"Rain Man", Schizophrenia, and the Definition of N

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Last night, I watched the new documentary about Roky Erickson and then discussed it with two of my boyfriend's NT friends. (Roky Erickson is a schizophrenic musician who has been taken advantage of by NTs and has lived in poverty for many years, getting by on his mother's assistance, without any treatment.) One of the friends remarked that they had watched "Rain Man" earlier that evening and they were struck by the similarities in the story.

At first I was annoyed by this comment. I thought, "But autism and schizophrenia are extremely different!" Then I realized that I shouldn't be so judgemental--at least they were saddened by a theme of people being taken advantage of by a culture they don't understand.

Then I started thinking about the definition of neurotypical. If it is defined as having a brain scan identical to that of a majority of people, then someone with schizophrenia would not be an NT. Schizophrenia has been shown to be a degenerative brain disease in which brain matter is slowly lost from several areas, primarily the frontal lobe. Conversely, I believe there is no conclusive evidence that AS can show up on a brain scan.

I'm not saying that people with AS are NTs; I'm trying to point out that there are other categories besides ASD and NT and the other kinds of non-NTs often go through some of the same things that we do. They are also ostracized and ridiculed because of their differing brain chemistry. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this matter?

Schizophrenia and ASD's are very similar conditions and it's mostly just the stroke of a pen separating things like "disorganized" and "simple" schizophrenia from AS, though schizophrenia really only becomes visible when a person enters adulthood. The challenges people with these conditions go through are the same. Psychiatry has failed to prove that schizophrenia is a disease though, and the brain atrophy that shows up in autopsies is most likely due to the wonderful "medication" they recieve. I'm personally trying to compile a list of characteristics that people with ASD's and schizophrenia usually share, and this is what I've come up with so far, sorted by category:

"Schizoid", the far driven introvert:

No participation in social structures and hence none of the aggression following that
Reduced or lacking interest in friendship
No natural interest in other people.
Taking remarks or interaction with other people very seriously, both giving and taking.
Expectation of loyalty as integral part in established companionships.
Lack of response to slightly offensive behaviour by other people, expecting these to sort their problems out without action on the Schizoid's part.
Flat affect, usually responding to other people's approaches with whatever is expected to get the person to go away.
Seeking pleasure in solitary activities and not having a natural way of coordinating the activity with other people.
Naturally stubborn from not having the usual drive to compromise. Lack of compromise means a strong drive to seek the truth about matters.
Telephone phobia
Monotonous voice, very little emotion expressed in it.


Disorganized:

Ambivalence
Auditory processing disorder
Sensory integration problems, some stimuli are recieved stronger and some weaker.
Hyperacusis
Focus on details
Anxiety when the normal structure is breached and when dealing with unknown factors.


With AS, you also have the special interests category of symptoms/behaviour, but otherwise it seems like the conditions are composed of the same building blocks. Learning about schizophrenia has made a lot more negative to psychiatry, seeing how people with this fuzzy diagnosis have been force-fed with drugs in spite of these not being of any benefit to the real problems of the patients. It definitely feels like whatever struggle us with ASD's are taking part in, we're in it together with the people with "schizo" diagnoses.

I read an article last year that said that a group of psychiatrists were trying to eradicated "schizophrenia" as a diagnosis. They claimed it's an umbrella term that is more accurately treated by diagnosing specific traits. We know that autistics were mistakenly diagnosed as schizophrenic, indeed, in the past the two terms were interchangeable. That had a lot of basis in the fact that autistic traits were misread as psychotic symptoms.

If you Google autism schizophrenia you find at the outset a very good clarification of the two entities by Uta Frith. Percentage of occurrence is approximately 1% for both. But autism is 4 to 1 males.
Difficulty in establishment of relationships appears in both conditions, but hallucinations and paranoia characterize schizophrenia. Genetic origin appears in both, but the onset of syntoms appears later in schizophrenia. Autism is probably largely underdiagnosed. In the common discourse the two conditions are often considered the same thing: being "mad".