that does not diminish the feelings that we are confronted with while having those episodes. If we don't care about our situations and feel like saying screw it, nobody cares we can decompensate, which means we can break down further to a point where those episodes can be more intense. We do exhibit a certain level of conscious control over our situations. Some people may be in worse shape and could have lost some of that control. At that point it's like a chronological flow chart. Step 1 then step two and three etc; We can become victims of our own minds if we let it. Some of us may choose to let it because we feel we just can't deal with it. some reasons we feel that we just can't deal with it is because norms don't want to listen. This becomes too much for us to handle and at that point the norms want to just put us in a state institution. For some us we can envision this as a very real possibility and it's scary and sad at the same time. It really speaks volumes about society doesn't it? Talk is cheap unless its your therapist, then not so much. Honestly I don't like the idea of paying people to listen to my problems when I think my money would be better spent on paying bills instead of creating them. But for us as Schizotypals, one of the best ways to deal with our situation is learn more about it. Knowledge is power. the more we know abour our condition, the better we will be able to walk in the world of the norms and do it with confidence. Confidence is something we generally don't have much of because everytime we get it something happens to knock it out from under us and we don't believe in it as much. We can be better but we have to work for it.
Schizotypals are in the schizophrenial spectrum of disorders whereas Asperger's is in the Autistic spectrum of disorders as referenced by THAT BOOK. (the DSM book) Our symptoms overlap a lot and we share a lot of the same traits BUT know that we are different. we're on here because we are sharing our similar experiences in hopes that somebody might be able to benefit from it.

I think that anwsers my question. I probablly am more schizotypal that schizophrenia/schizoaffective. I rarly have hallucinations although I see distortions in things that are there regularly (Illusions). Do you also have derealization (preceiving the world isnt real?) I feel like that constantly. I was wondering if that is a schizotypal symptom or not. Ive also wondered if the schizotypal symptoms begin in adolence or early adult hood in most people. Ive always had them but some symptoms seemed to get worse as I aged. It was more like I developed bipolar like symptoms during my teen years more so than most teens when their growing up. I still get what are might be manic episodes sometimes although I also have a sleep disorder that makes it impossible to come out all the way. During these times I become much more impulsive and do reckless things and other stuff I wouldnt normally do.

is there a milder version of schizoaffective disorder in the way that schizotypal is to schizophrenia. schizotypal with affective features maybe?

Being schizotypal is said to begin in early adulthood. Word has it that the APA/DSM book is going to do away with "Schizoaffective" But yes your symptoms as you describe them sound like they do belong to the Schizotypal and not the Asperger's Syndrome.. If you formally haven't been told that you are Schizotypal, go get it checked out. As for your sleep disorder, maybe it's a sleep apnea or something? You can get a sleep study done and have that get all figured out. They could put you on a CPAP machine if it is a sleep apnea. But do it to improve your quality of life as it is right now and you will find that the quantity of episodes will decrease as you relax a little.

I had a sleep study. They diagnosed atypical narcolepsy vs. hypersomnia with rem dysregulation. I have been diagnosed schizotypal although sometimes they also say some other schizo spectrum disorder. My official diagnosis that social security gave me last year says Aspergers, ADHD, and Schizotypal Personality Traits. This seems about right and now I have the additional sleep dx.

according to what got said at APA (quoted from Wikipedia)

Citing poor interrater reliability, some psychiatrists have totally contested the concept of schizoaffective disorder as a separate entity. The categorical distinction between mood disorders and schizophrenia, known as the Kraepelinian dichotomy, has also been challenged by data from genetic epidemiology. Consequently, some researchers have disputed that the term "schizoaffective disorder" refers to a well defined condition, and have recommended that the term be removed from or amended in future diagnostic manuals In April 2009, the DSM-V Psychotic Disorders Work Group headed by psychiatrist William T. Carpenter of the University of Maryland, College Park School of Medicine, reported that they will be "developing new criteria for schizoaffective disorder to improve reliability and face validity," and that they will be "determining whether the dimensional assessment of mood will justify a recommendation to drop schizoaffective disorder as a diagnostic category."Speaking at the May 2009 annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association, Carpenter said, "We had hoped to get rid of schizoaffective [disorder] as a diagnostic category because we don't think it's valid and we don't think it's reliable. On the other hand, we think it's absolutely indispensable to clinical practice."

Personally I think the new DSM is a bunch of crap so far. There is lots of things ive heard about it that are not good for peoples treatment and overtreatment.

I'm with you I think that too! The APA needs to stop trying to play GOD because they are not. But I've been saying that alot of it has been a bunch of crap from the start going back to my diagnosis of being schizotypal in 1987 under the DSM-III Version. BTW, who the heck gave them the authority for this stuff anyway? Was it Congress because if it wasn't why then should it be recognized at all?