zlacker

[return to "Autism's confusing cousins"]
1. H8cril+ya[view] [source] 2025-12-06 13:14:11
>>Anon84+(OP)
BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism. You have to squint your eyes a bit, for example both of these neurotypes involve social difficulties, like the subjective feeling of being alien in the world (known as Anderssein in German psychiatry). However if you peel off the social layer then the remaining autistic features become anti-correlated with the remaining schizotypal features on the scale of the population. There are also some decent theories that suggest this should be the case - for example in the predictive coding theory it is believed that autistic brains over-weigh sensory inputs over their model of the world, whereas schizotypal brains over-weigh their model of the world over the sensory inputs. Or the Big Five traits, openness to experience is usually low in autism and high in schizophrenia.
◧◩
2. Noaidi+6h[view] [source] 2025-12-06 14:11:44
>>H8cril+ya
> BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism.

And I disagree with that. There is a wide overlap of symptoms in all mood disorders. People with ASD show many traits of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. This paper might change your mind:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8931527/

◧◩◪
3. H8cril+Kj[view] [source] 2025-12-06 14:37:15
>>Noaidi+6h
Yeah, at face value the two diagnoses are positively correlated. This is simply true. And traits of these two only become negatively correlated if you remove the shared social difficulties, which includes a lot of the negative symptoms. Unfortunately everything is positively correlated in psychiatry. If you want to explore this deeper I recommend the "p factor" (general psychopathology factor), which is a serious, multi-year attempt at identifying something like the "first eigenvector of psychiatry", a loading common to all psychopathology, including substance use, affective disorders, psychotic disorders, conduct/personality disorders, ... The idea is that if you only know that someone has whatever goes into this vector then you know that person is quite likely to develop some disorder, but you don't know which one.

I would only add that ASDs do not have "real" negative symptoms of schizophrenia, but what they do have can look a bit similar. The research on anti-correlation was using questionnaires and binned the social questions taking that into account.

[go to top]