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agitprop
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04 May 2009, 3:43 pm

donkey wrote:
schizophrenia, AS and schizotypal can present similar.
but i find a psychologist will se AS and in the same person a psychiatrist will see schizotypal.
the hallucinations are an indicator away from AS and differentiate it from schizophrenia.


Hi. New to the forums. This is my area of interest. I have a schizophrenic sister who has very strong autistic-like symptoms. She has a flat affect, much of the time, wants to be alone, actively dislikes people, and finds nothing in common with others. She doesn't like being around other people with schizophrenia because they are "crazy". She is able to maintain eye contact easily. She stares in your direction, without actually beholding you, is the impression I get. To me staring at someone unblinking, in this way, is a first cousin to not looking at them at all.

Autism strikes me as schizophrenia, minus the hallucinations and extreme paranoia. Think some forms of schizophrenia are actually closely related to autism.



ryan93
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04 May 2009, 4:10 pm

I don't think I'm schitzophrenic, but I have had hallucinations. I was waiting outside class one day and I started having a conversation with a friend who wasn't in that day. He was holding a knife for some reason :lol:. But it was because I accidentally went into a perfect trance-like state, not because of some mental problem. I agree that Schitzophrenia and Asperger's have some definite similarities, as they share a lot of symptoms. I'm not a neurologist, but maybe a new term should be coined for those with AS and Schitzophrenia, Aspiephrenia? :lol:



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04 May 2009, 6:24 pm

This is interesting because a couple of years before I was diagnosed with A.S., I did a research paper for a science class on Schizophrenia cause I wanted to do research on it to see if I had it.

Personally speaking, I've developed some schizophrenic like qualities that I think would not have happened without having A.S. to begin with...I think having severe depression could also trigger this sort of thing too.

What kind of schizophrenic qualities you ask? Well let's say I'm seeing things or hearing voices but I am constantly cursing and talking to people who aren't there (mainly while I'm driving by myself or in my bedroom alone) but are technically supposed to exist, and that God is against me for not committing certain evil deeds that I'm convinced he wanted me to do but didn't, and that I'm afraid to go out in public because I'm scared that I'll run into familiar faces who wanna attack me. Nuff said.



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04 May 2009, 6:30 pm

ryan93 wrote:
I don't think I'm schitzophrenic, but I have had hallucinations. I was waiting outside class one day and I started having a conversation with a friend who wasn't in that day. He was holding a knife for some reason :lol:. But it was because I accidentally went into a perfect trance-like state, not because of some mental problem. I agree that Schitzophrenia and Asperger's have some definite similarities, as they share a lot of symptoms. I'm not a neurologist, but maybe a new term should be coined for those with AS and Schitzophrenia, Aspiephrenia? :lol:



there already is a term for those inbetween the autistic spectrum and and Schizophrenic spectrum

its called McDD or Multiple-complex Developmental Disorder

Multiple-complex Developmental Disorder (McDD) represents a distinct group within the autism spectrum based on symptomatology.

Ever since autism was first recognized, its continuity with schizophrenia has been a matter of debate. In fact, until the late 1970s, children with autism were often labeled as having "childhood schizophrenia." In the last thirty years, however, the term "childhood schizophrenia" has been displaced. Diagnostic criteria for autism have been established that rely solely on social, communicative and sensorimotor symptoms, without reference to the thought disorders typical of schizophrenia.

Nevertheless, there are some children who display the severe, early-appearing social and communicative deficits characteristic of autism who ALSO display some of the emotional instability and disordered thought processes that resemble schizophrenic symptoms. Cohen, et al. (1986), coined the term Multiplex Developmental Disorder (MDD) to describe these children, although they are often given a diagnosis of PDD-NOS by clinicians who may be unfamiliar with this terminology. Unlike schizophrenia, MDD symptoms emerge in childhood, sometimes in the first years of life, and persist throughout development.

Multiplex developmental disorder is diagnosed in people who are on both the autism and schizophrenia spectrums. Their intelligence and emotional range run the gamut. There is a high rate of co-morbidity with learning disorders, AD/HD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, social anxiety disorder, Tourette's syndrome, personality disorders, epilepsy, and phobias.

McDD is a developmental disorder with symptoms that can be divided into three groups.

A. Regulation of emotion. (Affective symptoms) – two or more of the following.
1. Depressive symptoms such as consistent depressed mood, feelings of sadness or emptiness, thoughts of death, little interest or pleasure in activities, chronic fatigue, feelings of worthlessness or guilt.
2. Manic symptoms such as racing thoughts, irritability, distractibility, psychomotor agitation, impulsivity, sleep disturbances, feelings of grandiosity or extreme self worth, risky behavior.
3. Anxious symptoms such as recurrent panic, intense inappropriate anxiety, dissociation, diffuse tension, paranoia, unusual fears and phobias that are peculiar in content or in intensity.
4. Severely impaired regulation of feelings with significant and wide emotional variability.
B. Consistent impairments in social behavior and development (Autistic symptoms) - at least two from (A) and one from (B) or (C).
(A) Qualitative impairment in social interaction.
1. Marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction
2. Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level
3. A lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people
4. Lack of social or emotional reciprocity
(B) Qualitative impairments in communication.
1. Delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language (not accompanied by an attempt to compensate through alternative modes of communication such as gesture or mime)
2. In individuals with adequate speech, marked impairment in the ability to initiate or sustain a conversation with others
3. Stereotyped and repetitive use of language or idiosyncratic language
4. Lack of varied, spontaneous make-believe play or social imitative play appropriate to developmental level
(C) Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities.
1. Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus
2. Apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals
3. Stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms
4. Persistent preoccupation with parts of objects

C. Impaired cognitive processing (psychotic symptoms) – two or more of the following.
1. Delusions, including fantasies of personal omnipotence, thought insertion, paranoid preoccupations, overengagement with fantasy figures, grandiose fantasies of special powers, referential ideation, and confusion between fantasy and real life.
2. Hallucinations and/or unusual perceptual experiences.
3. Negative symptoms (anhedonia, affective flattening, alogia, or avolition)
4. Disorganized or catatonic behavior such as thought disorder symptoms, easy confusability, inappropriate emotions/facial expressions, uncontrollable laughter, etc.
5. Disorganized speech.


copyed an pasted from wikipedia



Mage
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05 May 2009, 10:22 am

MCDD and MDD aren't in the DSM IV and aren't widely recognized as being actual conditions. I would take anything you read on the internet about them with a grain of salt. Having personally known someone with schizophrenia, I know she absolutely will not ever admit to being schizophrenic. I think this MCDD and MDD is an attempt for those who have been diagnosed as schizophrenia to continue denying they have it, and to avoid treatment for it.



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05 May 2009, 10:29 am

It actually allows Schizophrenia and Asperger's to coexist in the DSM-IV-TR, see:

Quote:
By definition the diagnosis is not given if the criteria are met for any other specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder or for Schizophrenia (although the diagnosis of Asperger's Disorder and Schizophrenia may coexist if the onset of the Asperger's Disorder clearly preceded the onset of Schizophrenia)(Criterion F).


People really shouldn't just look at the criteria.



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05 May 2009, 10:54 am

From my own personal opinion in regards to Aspergers and Schizophrenia, I've alwways felt that both trouble conditions yes, share some qualities but, more than likely tend to be their own seperate medical realities.. I'm no doctor but, honestly I've actually came across someone whom has Schizophrenia-- with symptoms of delusions and for the most part I honestly can't see how another person might mis-identitfy as such.Still, anything is possible in this world..



ProfessorX



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05 May 2009, 7:19 pm

Mage wrote:
MCDD and MDD aren't in the DSM IV and aren't widely recognized as being actual conditions. I would take anything you read on the internet about them with a grain of salt. Having personally known someone with schizophrenia, I know she absolutely will not ever admit to being schizophrenic. I think this MCDD and MDD is an attempt for those who have been diagnosed as schizophrenia to continue denying they have it, and to avoid treatment for it.


i read somewhere ( on an official document)

that they were considering puting MCDD in the DSM V which is coming out in 2011

im not soure what they decided or not



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05 May 2009, 7:34 pm

ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
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Autistic people have trouble with empahty, and might not understand other people's thoughts and ideas will be different to their own.


That is a problem I have, I admit. The concept that people's thoughts and ideas are different than mine. I've always had difficulty with that in particular.


Most times, they're not. We think that our thoughts and ideas are different from others, but people, generally, share similar thoughts. Some just analyze more, or are more imaginative, suspicious, concrete, logical. Others are more detail-oriented and notice particulars. We are all connected uniformly (hate to break it to you).



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05 May 2009, 10:03 pm

ProfessorX wrote:
From my own personal opinion in regards to Aspergers and Schizophrenia, I've alwways felt that both trouble conditions yes, share some qualities but, more than likely tend to be their own seperate medical realities.. I'm no doctor but, honestly I've actually came across someone whom has Schizophrenia-- with symptoms of delusions and for the most part I honestly can't see how another person might mis-identitfy as such.Still, anything is possible in this world..



ProfessorX

Symptoms of delusions are "positive" symptoms. If enough "negative" symptoms are present, and there is clear evidence of clinically significant mal-adaptivity, plus a few things that might be construed as delusional (such as the notion that people are picking on you, or are all "in on" information/communicating information to which you are not aware and excluded from) in the context of negative symptoms being present and the absence of any other clinical explanation, then it's all too easy for someone to be misdiagnosed.

Some people with ASDs are very suggestible and socially passive. If they are told something enough, by people they perceive as authoritative (in terms of knowledge), then they can begin to believe what they are told. From being placed on hard core drugs, to being told one is suffering delusions of belief, and often perceptual/sensory hallucination (for instance the delusion that particular stimulus is painful being interpreted by medical professionals and explained to the patient as sensory hallucination), and that they have a degenerative condition that may or may not be sufficiently controlled by the medications to prevent further delusions or hallucinations, they might believe that they are experiencing hallucinations. They might, with enough leading, develop powerful fantasies in which they over-interpret mere ideas and thoughts as actual visual or audio hallucinations (indeed they may misunderstand the literal quality of real hallucinations as a result of over-compensation for over-literal interpretation).

Additionally, people with ASDs can develop transitory stress related psychosis, and if being medicated with powerful drugs one does not need, and pyscho-educated into believing one has a severe oten degenerative mental illness, does not constitute stress, what exactly would?

Knowledge about ASDs is not particularly pervasive in the medical field, including in psychiatry. Arguably, it is silly to suggest people with ASDs were not receiving mental health services prior to 1994, and to this day, many in psychiatry would not recognize an ASD if their (verbal) patient walked into their office proclaiming it.

People with ASDs in the main do superficially appear to have some psychiatric issue if their ASD is ignored (in the context of psychiatric evaluation), because in the main we present with what superficially appears as psychiatric symptoms. I do not know of any comprehensive attempt to identify these people within the psychiatric patient population, and many no doubt are currently misdiagnosed, mis-medicated, and without any prospect of the quality of life they could obtain in the absence of unnecessary and counter-productive "treatment" for non-existent mental illness.

The limited research in this area is led by the UK, and the evidence is that such persons are currently in the mental health system. One report on such research went so far as state directly that it had found patients who were committed to special hospitals with psychiatric diagnoses, because their underlying ASD had been misdiagnosed (with consequential lack of appropriate support and imposition of harmful interventions).



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25 Jul 2010, 4:05 pm

I am terrified of Schitzephenia - I've read articles in the paper about people with that and they've been the most violentest, horriblist people on earth.


Oh my god I am NOT getting that! I don't think I've got it. No no no no no no no it's worse than Altzhiemers!! !! !!



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25 Jul 2010, 5:47 pm

SteelMaiden wrote:
How many "traits" or "symptoms" do Asperger's and schizophrenia share?

I'm only asking this because I was diagnosed with Asperger's and paranoid schizophrenia almost simultaneously by a consultant psychiatrist.

I know obviously that hallucinations/paranoia/etc are all to do with the paranoid schiz., but there are some other, more behavioural traits/symptoms that I am not sure I can attribute to AS or to the paranoid schiz.

For example, I am 100,000 times better at communicating using a computer than speaking. Speak to me and I won't talk much or tell you about how I am feeling etc. This could be AS because AS people have communication problems, but this could also be the paranoid schiz. as one of the "negative symptoms" (research paranoid schizophrenia if you don't know what "negative symptoms" are).




I've been unofficially Dxed with NVLD (NVLD is not a formally-accepted mental disorder) and officially dxed with schizotypal personality disorder several times and schizoid personality disorder (with schizotypal and avoidant features) on my most recent neuropsychological evaluation.

I tend to believe I meet the dx criteria for Asperger's all things considered, but apparently the psycholgists who've tested me disagree. There are many experts who believe schizoid pd and
schizotypal pd are on the schizophrenic "spectrum". I do exhibit many of the negative symptoms
of schizophrenia too. I have been paranoid at times and I still am occasionally. I have never had
any hallucinations, but a few psycholgists felt I was exhibiting psychotic signs because I had some
bodily illusions during panic attacks.


I don't get panic attacks much anymore since I stopped all caffeine intake.


Some of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia can be associated with depression too.


Particularily if the depression is severe or profound.



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26 Jul 2010, 4:41 am

Joe90, might I direct you to research, for instance, Elyn Saks? She has schizophrenia, and she's neither horrible nor violent; in fact, she teaches law and has written several books. There's a lot of misinformation out there about schizophrenia, and if you haven't done any research of your own, it's easy to come to a conclusion such as the one you just espoused.

First of all, people with schizophrenia are actually not all that violent; the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. (Not that you'd know it from TV. They intentionally cover stories of bad things done by the mentally ill and ignore bad things done to them. People like Cho Seng-hui are the exception, rather than the rule, but they make for better headlines.)

It may be worse than Alzheimer's, but then again, a full recovery from schizophrenia is possible. (In about a third of cases, there is only one episode. In another third, there are multiple episodes, but the individual still functions.)

It's true that the prognosis is not that great, but it does not necessarily speak to the character of the individual.

Tl;dr version: remember that you get that information from the same people who call autistics soulless and accuse us of being what's left after the real child is stolen away.


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26 Jul 2010, 5:32 am

I used to work in mental health, and so I met lots of people with paranoid schizophrenia. I observed there is a difference between schizophrenic type of paranoia and Aspergers paranoia.

Paranoid schizophrenic people seem to have a sense that people are out to get them in some way - an intrinic and irrational sense of being a target for all kinds of irrational things. For instance, I knew one woman who was convinced an invisible person kept coming into her room at night an putting invisible contact lenses into her eyes, and no amount of reasoning could persuade her that this was impossible.

I think with the autistic spectrum, paranoia is more a logical result of not being able to read other people or know how they are reacting to you, and frequently having people interpret you as rude and thus be unfrriendly to you as a result. While I don't have a doom-laden sense of the universe being out to get me, I am often not sure whether people are being friendly or unfriendly, or I can sense that they are a bit 'off' but I'm not sure why, so I assume it's my fault because I observe people behave in a certain manner with people they are annoyed with. I also have difficulty distinguishing between whether someone is temporarily irritated with me or permanently dislikes me - black and white thinking makes me assume the latter.

Thinking about it, I'd say that schizophrenic people's paranoia results from trusting their own distorted sense of the world above other people's, whereas mine tends to be a result of distrusting my own sense of the world and thus having nothing to trust.


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ladyrain
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26 Jul 2010, 1:19 pm

DandelionFireworks wrote:
Tl;dr version: remember that you get that information from the same people who call autistics soulless and accuse us of being what's left after the real child is stolen away.

Not on topic, but I heard so many variations on this theme when I was a kid. Yuck!



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28 Jul 2010, 3:07 am

Sora wrote:
AS criteria say:

DSM-IV-TR wrote:
F. Criteria are not met for another specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder or Schizophrenia.


Expanded meaning:

DSM-IV-TR wrote:
By definition the diagnosis [of Asperger's] is not given if the criteria are met for any other specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder or for Schizophrenia (although the diagnoses of Asperger's Disorder and Schizophrenia may coexist if the onset of the Asperger's Disorder clearly preceded the onset of Schizophrenia) (Criterion F).


If you met the criteria for AS before your schizophrenia started, you can have both diagnoses.


It is really unfortunate that the summarised versions of the diagnostic criteria, without any exception that I could find, omit the statement that schizophrenia can co-exist with Asperger's syndrome. The relevant page of the DSM-IV is here http://books.google.ie/books?id=3SQrtpn ... &q&f=false

Schizophrenia actually appears to be more frequent in people with Asperger's (as are anxiety, depression and psychosis).

Pages that misleadingly state only that "Criteria are not met for another specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder or Schizophrenia" (or similar) include these:

http://www.autreat.com/dsm4-aspergers.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis_ ... r_syndrome
http://www.aspergers.com/aspcrit.htm
http://autism.about.com/od/aspergerssyn ... aforas.htm

All pages summarising the DSM diagnostic criteria should include the additional text that "By definition the diagnosis is not given if the criteria are met for any other specific Developmental Disorder or for Schizophrenia (although the diagnosis of Asperger's Disorder and Schizophrenia may coexist if the onset of the Asperger's Disorder clearly preceded the onset of Schizophrenia) (Criterion F)."