Has your ASD ended up making you schizoid?

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archraphael
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15 May 2012, 6:21 pm

jackbus01 wrote:

archraphael wrote:

[
i think y2k has made a lot of autistics schizoid. the breakdown of society's connection to each other and norms has made everyone seem more distant and schizoid imo. and imo as result i believe mental illness and suicide literally is on the rise

What are you talking about! Society is way more connected now than at any time in the past. :!:

hypothetically, with the internet. i live in a suburb where neighbors don't even talk to each other or invite each other over. past societies used to be more held together because lack of fake connections like the internet.

wokndead
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15 May 2012, 6:25 pm

Schizophrenia and AS are genetically related, but differ in which genes are the cause, therefore they wouldn't occur together. I'm not totally sure about Schizoid or Schizotypal personality disorders, though.

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Deinonychus

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16 May 2012, 5:06 pm

wokndead wrote:

For 40 years I just assumed I was schizoid. Since last year two professionals have said I have AS instead. So I think that in some cases the symptoms can overlap so much that it's not clear which of the two a person has. I can identify with big chunks of both but not with everything in either. Just from hanging out on this forum I have noticed that there are schizoid-seeming aspies and aspie-seeming schizoids out there.

hoegaandit
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18 May 2012, 3:24 am

I find this quite an interesting thread. Firstly schizoid and schizotypal are completely different. We are talking schizoid here - lack of interest in people. I think there are two types of schizoids - those who are "naturally" schizoid and those who become schizoid because of bad experiences. I wonder if I am not in the latter category. I think when I was young I was intensely concerned about how people thought about me etc, yet now in my fifties I care little. I don't really feel the need for friends that most people do, so that is kinda schizoid, but I think this is different from how I used to be.

I do need to state that I am on wrongplanet because my son is dx autistic, rather than me. Most people who see me would not pick up anything different, and I scored strongly NT on the Aspie quiz I just did, although was borderline autistic on the Baron-Cohen quiz. But I've always had underlying difficulties socially, maybe from some ASD tendencies, and after decades I just think it wears you out.

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18 May 2012, 6:26 am

hoegaandit wrote:

I think that a lot of people get more isolated as they get older, for fairly obvious reasons. Friends and relatives move away or die or whatever and you don't have the same drive to meet new people that you had when you were young because not so many exciting new things are apparently just around the corner waiting to be experienced. Now, at 58 I really can't be bothered to meet people and prefer to spend as much time alone as possible doing my special interest. But I think that if meeting people were fun I would do it, so then the question is why has meeting people never been much fun? Speaking personally, as a child I was mostly alone in my room engaging in stimming behaviours and living in my own little headspace rather than wanting to have friends, so I think there must have been some sort of underlying aspie syndrome which led to the schizoid lifestyle in the first place. Again, having never been much good at socialising and having friends as a child makes it hard work doing those things as an adult.

hoegaandit
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18 May 2012, 7:53 pm

Halligeninseln wrote:

hoegaandit wrote:

Yeah I think my position is a bit similar. When I was a kid I sometimes used to bike off during school lunchtimes to some bush area to be alone with myself. I had fantastical and unreal notions of my abilities and what I could do. Were those issues functions of living in a rural area initially with few friends and then moving around a lot of different schools in my first school years? Probably that played a role but I think there were underlying ASD type reasons (my mother and her father show some ASD symptoms). I may say that I was quite popular in high school where I was settled and had quite a few friends. But latterly, although I have moved to a different country, about four or five of those old school friends somehow tracked me down and emailed me, but I have generally not been bothered to respond. I am trying to talk to some people outside of my office while waiting for the train or walking the dog as I think that would be better for me, although I really don't have that much interest. I don't think I have ever had real reciprocal relationships, so there may just be something missing there (although when young I fell in love and had girls fall in love with me). In summary I think it is right that there are underlying issues (eg ASD) and these can be masked (few if any would pick up on them while communicating with me) but that does not mean they are not there.

Last edited by hoegaandit on 20 May 2012, 1:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yourmomm
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19 May 2012, 8:42 am

hoegaandit wrote:

I couldnt agree with this more-except for one bit: Im not sure anyone is "born", or "naturally" schizoid...I guess my personal belief is that everyone whose behaviour could be characterised in this way has gotten to that point through struggling (and eventually giving-up struggling) with the vagaries and complexities of social interaction. Pronounced detachment in my experience only comes about through repeated effort and failure within the social realm. I think you can only be diagnosed with any P.D. after the age of 18(?), which suggests an individuals experience is crucial in their genesis....? Put this way, and as far as the original poster goes, schizoid behaviour and attitudes might be expected to be fairly commonplace within ASD, and full-blown diagnostic criteria for schizoid PD would inevitably apply for a smaller proportion of these people. I'm pretty sure these criteria might increasingly apply to me as I get older, but there have been brief, fleeting times in my life where I have felt more able to successfully connect with an individual (inevitably as socially inept as myself), and, during these times, I was quite motivated to engage in social activity (even if it consisted of playing chess and not saying anything at all to each other for hours on end!). On this note, the original poster has asked this forum for it's views on an interesting topic and one which I think a lot of us may have had thoughts in the past: but is this not in itself a social act of connection within (as opposed to detachment from) the social realm? By definition, such acts might be viewed as paradoxical to a schizoid PD diagnosis...? You'd have to ask a doctor I guess....

hanyo
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19 May 2012, 10:58 am

Yourmomm wrote:

On this note, the original poster has asked this forum for it's views on an interesting topic and one which I think a lot of us may have had thoughts in the past: but is this not in itself a social act of connection within (as opposed to detachment from) the social realm? By definition, such acts might be viewed as paradoxical to a schizoid PD diagnosis...? You'd have to ask a doctor I guess....

I don't know. Schizoids even have forums of their own. Here is one I have saved and read on occasion. I never posted there.

http://www.psychforums.com/schizoid-personality/

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19 May 2012, 11:36 am

I don't think the idea is that schizoids don't want to communicate with anyone at all. As I understand it many of them are ambivalent about closeness, wanting intimacy but shying away from it, too. As the last poster said, they have their own forum so they must want to communicate with others :roll: . It would be strange if they wanted to be 100% cut off from everybody, although maybe there are such extreme cases too . What I have read on the subject seems to suggest an element of mistrust, too, as though they don't want to reveal their inner selves to other people, which stands in contrast to a lot of what aspies do on this forum. The element of "schizoid" which seems relevant in the context of ASD seems to be mainly that of social withdrawal. It is said that schizoids make contact with others and then feel overwhelmed and withdraw. This happens to me on a daily basis and has done so ever since I was a small child, but it doesn't have anything to do with mistrust. My brain just starts screaming with overload after not too long when I am with others and I have to get away, not for any emotional reasons, just neurological ones as far as I can tell. However a psychiatrist would probably try to find some emotional reason why I'm like that where there is in fact no such reason. I have learnt to deal with having that kind of neurology and my partner takes it into account all the time, which is great because no-one else in the world has ever done so before (that's why we've been together for 10 years). However, because I get stressed out and overwhelmed in social situations (it literally hurts my brain) I have tended more and more not to be social. In the same way, when I was young I used to be really happy when I saw there was a letter in the letter box ; now I know that it is just bills so I am happy when there is nothing in the letter box. With social relations I have learnt that they stress me out so I feel happy when I know I don't have to see anyone and not so happy when I know I have to see someone. I suspect that underlying this is a form of ASD (I have 2 unofficial diagnoses), which is why I think that having a certain type of neurology can end up making you schizoid in that sense.

XFilesGeek
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19 May 2012, 2:33 pm

hanyo wrote:

Yourmomm wrote:

I don't know. Schizoids even have forums of their own. Here is one I have saved and read on occasion. I never posted there.

http://www.psychforums.com/schizoid-personality/

Most of the people I've met online claiming to be "schizoid" were actually just either narcissists or depressed introverts.

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19 May 2012, 6:56 pm

XFilesGeek wrote:

hanyo wrote:

Yourmomm wrote:

I don't know. Schizoids even have forums of their own. Here is one I have saved and read on occasion. I never posted there.

http://www.psychforums.com/schizoid-personality/

Most of the people I've met online claiming to be "schizoid" were actually just either narcissists or depressed introverts.

That's interesting. Then where ARE all the schizoids? (I mean the real ones). Maybe what I think of as schizoid is just extreme introversion. They are supposed to represent 1% of the population, so where are they all? What is it as a syndrome anyway? I don't really understand, even though I've read the little that is available on the subject. If 1% of the population is schizoid, as they claim, then that is MILLIONS of people and far more than the number of people with ASD, so why is it so little documented? I don't expect anyone to be able to answer these questions.

Yourmomm
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19 May 2012, 9:31 pm

Most of the people I've met online claiming to be "schizoid" were actually just either narcissists or depressed introverts.[/quote]

I'm not sure I'd like to differentiate here, and it's all sounding a little perjorative to me...I think halligeninsein was inviting a debate about whether a schizoid personality could be arrived at from experiencing the difficulties often associated with Aspergers (sorry if I have misinterpreted the original question)...I would say my belief is "for sure!". But that is not to say that this is the only possible route toward a schizoid pattern of responding to our world: anyone who repeatedly (ie fairly consistently, over the course of a number of years) experiences overwhelming negative affect, as a direct consequence of social interactions, might reasonably learn to try to cope with this overwhelming negative emotional-arousal state, successfully or not, through withdrawal and subsequent avoidance of future social interactions: I guess it's possible that this could apply just as much to "depressed introverts" and "narcissists", as it might to Aspies: all might experience an overwhelming negative emotional arousal state within social interaction, and I think then it becomes a matter of whether this occurs consistently enough, over a long enough period of time for their belief that "the best/only way of coping is through detachment" to cement and generalise to all future social interactions. I'm not a doctor, so I don't know this for sure, but my guess would be that people who meet diagnostic criteria for schizoid PD would
also meet criteria for a wide range of other diagnoses; this seems to be the nature of PD diagnoses more generally. I think of more use than a reified diagnostic category (often pejoratively-applied by members of the public as well as those within the medical establishment) is a genuine understanding of the processes by which such patterns of responding come about. I think this is what the OP was getting at (?), and a sense of this personal journey is what he and others have discussed in the posts above. Halligeninsein also alludes to another possible route toward schizoid personality types: pronounced mistrust of others...this makes sense to me! I'm sure there are literally hundreds of factors which may or may not be important for a given individual to exhibit schizoid tendencies. What's true for one person may have nothing to do with another's experiences, although both may end up with the same diagnosis. Me? Like the OP, I've had a few diagnoses over the years, but I'm not sure any of them captures the "true" nature (whatever that is) of my experiences: they are just convenient shorthand for describing some things I do and struggle with that others find hard to understand.

And thanks to the forum for the heads-up on a schizoid forum-i take the point that my logic on this point was flawed. I guess being schizoid is really nothing to do with disinterest in all forms of social interaction: it might be more about regulating emotional distance within social interactions, to minimise the threat of overwhelming negative affect, and the avoidance of those social interactions where this is not easily possible. Why not a schizoid forum! I'll retreat back into my shell and go check it out:-)

Halligeninseln
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20 May 2012, 12:42 pm

Yourmomm wrote:

I'm not sure I'd like to differentiate here, and it's all sounding a little perjorative to me...I think halligeninsein was inviting a debate about whether a schizoid personality could be arrived at from experiencing the difficulties often associated with Aspergers (sorry if I have misinterpreted the original question)...I would say my belief is "for sure!". But that is not to say that this is the only possible route toward a schizoid pattern of responding to our world: anyone who repeatedly (ie fairly consistently, over the course of a number of years) experiences overwhelming negative affect, as a direct consequence of social interactions, might reasonably learn to try to cope with this overwhelming negative emotional-arousal state, successfully or not, through withdrawal and subsequent avoidance of future social interactions: I guess it's possible that this could apply just as much to "depressed introverts" and "narcissists", as it might to Aspies: all might experience an overwhelming negative emotional arousal state within social interaction, and I think then it becomes a matter of whether this occurs consistently enough, over a long enough period of time for their belief that "the best/only way of coping is through detachment" to cement and generalise to all future social interactions. I'm not a doctor, so I don't know this for sure, but my guess would be that people who meet diagnostic criteria for schizoid PD would
also meet criteria for a wide range of other diagnoses; this seems to be the nature of PD diagnoses more generally. I think of more use than a reified diagnostic category (often pejoratively-applied by members of the public as well as those within the medical establishment) is a genuine understanding of the processes by which such patterns of responding come about. I think this is what the OP was getting at (?), and a sense of this personal journey is what he and others have discussed in the posts above. Halligeninsein also alludes to another possible route toward schizoid personality types: pronounced mistrust of others...this makes sense to me! I'm sure there are literally hundreds of factors which may or may not be important for a given individual to exhibit schizoid tendencies. What's true for one person may have nothing to do with another's experiences, although both may end up with the same diagnosis. Me? Like the OP, I've had a few diagnoses over the years, but I'm not sure any of them captures the "true" nature (whatever that is) of my experiences: they are just convenient shorthand for describing some things I do and struggle with that others find hard to understand.

And thanks to the forum for the heads-up on a schizoid forum-i take the point that my logic on this point was flawed. I guess being schizoid is really nothing to do with disinterest in all forms of social interaction: it might be more about regulating emotional distance within social interactions, to minimise the threat of overwhelming negative affect, and the avoidance of those social interactions where this is not easily possible. Why not a schizoid forum! I'll retreat back into my shell and go check it out:-)

Good post

. I think you must be right about there being a whole range of routes to an individual coming to exhibit schizoid tendencies and I'm pretty sure that one of them is ASD, with the proviso that if you become schizoid as a result of your ASD it doesn't count as schizoid for the DSM because the schizoid behaviours would be well enough explained by the ASD. I hope my comments about schizoids were not pejorative - I would consider myself to be schizoid in a broad sense so I wouldn't want to run them down since I could be seen as being one. I'd rather there was just a diagnosis "social withdrawal for whatever reason" and that they scrapped the schizoid diagnosis altogether. As far as I am aware they are going to do just that in the new DSM, replacing it with something like "Personality Disorder, Trait Specified: Social Withdrawal". I'm not sure I've got the wording exactly right but it's more or less that. Such a diagnosis wouldn't imply that you are indifferent to praise or criticism or have flattened emotions or any of the other things you get charged with if you get a schizoid dx, just that you withdraw from social contact. I think I'd be willing to accept the dx that I have a disordered personality which likes to withdraw. You can have a disordered personality which likes to withdraw whether or not you also have ASD, as you mention.

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20 May 2012, 6:37 pm

Halligeninseln wrote:

XFilesGeek wrote:

hanyo wrote:

Yourmomm wrote:

I don't know. Schizoids even have forums of their own. Here is one I have saved and read on occasion. I never posted there.

http://www.psychforums.com/schizoid-personality/

Most of the people I've met online claiming to be "schizoid" were actually just either narcissists or depressed introverts.

That's the point. I don't think they would bother.

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20 May 2012, 7:42 pm

see also:

http://schizoids.net/forum/forum.php

( im not registered there btw)

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