Asperger's and schizophrenia.

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This is all very interesting I must say and I am glad that I started the topic.

However I maintain that I can have both simultaneously as I have been diagnosed with both by a psychiatrist who is an expert in adolescent psychiatry, and I have also been diagnosed again with AS by an educational psychologist, and paranoid schizophrenia by several different psychiatrists, adolescent psychiatry experts and adult psychiatry experts.

ok , but i would only respond ( not argue) by saying this.....there is no objective test for any of what you describe.

you seem to have a lot on your playe i wish you well in dealing with it.

Thank you.
I know there is no test but for my schizophrenia, the fact that antipsychotics help about 50% and that several psychiatrists agree on this diagnosis makes it pretty certain.
As for the AS, I just seem to match most of the criteria.

Ive been simotainously dx'ed with aspergers and schizoaffective bipoler type and also innatentive adhd and dyslexicdysgraphia several times. its actualy called multiple complex developmental disorder. heres a link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-c ... l_Disorder it is more common for people with asd's to devlop psychosis than nts. you can hit me up on messagner if you have any more questions. i am interested in talking to other people similar to me.

They seemed extremely real, but 97% of the time, I did know that they were not real. And the paranoia! But people who really are schizophrenic, believe it 100% If you try to tell them otherwise, they will believe that you are part of the conspiracy.

My friend who is totally schizoaffective and was diagnosed as a child, has a ton of AS characteristics...

Eugen Bleuler, who introduced the term schizophrenia, coined the word autism to describe a turning away from reality into a private world of fantasy:

Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911.

He regarded autism as one of the three main symptoms of schizophrenia; the other two were thought disorder and blunting of affect (i.e. lack of expression of emotions such as sadness or joy). Hallucinations and delusions were not core symptoms but a reaction to the disease.

Leo Kanner adopted the term autistic to describe what he regarded as the total lack of contact with other people by the children he studied. He used the expression "autistic disturbances of affective contact".

In its diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1992), after delusions and hallucinations, lists the following symptoms:

That is a very good post. Thank you for the detailed information.

I've been trying to figure out for a few weeks now what describes the weird symptoms I get after I have a run-in with sociopaths who target me. This has happened twice. Each time, I've had bizarre mental breakdowns where I felt disoriented and filled with their malevolent cognitive behaviors. At a basic level, I understand now what is happening. I am picking up their cognitive behaviors on a non-verbal level and impressing with them, during a process I have developed to "bond" with NTs. I implicitly learn a particular NTs cognitive behaviors and then after a while I understand that particular NTs expressions and moods, like my boss or something. When I do this in contact with a sociopathic abuser, I experience serious cognitive disruption and breakdown. It's like I pick up some kind of serious cognitive infection, from my contact with sociopaths who targeted me. Lately, I've been thinking the experience is like a schizophrenic episode (cognitively -- no physical symptoms of catatonia, etc).

What I have been trying to do lately is correlate my low-level analysis of what happens to me after run-ins with sociopaths to diagnostic criteria for existing mental illnesses.

So a clinical way to describe my post-sociopath-encounter collapses is to say, I have a period of time -- this has happened in each of the 2 cases of my being targeted by sociopaths -- where I think I develop the symptoms of non-delusional schizophrenia. This seems to hit a peak within the year following first exposure and then starts to subside about a year after that. But I don't know if a schizoid episode accurately describes what I experience, yet. I have only just started to think about it in those terms and don't know much about schizophrenia.

Another way to describe it is from a diagnostability perspective. I was diagnosed with AS, but I was not diagnosed with anything else. In fact, therapists and their ilk keep telling me that nothing is wrong with me when I complain about being "infected" with the sociopath's mental problems. However, that undiagosability of the "infection" is consistent with how diagnosticians work. If I get infected with someone else's personality-disordered cognitive behaviors and they didn't develop in me, then there is no cognitive structure or history that a diagnostician would look for. There is no infrastructure around the mental distress, in other words, since it didn't evolve in me. So I just tell the shrinks my thoughts are painful but they don't see anything beyond that I am choosing to think them, which is false. Fortunately, I am only temporarily "infected" with the sociopath's viral cognitive behaviors. So there are no footprints, so to speak, in my history or personality, that would make them continue to exist, just as there is no infrastructure help a therapist see these "bad thoughts". (And I have no behavioral infrastructure that would support my going out and acting like a sociopath). So the "infection" fades, eventually. The whole thing is invisible and apparently undiagnosable.

So in that sense, a temporary infection, like computer viruses, with a sociopath's cognitive behaviors, if that is what I have, would be kind of "schizoid", where the thought behaviors that I think aren't mine, are non-delusional. But the experience of being infected is a kind of non-delusional delusion. I am beginning to interpret the experience as a kind of induced, temporary schizophrenic episode.

I am still working this out, but from the first things I've been reading, it is possible for AS to be schizophrenic. But I don't know if my own experience of what I think are temporary "schizoid" episodes after exposure to sociopaths supports that. Because that might not be a true schizoid episode.

My younger sister has a related disorder called delusional disorder which is a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. But the disorder seems to contradict anything related to autism. Like her imagination is so vivid and clear to her she often cannot separate it from factual reality and thus has all these false beliefs where her imagination gets entangled with reality. With autism there is a very much deminished imagination and my imagination can never be confused with reality. She was also very big on imaginative play as a very young child. Like at the age of 2 she would pretend her toy trike was a horse and even believe it so.

I already posted this in another thread (with the same name), but I will to post in this thread also:

my grandmother has schizophrenia and i dont really know but i guess it makes you kindof a solitary individual. schizophrenics usually get lossed into there own world and dont have much friends much like aspergers but reality is intact. people that are schizophrenics lose touch with realty, wich necessarily isnt a bad thing since reality is usally lame anyways

Hm. Strange. Did not know that paranoia was an AS trait. But I'm quite new to the situation and have not studied everything about the matter. I hit the wall in 1999, or do you use meltdown as the term? Before that I had a long period of stress, both at home and what then was my job. I had, in combination with untreated depression, also some paranoid feelings. In long periods I was convinced that someone was trying to poison me, but at the same time I had a fairly good perception of reality. That, said my therapist, saved me for undergoing severe treatments for zhizo or perhaps other mental illnesses.
My depressions never seems to go real deep, but combined with stress, they allways seems to give me degrees of paranoia. I have never had any halluscinations, either voices or sights, nevertheless the noia can be real percistent at times.
Now, through this site I've found out that the depressions might come from being an AS. I learn something every day.

i saw on wikipedia there is condition that some doctors believe is a cross between autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia

Its not currently in the DSM and i dont know whether or not they are planning to put in in DSM5 or not but here is the article on wikipedia ( oh and by the way i looked it up and theres info on other sites too so its not just Wikipedia which i know can be messed up sometimes)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-complex_Developmental_Disorder


Multiple-complex Developmental Disorder

Multiple-complex Developmental Disorder (McDD) represents a distinct group within the autism spectrum based on symptomatology.

Ever since autism was first recognized, its continuity with schizophrenia has been a matter of debate. In fact, until the late 1970s, children with autism were often labeled as having "childhood schizophrenia." In the last thirty years, however, the term "childhood schizophrenia" has been displaced. Diagnostic criteria for autism have been established that rely solely on social, communicative and sensorimotor symptoms, without reference to the thought disorders typical of schizophrenia.

Nevertheless, there are some children who display the severe, early-appearing social and communicative deficits characteristic of autism who ALSO display some of the emotional instability and disordered thought processes that resemble schizophrenic symptoms. Cohen, et al. (1986), coined the term Multiplex Developmental Disorder (MDD) to describe these children, although they are often given a diagnosis of PDD-NOS by clinicians who may be unfamiliar with this terminology. Unlike schizophrenia, MDD symptoms emerge in childhood, sometimes in the first years of life, and persist throughout development.

Multiplex developmental disorder is diagnosed in people who are on both the autism and schizophrenia spectrums. Their intelligence and emotional range run the gamut. There is a high rate of co-morbidity with learning disorders, AD/HD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, social anxiety disorder, Tourette's syndrome, personality disorders, epilepsy, and phobias.

McDD is a developmental disorder with symptoms that can be divided into three groups.

A. Regulation of emotion. (Affective symptoms) – two or more of the following.
1. Depressive symptoms such as consistent depressed mood, feelings of sadness or emptiness, thoughts of death, little interest or pleasure in activities, chronic fatigue, feelings of worthlessness or guilt.
2. Manic symptoms such as racing thoughts, irritability, distractibility, psychomotor agitation, impulsivity, sleep disturbances, feelings of grandiosity or extreme self worth, risky behavior.
3. Anxious symptoms such as recurrent panic, intense inappropriate anxiety, dissociation, diffuse tension, paranoia, unusual fears and phobias that are peculiar in content or in intensity.
4. Severely impaired regulation of feelings.
5. Significant and wide emotional variability with or without environmental precipitants.

B. Consistent impairments in social behavior and development (Autistic symptoms) - at least two from (A) and one from (B) or (C).
(A) Qualitative impairment in social interaction.
1. Marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction
2. Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level
3. A lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people
4. Lack of social or emotional reciprocity
(B) Qualitative impairments in communication.
1. Delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language (not accompanied by an attempt to compensate through alternative modes of communication such as gesture or mime)
2. In individuals with adequate speech, marked impairment in the ability to initiate or sustain a conversation with others
3. Stereotyped and repetitive use of language or idiosyncratic language
4. Lack of varied, spontaneous make-believe play or social imitative play appropriate to developmental level
(C) Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities.
1. Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus
2. Apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals
3. Stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms
4. Persistent preoccupation with parts of objects

C. Impaired cognitive processing (psychotic symptoms) – two or more of the following.
1. Delusions, including fantasies of personal omnipotence, thought insertion, paranoid preoccupations, overengagement with fantasy figures, grandiose fantasies of special powers, referential ideation, and confusion between fantasy and real life.
2. Hallucinations and/or unusual perceptual experiences.
3. Negative symptoms (anhedonia, affective flattening, alogia, or avolition)
4. Disorganized or catatonic behavior such as thought disorder symptoms, easy confusability, inappropriate emotions/facial expressions, uncontrollable laughter, etc.
5. Disorganized speech.

Other possible symptoms. (Does not count for diagnosis)
-Poor sensory integration/moter skills.
-Compulsive behavior and tics.
-Learning disorders.
-Poor judgement/difficulty making decisions.
-Difficulty expressing self.
-Literal concrete thinking.
-Poor concentration.

Perhaps could exist two different "Asperger's Syndromes", with similar symptoms: one related to classical autism, and other related to schiziphrenia?

An expriment could be made to test these hypothesis (perhaps some researcher already did that): split some people with AS in two sub-groups - one with close relatives with schiziophrenia, and other without.

Then, look at the proportion of close relatives with "classical autism" in both groups (perhaps, in the first group, could be a good idea calculate these as a proportion of the non-schizophrenic relatives instead of as a proportion of total relatives).

If the proportion of "classical autistic" relatives in first group was, at significant levels, inferior to the second group, these could validate the hipothesis (that there are two AS - one in ASD and other in SSD)

It's been said more than once that paranoia is a normal reponse to a situation where nothing else works.

As an aspie trying to make sense of a normal world, I've had my flirtations with paranoia. In my own specifics I was saved by a messianic complex that rolled any difficulties down to another instance of the test.

Equally, schizophrenia - if what your genes have left over tips you towards the synthetic universe rather than the excluded one, then it's a fairly obvious outcome. In the world of the post-babyhood aspie, anything that looks like understanding is going to get incorporated into the whole flawed analysis.

How about the Beautiful Mind guy?

Wasn't he likely an aspie if he was such a keen and brilliant mathematician?