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aspergers vs schizophrenia

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nominalist
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04 Jan 2008, 1:51 pm

Apatura wrote:
I have made 2 polls here asking members if they experience delusional thinking (with or without reality testing). An overwhelming majority said that they did. Obviously this is unscientific but there could be a real continuum between AS and schizophrenia. It seems rather arbitrary to call one a mental illness and the other a neurological variant.


I agree. However, the label "mental illness" itself is controversial. There are those, such as Thomas Szasz (a psychiatrist), who reject the concept of mental illness as little more than power politics by institutionalized psychiatry.


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laplantain
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04 Jan 2008, 4:04 pm

Hmmm.
The original post was because I was just wondering about my son because it was just confirmed that my mother-in-law is schizophrenic. Somehow it is a lot scarier to me than Aspergers. I think my husband is secretly afraid that he might be schizophrenic.

I wonder for people who are schizophrenic if they had delays when they were young children, because from what I have read it starts in adolescence. I guess I am somehow hoping that it is a totally different thing, and now that we know what delays our son has that he might be saved from anything new popping up when he is older.



Apatura
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04 Jan 2008, 7:09 pm

laplantain wrote:
Hmmm.
The original post was because I was just wondering about my son because it was just confirmed that my mother-in-law is schizophrenic. Somehow it is a lot scarier to me than Aspergers. I think my husband is secretly afraid that he might be schizophrenic.


I have often been secretly afraid that I'm schizophrenic-- but I would not qualify for a diagnosis because my reality testing is good and I have no auditory or visual hallucinations. I do, though, fit the criteria for schizotypal personality disorder, the description of which is very similar to Aspegrer's.

Autism, when it was first described, was considered a form of schizophrenia. There may well be some kind of link that isn't well understood yet.