what is the relationship between Schizophrenia and autism

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i understand schizophrenics are delusional while autistic people have developmental problems, but autism, and schizophrenia are always together (to me anyways)

my grandmother (my dads mother) was a schizophrenic, and my mom has Borderline Personality disorder, but the more my grandfather (my dads father) sees me, he keeps saying "your just like your grandmother" which i find interesting, also, the more time i spend with my grandfather, the more he starts to think my grandmother was Autistic, not schizophrenic.

do you think there are genes in schizophrenic people that can be simular or even result in autistic genes? i wish i could explain it better

No.

Buddy, you post a lot, and I like you and think you are brilliant and sensitive. But you don't strike me as schizophrenic at all. Please consider that you are a whole and healthy person with a unique brain which speaks to you in amazing ways; and play from your strengths.

The only relation I think autism has to schizophrenia is that it was originally used as terminology for symptoms of schizophrenia. Here's some text stating this from the relevant Wikipedia article.

But other than that, as I understand, autism has no relation or co-morbidity with autism. The disorders aren't even similar in a diagnostic sense since one is a form of psychosis with different ranges and the other is a range of developmental disabilities.

If autism was originally termed a form of being schitzo (something like 'childhood schizophrenia'), could it be that in those early days doctors did see a connection between the symptoms of the two?

My mother has schizophrenia /idk

I have an old friend with schizophrenia and his issues don't even vaguely resemble mine. Schizophrenia is diagnostically almost the polar opposite of autism.

No. To be clear, schizophrenia and autism are diagnostically opposite in both presentation and aetiology. In fact, the presence of one rules out the other. These are mutually exclusive conditions. While schizophrenics are delusional/psychotic, autistics can be hyper-real and logical et al. The co-occurrence of these two conditions is so diagnostically rare (<< 0.1%), that it's considered practically null. Now, sometimes young adult Aspies (who are in crisis, for example) can be (temporarily, hopefully) misdiagnosed, mostly because of misinterpretation/misunderstanding by any given practitioner.

Amongst certain laypeople, I have encountered confusion between these two and it's always the wrong direction. There are very real and distinct differences in neuroreceptors between these two opposite conditions (& I'll not go into details here now - besides I already have on historic posts). And so much more. It is well-established that these are truly opposite conditions.

It is true that long ago autism was termed 'childhood schizophrenia' (although the onset of schizophrenia is early adulthood, but nevermind here). The reason was because there simply was no other diagnostic category! Yes, doctors/practitioners did know this was amiss, but there was no recourse. Make no mistake that these are synonymous. Remember too that was the time when psychiatrists correlated mental illness with unwholesome living, devil possession or even Satanism. Long gone are the days that autism is caused by 'refrigerator mothers' (or other nonsense). Of course we know better now, and these outdated notions are downright silly.

I don't think that there's no connection between schizophrenia and autism at all. I don't know about the exact numbers of comorbidity (some of the diagnostic systems indeed exclude comorbidity), but I believe that a significant number of so called high functioning folks - that includes me - closely resemble mild schizophrenia, or more precisely, schizoid personality disorder.

I did the mmpi2 test (not just a random internet quiz), and after some research I realized that I truly have significant schizophrenic and paranoid traits (besides autistic). The fact that some diagnosticians do provide multiple diagnoses of ASD and SPD, and that borderline and bi-polar personality disorders are often comorbid with ASD, it's only reasonable that ASD and SPD might actually have something in common. At least more than one might think.

Research supports that in families of autistic people there's a higher occurrence of schizophrenia, so it suggests that there's a genetic connection.

People who later receive an SPD diagnosis might actually have a similar brain setup than autistics, perhaps less issues stemming from the dysfunction of the social compartment and more coming from some other, but I just can't believe how short-sighted some autistic people can be when it comes for evaluation of their own 'logic device'. Logic and sense of reality are two distinct things. Unless your logic gets fed with the sense of reality, it will make logical missteps purely based on ineffective fact-filtering. In other words, only a well-established mind can make both logical and realistic judgments. People who have issues with navigating the social arena will never be naturally good filterers. It'd take a lot of mental effort to at least get close to what the most brilliant minds without an autistic spectrum disorder can achieve, IMHO.

Last edited by OJani on 28 Dec 2013, 2:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thank goodness that LabPet saved me the trouble of typing the same thing, I know that when I joined WP that the ideas of Crespi and Badcock were being considered. In BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES, 2008, 31(1), 241 their ideas are laid out.

Autism wasn't described in the 1910s. It wasn't until the late-1930s and early 1940s that Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner first introduced Autism Spectrum disorders. And just because its terminology was first used in cases of schizophrenic withdrawal within its negative symptoms doesn't necessarily mean that both autism and schizophrenia share any relation in subjects like etiology, diagnosis and characteristics.

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/autism/ ... izophrenia

http://hrcak.srce.hr/file/113458

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia form disorder in my early teens but no one else really thought I had schizophrenia. They didn't really know at all why I was so different, including myself, until I was rediagnosed with Asperger's in my mid 20's. Apparently it is common for girls with Asperger's to be misdiagnosed as such. Schizophrenia is a mental illness, Asperger's is not, but the media has always loved to make people think they turn people into murderous psychopaths and are somehow to blame for their "being crazy".

I am schizophrenic and autistic and I think both conditions arose in me due to a combination of birth problems and genes. Although stress certainly did assist in the development of my psychosis (mum would get drunk often and beat me up, parents divorced when I was a teenager etc).

I'm sure of once reading that Autistic people have a natural protection against schizophrenia meaning they are statisticly least likely to get it.

Asperger's is slightly different(according to most psychiatrists) . Only 7 percent of patients with Asperger's are diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Which is probably higher than average but still fairly low. It is confusing because Asperger's is being lumped in with cluster A personality disorders (odd, eccentric, weird). Paranoid, Schzotypal, schizoid. The same category as those with schzophrenia

Don't you just love Psychiatry

I have read a few articles stating that both Autism and Schizophrenia are greatly affected by Leaky Gut & related gastrointestinal problems. I've experienced the same for myself.

Rather than just provide the links, please could you give your view on the two papers. These papers disagree with the one which I mentioned, I suspect that no clear answer has come from the scientific community, but after seeing the stuff that some MDs write in academic papers I do question the competance of MDs in general to do science.

Those from some areas of medicine are bester / worse than others, I think that some areas of psychoanalysis are patent nonsense and are totally unscientific.