Schizophrenia is a complex brain disease with positive and negative symptoms. The positive symptoms are hallucinations and delusions. If a person is experiencing the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, that person is said to be psychotic.
Psychosis is not a part of autism. However, some of the sensory issues that are part of autism, might be confused with having hallucinations. For example, if a person has synesthesia, I can see how an outside observer might conclude the person is hallucinating. However, synesthesia is a completely different phenomenon.
The negative symptoms of schizophrenia are things that people with autism also have a lot of the times (anxiety, being asocial, lacking social skills, poor hygiene, poor executive functioning, depression, etc.). Because people with schizophrenia have some of the same problems that people with autism have, I can see how an outside observer would confuse the two conditions. The positive symptoms (hallucinations and delusions) can be greatly reduced with anti-psychotic medication. However, the negative symptoms seem to always be there, so when you treat someone with schizophrenia, a lot of time they start looking a lot like a person with Asperger's (someone with all the negative symptoms but no psychosis). I think the key feature that separates schizophrenia and autism is the positive symptoms (aka psychosis).
25 Feb 2015, 9:28 pm
