My son, 27, was diagnosed with high functioning autism five years ago, which was more helpful than previous diagnoses. But it’s recently become clear he suffers from schizophrenia. I am so perplexed about why the autism experts almost never talk about schizophrenia, and the schizophrenia experts almost never talk about autism, when the amount of overlap is massive. It’s been important for me to learn that currently schizophrenia is considered to have positive symptoms (things that are present that shouldn’t be, basically psychosis), negative symptoms ( things that are lacking—severe disorganization, lack of awareness about the symptoms, difficulties with planning and goal-setting, depression, anxiety), and cognitive impairments with higher order things like theory of mind (eg interpreting others’ body language). What seems to happen is once the positive symptoms appear during frontal lobe maturation in the late teens some doctor says, “Ah, it’s schizophrenia” and it turns out the negative symptoms and cognitive impairments have been there from early childhood and showed up on neuropsych evaluations from childhood. At least that’s what’s happened to us, and I’ve heard so many similar stories.

Posted by kwbueler at 2022-12-18 13:51:35 UTC