Did it occur to you maybe you're Schizoid and not an Aspie?

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I posted this earlier in the thread:



I suspect that, in the future, neurological spectrums will be entirely reconstructed, and renamed, according to the principal brain centers involved.

Here is the quotation I mentioned earlier. The authors tentatively place the ASDs, ADHD, schizoid disorder, and others on the same spectrum. They also suggest that Asperger's, semantic-pragmatic disorder, right hemisphere learning disability, nonverbal learning disability, and schizoid disorder are different names for the same condition.

It is a great book, but the grammar is awful. Their editor must have been on vacation.

Note: I just corrected two minor copying errors.

Last edited by nominalist on 26 Dec 2007, 6:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am more and more convinced that the socially-disabling aspects of "Aspergers", and perhaps "HFAS", ( with poorly developed proprioceptive systems arising from motor-skill-use deprivation in infancy, to account for various "body-conciousness" aspects of "condition"!) are the result of increasingly widespread unconscious acting out by highly sensitive introverts of the main elements of standard behaviour of teachers in the classroom, so resented by sensitive and intelligent children, particularly as seem to have no choice but to submit to the situation..

I posted on this thread because in the process of dissecting/exploring in detail the diag crit for Aspergers and SPD the same very evocative descriptions kept coming up; the description above, like several others on this thread, sounds like that of a teachers behaviour/experience IN the classroom, (which is what children see). Even down to reproducing the teachers social exclusion in a classroom.



I've never known a teacher to shut up because they were boring the pupils!! Nor show other usual/healthy signs of social responsiveness to peoples discomfort or hostility by allowing others to lead etc!!

NB: what i mean is that there is a genetically determined base, of highly sensitive introversion ( accounting for many of the sensory issues exp by "aspergers" etc, including food and chemical intolerances, causing serious brain disturbances), but onto which is piled proprioceptive problems as a result of the motor-skill-use deprivation in infancy now endemic in the West, artificial "interested-in-listening-to-child" behaviours etc which encourage poor social skills before school, aswell as too early reading , etc, followed by school.

PS: I am only talking about Aspergers/HFAS here, not Kanners Autism.

Last edited by ouinon on 27 Dec 2007, 1:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

Look mate,
I dont think they are simular at all. People with that personality disorder thing do not seem to want a disire for anything or anybody and seem cold but really aspergers isnt like that at all. And it isnt like me. I have never thought about it.
much love
xx

I display significant features of the entire eccentric cluster of personality disorders; I superficially seem more schizoid than I do AS. Sometimes I am fearful that I might not be autistic, because my more bizarre problems are getting worse (esp. paranoia and depersonalization), and may someday interfere with my ability to function independently.

While I sometimes think I am less happy than I could be because I'm alone, I have never found a strong enough desire for association to even conform to the culture in which I am submerged. But I think I act schizoid simply because other people don't seem so much like people as they do things, and this is probably due to AS.

I've had dreams in which people appeared who seemed like actual people; they were wonderful.

Nope. I'm happy being part of a family and having friends, though I do need time to unwind after social activities and family gatherings. And I'm not completely cold and apathetic towards other people. With all the sensory issues and such added in, my traits are definitely AS, not schizoid.

Then why does it exist in people who never went to school!?!?



Maybe this is just something that's irritated me ever since I read Kanner's original paper, but please watch out before you use the term "Kanner" in supposed "opposition" to "AS" and "HFA" (see this post for more details)

By the way, given that I think I know what you meant by that, someone who does research into autistic cognition said that there does seem to be a cognitive difference between AS and other forms of autism in terms of profiles of cognitive abilities along the usual measures (although I think frankly that if you define one category by being really good at language then of course that'll be different than those you've defined as not being that way), but there is not[ a cognitive difference between "HFA" and "LFA", when it comes to patterns of skills in different areas tested. (And there's not even necessarily a difference in level either, in the areas they're good at they're both potentially equally good, basically there is no actual support in terms of cognition for such a distinction.)

So according to her, there might be two categories, "AS autism" and "non-AS autism" (although I think again that's a matter of singling one kind of autistic people out for having closer to typical spoken language development), but there's not an "AS/HFA category" and then an "LFA" category, it just doesn't work that way.

So you'd have to explain why "HFA" and "LFA" people both had similar (even indistinguishable, really) patterns of cognitive strengths to each other while "AS" people had different ones, if you were to make the distinction you are trying to make now, and if your theory was going to work somehow. (There's a lot of other things you'd have to explain too though, like why there are autistic extroverts.)

I think the answer may be in what you mean by "it" in your question.

What does that "it" refer to? I think that
a)the description "highly sensitive/introvert", which applies to more than 96% of members on WP who take the test, explains many of the sensory issues recounted by people with "aspergers", under pressure from environment ( incr. noisy, polluted etc allergies, etc) , and that
b)the poorly developed proprioceptive system resulting from motor-skill-use deprivation in infancy explains many of the motor skill difficulties/particularities of people with "Aspergers"( and HFAS?) , including the experience of body boundaries etc,.... which leaves what?

If take the "theory of mind" idea with the pinch(es) of salt that increasingly seems to require, then "it" seems to consist of "social skills and communication" impairment, which i think may be the result of modelling onesself, unconsciously, on teachers , in the way i've described. What else is there ?

If there is a difference in the way "aspergers" think, eg; fluid intelligence, to rest of population, that does not constitute a disability.

I get the impression, from own experience and reading on WP, that the most disabling things in "Aspergers" are the sensory and the social "disturbances". One, the sensory, is a mix of genetics ( high sensitivity), and experience in infancy , and environmental factors, and the other, I believe, is entirely environmental and could be avoided if abolished school for under 7-8 year olds , and made education after this age dependent on need and interest. Rote learning when/where need it, and flexible paths for other learning. Children need to be reintegrated into society in their very early years; taken by parents to their workplace on almost daily basis from earliest infancy for example etc.

If this "social skills and communication" impairment exists in people who have never been to school perhaps those very rare individuals have experienced something similar to school in their families. And if "it" exists in children before they go to school perhaps it has more to do with proprioceptive disturbances, and/or sensitivity issues.
But perhaps it has even more to do with introvert inclinations/interests in people known as children which seem "inappropriate/odd". The label "child" tending to imply certain "correct" ( usually extravert) behaviours for the person so labelled!

About the differences between various kinds of Autism; I believe that as Donna Williams says it is more important to look at each difficulty/disorder/disability separately. And find its origin. As I try to above.
I think that the reason i keep using the group terms may be because "Aspergers" has taken on an identity. People identify with it, or with (parts of) the "spectrum", as with a team, and i have got into the habit of referring to "it" as if "it" were one thing, a discrete identity.
I have been thinking, in error I now realise, that to refer to an "it", the "it" of Aspergers/HFAS etc, is clearer. But now see that in the same way as when referring to "child" need to remember that it is a construct, not a real thing, I need to always specify what particular "difficulty", ability, difference, i am talking about.
Thank you .

Last edited by ouinon on 27 Dec 2007, 1:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

That is almost exactly my view, as well. I would say that "Asperger's" is merely a name for a category of neurological attributes. Scientists observe similar attributes in certain individuals and term it a "syndrome." However, the syndrome is nothing more than a word, a social construction, not the attributes themselves. Treating the category or construction as a universal, as a real thing, is called essentialism (or "naive" ontological realism). Nominalists, like myself, reject essentialism as metaphysical speculation.

Like many others on this thread, I desire relationships with others.

i often afraid i will be Schizoid ,but it never happen

I can help you see why....

The odds against any one person, picked at random from the general population, being schizophrenic are roughly 1 in 100, a long shot.

There are over half a milion people in the UK with an autism spectrum disorder - that's around 1 in 100.


Diet intervention and autism: implementing the gluten free and casein free diet for autistic children and adults

Countries where the national diet traditionally contains large quantities of cow’s milk and wheat have poor recovery rates for schizophrenia. This is not unexpected as some schizophrenics greatly improve on gluten free diets.

Is Autism Genetic?
We know for sure that autism runs in families. Siblings of autistic people are more likely to be autistic, and twins are extremely likely to share autistic traits. This means there is almost certainly a genetic component to autism.

“about half of the twins who share identical genes with a schizophrenic victim do not develop the disorder.”

Scientists aren’t certain what causes autism, but it’s likely that both genetics and environment play a role. Researchers have identified a number of genes associated with the disorder. Studies of people with autism have found irregularities in several regions of the brain. Other studies suggest that people with autism have abnormal levels of serotonin or other neurotransmitters in the brain. These abnormalities suggest that autism could result from the disruption of normal brain development early in fetal development caused by defects in genes that control brain growth and that regulate how neurons communicate with each other.

These fluctuations suggest that there may be a social or environmental “trigger(s)” promoting acute schizophrenic episodes. Differences between the four major subtypes of the condition also imply that there is unlikely to be a common cause for all forms of schizophrenia.

Classic Autism, LFA, HFA, AS

The illness, therefore, is probably a syndrome, associated with several environmental
“triggers,” and/or genetic abnormalities.

“Asperger's Syndrome”

Social Darwinians sought to explain crime, alcoholism, poverty, prostitution, homelessness, and,
of course, insanity as the price paid for the inheritance of “defective germ plasma.” That is, all society’s problems were seen as genetic. The way to solve them was through eugenics, a systematic attempt to increase desirable and decrease undesirable genetic traits in the population. To illustrate, British scientist Francis Galton13 promoted these ideas in two basic ways. “Positive eugenics” encouraged the healthiest and most intelligent to marry and procreate. “Negative eugenics” included the institutionalization, castration, and sterilization of those, including schizophrenics, who were considered “defective” or “undesirable.”

Carl jung

Talked alot on Introverts in 1920...
Before Jung came on the scene in the 1920s introversion was used practically synonymously with autism or schizophrenic tendency. Dr. Whitmont states that old textbooks of psychiatry commonly referred to a schizoid person as an introverted or autistic person.

The bias may be gone in some psychiatric circles, but as Whitmont states in his book The Symbolic Quest, the bias against the introversive personality in society continues.

One of the most important criterion I think most people overlook is that in order for behavior to be considered a disorder, it has to cause significant distress, or conflict with the quality of life one wants to have. Often I hear a lot of people claim to have OCD as if it's a fun, magical disorder. In actuality, OCD often destroys the capability of the sufferers to think and funtion without doing some sort of ritual. It's unpleasant. If people find their behavior pleasant or it does not affect their life in a (and I stress) significant way, then they simply do not have the "disorder."

I don't know about that.

I would have had diagnosable OCD as a kid. And yes, it was unpleasant, and took over huge amounts of my life. It consisted of constant obsessive thoughts and then rituals that would turn into even more rituals as I tried to break them.

I didn't just do the not stepping on a crack thing, for instance, my rituals would to things like start out with "never step on a crack" and then after awhile become "only step on cracks" and then after awhile become "try hard to walk in an exact pattern that looks natural whether you step on cracks or not" (but still have this be obsessive-compulsive rather than truly natural, and still subject to the same perfectionism and anxiety all other OCD routines are).

As I've gotten older, it's mellowed. I now only have it in a smaller number of areas, and sometimes to a lesser degree. I might not be as diagnosable now but it's still OCD, it's not like it morphed into not-OCD the moment it crossed over the line of not interfering as much with my life. I know other people this has happened to too, who had diagnosable OCD as kids and still have remnants of it (or periods where it's more obvious than others) despite most of it going away.

An example of what I have now is that for instance the grime in the corners of a friend's floors was distracting me so badly that I jumped down there and spent days cleaning it out. I couldn't not do it, and whether or not it was a useful thing to do, it still had the same compulsive edge that things used to when I was a kid. I also get nearly (sometimes more-than-nearly) to the point of screaming and/or getting very physically invasive if people have food on their face or shirt and won't clean it off. It's several levels stronger than a normal reaction to something or a normal level of thought about it, but in narrower areas than when I was a kid.

(When I was a kid, I had near-constant obsessive thoughts about "What would happen if doing <insert everyday thing here> would kill me?" Then I would imagine different ways of attempting to avoid it and all of them ended in not being able to avoid it and my anxiety ratcheting up several notches and then having to do something pretty drastic to avoid it. I could not go near halves of flowers that were on the ground or on anything that had been near them, which sometimes involved having to climb things to avoid stairs that had gotten them on them. I had terrifying thoughts of people I cared about with axes through their heads that I could not get out of my mind unless I repeated certain words and motions. I would also get single sounds or words I'd heard stuck in my head going over and over until my ears hurt, and anything I did not like or want to think about, I imagined everywhere to the point where every aspect of perceiving them was there except the actual perception, like if I imagined something visual then I would react to it as if I saw, without truly seeing it, but the repetitive imagining was so intense that my reactions to it were almost identical to if I'd seen it. What I have today is nothing like that pervasive.)

I should also point out that the OCD-fueled drive I had, however unpleasant, did make me function in certain areas in which I can't anymore. I just don't have the level of anxiety I used to have propelling me to do those things, and minus that anxiety they're impossible. (Some of them would probably still be impossible even minus that anxiety, but I think some of them would be more possible with it.) These are everyday things most people can do, so a person would have noticed the absence of them later rather than the presence of them at the time.

At any rate, I view these things going on now as related to OCD despite the fact that I don't have diagnosable OCD. The reason I think that is because I used to have the diagnosable kind of OCD and these are the remnants of that, they're not some other thing.

You ccertainly went through a lot. And it sounds like hell. Yes, even if you weren't diagnosed and only experience remnants, it is still OCD.

I dont think I made myself clear enough in my post.

You know those people who are quick to jump on something because it's "cool" or trendy? I was talking about the kids in my psych class who would say "I have OCD" and talk about how they like to have their room a certain order. And that's it. And they'd giggle and laugh until another person would claim to have OCD because she would count numbers (and that's it). One girl even said she liked to click her pen. And the whole class would have a giggle, except me. I had severe OCD as a kid. And it was horrible. I remember being so tired but so tied up in rituals, and breaking down and crying because I just wanted to go to bed, but I couldn't.

The OCD behaviors you described it not what I meant. You sounded like, even if you weren't aware, that your behaviors took up a great amount of time, which is also another criterion people usually ignore.

It is an important trait that it consumes much of your time and disrupts the flow of your life- for any disorder. I meant to say that disorders aren't necessarily labels, because they are considered problems that disrupt people's lives and can cause distress. Anyone who is so depressed or anxious that they cannot leave their room isn't exhibiting a "label" as zendell orginally proposed, but is experiencing something that lessens their quality of life. What I meant to say is psychologists aren't just making up labels to put people into categories of who they dont approve. That's ridiculous. Some disorders are so disturbing, and people want help.

There is no way in hell I could be mistaken for a Schizoid. I am quite emotionally warm and close to my close friends and family (my 1 and a half year old nephew is so attached to me it's hilarious! It's like I'm his best buddy. ), I just have problems with social interaction.