Is autism related to schizophrenia?

Post Reply New Topic

I've been seriously tempted to look over my usenet history and see what my writing was like 18 years ago, as I think those are the only examples that still survive from that far back.

Another good one is "shifting the goalposts." Also the more blunt "flaming" is one I'd get a lot, and I couldn't figure out what I was doing to get that response when I tried to word my posts as neutrally as possible. Of course, this was all usenet and mailing lists and not academia.

Don't forget troll. I have been accused of trolling at least twice that I can recall (when I am certain I wasn't trolling). I have had to remove myself from posting any personal opinion on my university forum, because no matter what people cannot seem to read what I am saying. I have even copied and pasted a few posts to a close friend of mine for an "NT review". She may not be NT in totality (which is probably why I love her so much), but so she usually says she finds nothing wrong in the way I am coming across. I could use an adult translator who gets me so that I don't aggravate people when I don't intend to. I read through things I have written and it's almost like I'm invisible or people can't read my words. It's weird.

I used to get supremely indignant about this stuff, prior to learning about the spectrum (and women on the spectrum in particular). I would then cop an air of superiority so I didn't feel like a complete idiot. Now I have realised I have some limitations and even though I might *want* to do x,y,z the reality is that I may not be capable of doing that in an NT-dominant world. Even my professor seemed to get a bit grumpy with me at one point. Many others couldn't see what I was seeing I guess.

gee, us types should stick together more often

Oh, yes. Troll. Been called on that a few times when not trying. Of course I was always trolled pretty easily because I didn't know how to spot them when they took even slightly novel approaches.

Oh and I used to get so much mockery by not understanding sarcasm and irony online.



Oh, this was me. I could be pretty mean on purpose when people were misreading me and I didn't know why. I got into so many fights (online and IRL) over stuff like this until the past few years, and even then when I tried to be kinder about things, I didn't know why the misreading was happening.

My working dx has been ADHD for over 35 years (I'm old :p). I have had experiences with "other" diagnoses at times, but none of them were valid due to circumstances at the time. I think most of us are very close to the criteria for schizotypal. I know an autistic kid (he's not a kid, I call everyone kid) who is certain he doesn't have ASD but has SPD. I know he's wrong. One of the main reasons I know he's wrong is that I had a crush on him for at least three years. Anyone I end up having a crush on is on the spectrum. I'm a diagnostician via romance, it's kinda like gaydar.

Which is only compounded by people who suggest because we are verbose and eloquent we couldn't possibly have a communication problem and are, therefore, simply using this as an "excuse" to get out of defending our position or simply being unable to do so because our ideas were obviously incorrect in the first instance. It's a never-ending circle of frustration, which I believe ambuend was referring to earlier in this very topic.

Have you considered that you might manifest both spectrums, the Autistic and the Schizophrenic? Here's a URL to confound you:

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/43/19/20.2.full

We all have rational and intuitive forms of consciousness, why could we not have differences from NT baseline in both types of consciousness?

Last edited by Dinosaw on 11 Apr 2011, 5:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Bullcrap. How do you know? How would you know? Has it occurred to you that you are doing to the rest of the members here exactly what you demand they refrain from doing to you--that is, making assumptions about ability?

As I said, you want everyone to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you aren't willing to return the favor. Your description of your language issues sounds very familiar--you take a great many words to outline it, but the overall gist of what you describe is not at all unusual, and could apply to any number of members of this forum. Why do you think your language issues are special? Why do you think they warrant all of these "accommodations"? Why do you insist that everyone approach your words with all of these B.S. excuses in mind while you simply take the words of others at face value? Why do you conduct yourself on this forum as if you (and possibly a few of your "cheerleaders") are the only people who warrant the kind of extraordinary consideration your oh-so-special condition requires?

Maybe "WP member X" has language issues similar to yours. Maybe the only difference is that they don't think that their issues are special. Maybe the only difference is that they're not consumed by this grand, narcissistic obsession with their issues. Maybe the only difference is that they recognize that everyone has issues, and the alternative to simply conversing in spite of those issues is retreating into some useless responsibility-free fantasy. Have you ever considered that?

Only anbuend knows what is like to be her. I have read here, on her blog, and elsewhere, her descriptions of her difficulties in respect of language. I have no doubt that she is a person of integrity and is telling the truth. Since January or February 2003 I have read what she has written online and have acquired a reasonably good idea of her character. She is not as Poke wrote

I very much hope that there are no more attacks on anbuend in this thread. In his previous message, not his latest one, Poke said he was not going to post on this thread anymore.

Yes, I don't see her demanding special privileges or asking for accommodations while giving none. I've seen her respond to people who correct her interpretation of their words positively, and apologize when it seems appropriate.

It seems to me this is mostly a matter of someone making a lot of something out of practically nothing, and it would likely cost very little to take what anbuend said earlier at her word. The alternative seems to be much less preferable unless one is looking for some kind of fight.

And I'm not looking for a fight at all. I honestly thought that, as usually happens, I could just say "That's not what I meant" and the other person would just go "Oh okay" and that would be the end of it. I've learned to avoid conversations with people who do the "You're hostile and I know it better than you do" thing because they never go anywhere useful.

I believe everyone deserves these accommodations. Rather than destroying communication, they improve communication. Communication is not communication unless what the first person meant gets across to the second person. If the second person insists they know what the first person meant better than the first person does, then that obstructs true communication. It's not the misinterpretation I mind, it's the insistence that the misinterpretation must be correct, above the objections of the only person who knows what they actually meant.

I also don't mind if people disagree with me. Honestly, I expect people to disagree with me even if they knew what I really meant. But there's a big difference between disagreeing with someone, and what has happened on this thread after the point where I said that this wasn't what I really meant. That's actually at times crossed the lines into personal attacks, which aren't supposed to happen on this forum.

As far as why I think the stakes are higher... I wasn't talking about just autism alone. I was talking about, among other things, the fact that overdoing things can result in serious breathing trouble because the muscles that weaken include the ones around my lungs. I don't talk about half of the things like that, that happen in my offline life.

The more autism-related issues I do talk about, I talk about for two main reasons. One, I consider it paying the world back for the help I have received through reading descriptions of other people's issues, thus helping me be able to understand and communicate about mine (and people have spontaneously told me it's helpful, so this isn't my imagination). Two, I consider it important to remind people that people like me actually come to places like this, and that doesn't happen if I just hide behind my ability to write well for short portions of the day.

I do expect there to be other people with the same autism-related issues as I have here, which is why I try to be really careful when someone tells me something isn't what they meant. I've talked to several people with similar issues here. However. I've also conducted polls on a lot of these issues and found myself to be either the only one or one of a small few in my category. I've described what the issues I have are, and had people who didn't have them utterly confused. I've been here for many years. Everything I read from other people's responses suggests there are others here with similar issues, but that we're in the minority. This goes along with everything I've ever seen in the online autistic world: Online, people like me are a minority, but neither the smallest nor the largest of minorities. I actually expected there to be far more of us once upon a time, but all experience has told me otherwise.

Far from thinking being in this minority-among-autistic-people makes me special, I actually find it to be a major hassle. It means having to explain myself over, and over, and over again, and not necessarily be believed by the end of it. I've watched this happen to other autistic people with the same issues over and over again. And I don't see myself as special in general. I feel like I'm being confused with a cartoon caricature of myself, and whenever I say something, someone imagines this caricature saying it. Well I'm not that caricature.

Honestly... the thing that happened on this thread to begin with... why is it being made into such a huge deal? All that happened was... it's not even exactly that I chose words that were wholly wrong, they just had a connotation to them that I didn't intend to put into them (as well as having the inevitable distortions that come with cramming decades of history into two or three sentences). I don't know why this has become a multi-page thread all about my communication skills when all that has to happen is someone saying "Sorry, I misunderstood." Is it really that hard? I say that kind of thing all the time, and it hasn't killed me yet.

Oops, I meant to imply that someone looking for a fight with you would keep pushing the matter, not that you were looking for a fight.

Seriously, this seems like so much over what should literally be very little at all. It's not hard to let go and move on and not make a misunderstanding about one person's alleged flaws.

I don't particularly see the point in pressing this fight further. Although I don't particularly appreciate the response this forum has given simply for expressing the possibility that I might not have a terribly high opinion of one other person on the forum, none of this is terribly relevant to the original discussion. Anbuend has backed down from her statements, and the question of why doesn't make much difference.

Yes, it was my idea.



In spite of being usual in the "pop psychology" to make an opposition between "rationality" and "intuition", I think that in practice they are not opposites.

I think that our knowledge is a result of (at least) 3 factors: reason, intuition and practical experience, and different people use different combinations of these factors; then, probably it is not possible to be extremely "intuitive" and extremely "rational" at the same time, but it is perfectly possible for a person to be more "rational" than the average, and, at the same time, more"intuitive" than the average - it is only a question of being less "practical" than the average.

And note that, while severe autism spectrum (like LFA) and severe schizophrenia spectrum (like schizophrenia) are easily diferentiated, mild variants of both spectrums (like AS and Schizoid PD) are very similar.