Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Autism vs Schizophrenia: Opposite Ends of the Spectrum? What Causes Them?" video.

@fluffyribbit1881 IMHO, the reason is because of how they diagnostic criteria were written. There remains no good way of diagnosing people that are in that gap as neither diagnosis is really intended for that. The people that fall in that sweet spot of being able to mask long enough to avoid any of the developmental disorder diagnoses are also likely able to use those same skills to mask over the schizophrenia spectrum diagnoses as well. But, I have seen in the professional research literature indications that really Asperger's Syndrome is essentially just extremely early onset Schizoid Personality Disorder and Schizoid Personality Disorder is essentially just a much higher masking much more alexithymic version of AS that can't really be identified due to the person not having access to much of the relevant bits of their own experience to ask for help. Personally, most of the schizophrenia spectrum symptoms I had, (and I do mean spectrum, I've had professionals indicate that I'm every one of the schizophrenia spectrum diagnoses except for schizophrenia), got a lot better when I started to treat it like a neurological condition rather than a mental health one. I made a point of just feeding my brain specific things so that the brain wouldn't be able to develop a lot of inappropriate connections and it got a lot better.
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Yes, it's been a massive problem having schizoid personality disorder in the schizophrenia spectrum for similar reasons to having Asperger's Syndrome in the autistic spectrum. They have far more in common with each other than the other diagnoses that are in their respective spectra.
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@SimoneandMalcolm For one thing Schizoid Personality Disorder doesn't exist. It's a dead diagnosis that disappears under the alternate diagnostic model from the DSM 5 and hardly anybody ever goes in for treatment of it unless there's a different comorbidity. I struggle to find any objective reason for it existing independently of AS, as it's really hard to justify it not just being an extremely high-masked and extremely alexithymic version of AS.
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@martyspandex That's my personally interpretation. I'm like right on the line in terms of what used to be AS versus Schizoid Personality Disorder. Most Schizoids have already been moved over to either Avoidant Personality Disorder or Paranoid Personality Disorder which mostly leaves the folks that are arguably extremely alexithymic aspies left in the diagnosis. If you look at the venn diagram of traits that aspies have versus schizoids, there is a massive degree of overlap.
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It does, however you need a lot of it to make a measurably impact. Keep in mind that each time a neuron fires there's a transfer of ions back and forth across the cell membrane. Each of those charged particles moving generates a little magnetic field and is influenced by magnetic fields in the environment. The real question is at what point the field becomes strong enough to affect the brain as the medical treatment is a fair amount of magnetic field and MRIs aren't enough to do anything, at least not as far as I've heard.
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@SimoneandMalcolm Is it even possible from a diagnostic point of view? The literal only reason that I didn't get my AS diagnosis years ago under the DSM IV was that I had a bunch of schizo spectrum diagnoses, as in basically all of them, on my record and it was explicitly banned to have both. I'm kicking myself now that at age 43, I really deserve a proper diagnosis, and it's going to be incredibly hard due to the fixation that the medical community on having the positive symptoms early enough in life to be developmental. For those of us that are old enough that the DSM IV wasn't in force when we were primary school age, it can be incredibly hard to gather the necessary evidence as these things weren't really on anybody's radar at the time.
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One of the things we lost when we lost the AS diagnosis was a place for the folks that are nearer to the center of that. When the Schizoid Personality Disorder diagnosis goes away due to lack of research and use, there'll be absolutely nothing in the middle. You'll either be on the autistic spectrum on the schizophrenic spectrum or neither. It's kind of a problem for some of us as there's some chunk of the autistic population that's like me. Essentially too schizophrenic to be diagnosable as autistic and too autistic to properly fit with the treatments for schizophrenic spectrum disorders. From the reading that I've done, I've seen even researchers blurring the lines between ScPD and Asperger's Syndrome. For folks like me, I started having schizophrenia symptoms many years before a typical diagnosis would show up, but many years after developmental disabilities are usually identifiable, meaning that I can have a diagnosis, I just can't have one that fits me and might threaten to provide any sort of real help with the problems I have.
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I don't know that that's allowed. Or at least that's the specific reason why I don't have a formal diagnosis for autism, doctors see more of the schizophrenia spectrum traits and even the first neuropsychologist that was doing her absolute best to communicate to me that I needed to get my schizophrenia spectrum diagnoses re-evaluated with an eye to removing them so I could get an AS diagnosis. It took roughly 15 years to figure that out, by which time the DSM criteria had been "fixed" to make folks like me a lot harder to diagnose because there were too many autism diagnoses being handed out.
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@ChrisjayH1 Yes, the thing that made my voices go away was embracing them. I learned that they were natural processes that was going on with me and how to influence them. At this point, they're gone and they probably won't ever come back except in periods of extreme sleep deprivation and stress. Which is kind of a shame because as loud and annoying as they were, now that they're gone I miss them. It was pretty cool to be able to have an internal MP3 player of all the music I liked and be able to literally hear it whenever I cared to.
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I've also seen Asperger's Syndrome referred to as being "schizoid of childhood" in some research literature. There was also some research to suggest that AS was a separate thing from autism, which is one of the reasons why it was so foolish to merge it with the other developmental disorders. Merging it pretty much kills research and makes it a lot harder to find research participants. Schizoid Personality Disorder for it's part is probably going to go away in the near future as there's very little research into it due to a lack of schizoids showing up for therapy due to the lack of a requirement for there to be clinically significant distress as part of the diagnostic criteria.
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Because if there's anything that the courts are known for it's allowing people to get off the hook due to psychiatric diagnoses.
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@1simo93521 TBH, I think that's a good chunk of it. As an autistic person, it took a lot longer to find a partner than my NT peers did. I'm still hoping to have kids, but I am 43, so I'm way late in that regard. My parents were a bit younger, but my mother was 30 when I was born which was pretty old at the time and both sets of grandparents were still having kids well into their 40s.
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And yet we're no closer to making headway on the problem of overdiagnosis of NT syndrome.
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YT does that occasionally. Sometimes I've gone back to my responses and found that they got posted to a completely wrong comment section, even though I was very clearly responding to something on a different video.
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