Autism <-----> Schizophrenia (Opposites?)

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Schizophrenics are hypersocial in the sense that they are constantly thinking about people and their intentions. They become withdrawn because they think too much about other people's intentions, talk to their own voices, etc. Schizophrenics attribute human qualities to animals and inanimate objects, such as hearing their dog talk to them. This is what I mean by hypersocial.

This is the complete opposite of autism/aspergers where people may be extremely interested in studying astronomy (it takes a mechanical, mathematical, analytic brain to understand this rather than a social brain).

I don't know what kind of mold was growing but it was definitely psychedelic and it caused me to have visions. So I got rid of the mold.

When you say attribute human qualities to animals and inanimate object, such as hearing their dog talk to them, do you mean hearing as in with words or what?

Almost every post here said something nutty, bewildering or nonsensisical so I'll just write up the facts to counter them.

I'm gonna ignore the actual OP since it's a waste of time, it's such a leap of logic that you could say this about a slew of disorders and schizophrenia

One first major point: Schizophrenics arn't always paranoid, and they're rarely paranoid all the time if ever, however it represents the largest subgroup in psychosis.



There#s no such thing as "Split personality disorder" and those with multiple personalities are not called schizophrenic by any professional.



Schizophrenia is..well see my signature, it's the disintigration of logic, the shattering of reason into thought disorder, but it's so much more...it's catatonic, depression, asociality, emotionlessness, joylessness, delusions, hallucinations, it's lack of formal speech, lack of speech at all, it's a lot more complex than autism.



Because this does come up often, there's always some professor with some half baked theory around the corner about the origin of autism, neadertals, autism supremacy or - my favourite - "I think X person is autistic".



Something can have nothing in common with another without being the opposite, the opposite of antisocial personality disorder (there's no such thing as sociopathic personality disorder) would be a completely healthy lovely person.



I cannot stress how wrong wrong wrong this is.

Schizophrenia - even minus the hallucinations and delusions - doesn't a single core feature with autism, not one.
No, being extremely introverted or in your own world is not a symptom of schizophrenia OR autism, read the freakin' DSM.

Or better yet, I'm "schizophrenic" yet I havn't got much in common with people here.

Someone also said schizophrenia is degenerative, it's not, it usually improves over time and can actually be prevented from happening at all if you're screened for it and early signs are caught.



That's a commonality in most mental disorders though, we all feel lost, missunderstood, in pain, that's mental illness in general.



This man speaks many truths.

I'm pretty sure the medical community of the world is in agreement that neither autism or schizophrenia are this.

Autism = High levels of deductive reasoning
Schizophrenia = High levels of abductive reasoning

See my website for more information.

If some of what you described as schizophrenia describes me and I have AS how are they opposites? how can one have features of both if they are opposite?

I doubt that two disorders so similar in external symptoms could be opposites.

More, I even doubt of the correction of many diagnosis of autism, AS, PDD/NOS, schizoid PD and schizophrenia (and, btw, ADHD-I) - in some cases, the symptoms could be so similar that the specific diagnosis could be simply the result of the previous bias of the clinician.

I think that the problem with making Schizophrenia and Autism into spectrum opposites is that it frames Autism as a mental illness. The opposite of a Schizophrenic would be a person who is not Schizophrenic.

The opposite of Autism? It depends on how you frame Autism I guess. There is a theory that Autism is an extreme male brain - not sure what I think of this, but if that were the case, then it's opposite would be a hyper-empathetic relationally driven female type of personality.

Personally I feel that although there is some overlap between male cognition and autism, I don't think the extreme male brain is a good model as it reduces cognitive styles to gender, which is overly-simplistic, and it frames Autism more according to personality than fundamental cognitive style.

I'm beginning to think more and more that autism is just an expression of certain natural human traits that emerge as part of the diversity of our genome, and in some people, those traits become strong enough, or unbalanced enough, to become maladaptive. Then the DSM noticed those and put a label on a certain boundary line.

I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying. Schizophrenics literally hear voices and may, for example hear animals speak to them. I watched a documentary about schizophrenia and this guy said birds would tell him things like that it is time to go to work.

I think the root of the paranoia is the opposite. It seems like autistics are confused, for example, by people's body language because they interpret everything in a literal way and are not as intuitive. Schizophrenics are hyper intuitive and not very literal. For example, say you pass someone on the street and they smile and wave at you. An NT sees the smile, thinks "They are friendly and happy to see me" smiles and waves back. An autistic may only see the literal; hand moves back and forth, person smiles, but there is no instant, intuitive connection that says, "Smile back and say hello." A schizophrenic sees the person, but thinks "Was that person waving a gun at me? And that looked like an evil stare, so maybe they want to kill me!" They did not see what was really there, they only saw their intuitive, imaginative interpretation of the event.

So, yes autistic people can become confused and a bit paranoid, but it is completely different than schizophrenic paranoia. Schizophrenics imbed their imagination on everything and cannot see the world as it is. It is like looking at the world as an impressionistic piece of art or a caricature where nothing is quite as it seems. Someone who is autistic sees the world in an incredibly accurate way and does not distort the world the way even NTs do sometimes. This is why autistic savants can memorize thousands of songs or draw pictures of city skylines after only seeing them one time (Stephen Wiltshire).

This is kind of what I mean by hyper social (I read this theory on a website, but I don't recall where). In order to understand people you have to have intuition and see the world in an implicit and not just explicit manner. The schizophrenic brain seems overdeveloped in that sense and the autistic brain in underdeveloped in that sense.

Not quite sure what you mean by that, but it sounds kinda like a generalization.......I mean in psychology I learned theres more than one type of schizophrenia for one so thats going to cause some variations in these things, not to mention no two people with the same mental illness are the same.

You could be right, but I disagree with the terminology - after all, if both too few and too much intuition affect socialization, why we should call the first "hyposocial" and the second "hypersocial"?

A curious point - in some languages (like mine), "autism" has the colloquial meaning of "living in fantasy ignoring reality" (I have at home an encyclopedia written in 1981 where "autism" is defined as "mental state characterized by a preference by subjective over objective impressions", or something similar). If autism is really a state of too less intuition, it will be the ironic effect of meaning that the colloquial use (in some countries) of "autism" is the opposite of the clinical condition known as "autism".

This illustrates the problem of defining something at the wrong level. As a kid, at times I did withdraw to a fantasy world - but that a trait can be associated with something doesn't mean you define or explain it by that trait. Defining something by a peripheral trait means defining it in a way that describes one element at the expense of a dozen others.

Example: people used to think dolphins were fish because of similar shape and habitat. To a pre-modern world, this was actually useful. With no knowledge of biology as we have, they had no deeper levels to go than general appearance, and to that end, appearance was explanatory on a communicative level. But once you understand the concept of mammals and fish, describing a dolphin as a fish is not only useless, it does harm to your understanding of dolphins and the larger concept of biology.

Perhaps a trait, such as hypo-empathy in autism, can have an opposite such as hyper-empathy found in Schizophrenia. So, it may be useful at a peripheral level to compare Autism and Schizophrenia (it may also be useful to note a dozen other opposites Autism has at a dozen other descriptive levels. That does not mean that autism and schizophrenia can be defined as opposites, and attempting to do so reduces an explanation to observing an emergent trait rather than a defining trait.

You can compare peripheral traits within their own realm - such as noting the similarity of dolphin fins with shark fins, when compared with the limbs of a land animal. But when it comes down to explaining what a dolphin is, you don't define it by explaining it's relationship to fish. Likewise, you don't explain Autism by explaining it's relationship to Schizophrenia.

Last time I checked hyper empathy wasn't associated with schizophrenia.

Correct. I am referring to the tendency to see intention everywhere which has been defined as hyper-empathy to fit the schiz/autism model.

Random thinking "outloud"

I get paranoid, obsessively perceiving intention, and it's precisely because I can't read people. Perhaps schizophrenics do the same. I see excessive intention on the social level because I'm looking for it, because my brain works well enough to realize that people I interact with have intentions, even if I can't read them intuitively. So, I look for them and this can be taken to excess.

The schizophrenic also has trouble reading people, but it's because his mind is falling apart and attributing everything to intention is his way of making sense of all the splintered bits. So he is not hyper-empathizing, he is creating false connections, which is the opposite of empathy, in the sense that empathy means one person making a true connection with another.

The paranoia of an autistic is inferring intention on social signals because you don't understand them, so you just assume everything has some meaning, even though you don't understand what it is. Thus, it's the result of a logical mind that is blind to social signals getting carried away looking for them.

Schiz. paranoia is looking for patterns, and being unable to find them due to a mind breaking down, latches on to some over-arching intention, some conspiracy, even in absence of anyone being around.

Maybe the autistic mind is in fact the opposite of schizophrenia - but only in the sense that an ordered mind is the opposite of a disordered mind. Well, in that sense, any sort of functioning mind is the opposite of schizophrenia. So, with that conclusion, I'm going to go ahead and call B.S. on the aut/schiz. theory.

All people with autism have ordered, rather than disordered mind? from what I've heard some people have schizophrenia and autism, so couldn't one potentially have an ordered and disordered brain or neither of those even?