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12:22am July 13, 2014
Anonymous asked: I thought I saw you make a post a while back about having both schizoid personality disorder and autism? If that was you, could I ask a little about that since I think that might apply to myself as well? It's possible you were talking about sensory processing disorder though, and if so, please ignore this ask.

I’ve had both diagnoses, sort of.  As in, I’ve had a provisional schizoid personality diagnosis when I was 13 and again when I was 14, before I was formally diagnosed with autism.  But I don’t think that means I had both schizoid personality disorder and autism.  I think that in children, a schizoid diagnosis is almost always really autism being misread by doctors.

In particular, they were focused on the fact that I had ‘flat affect’ and was very socially isolated.  Which are two of the main features of schizoid, and which are also consequences of autism.  It’s looking at the same thing through two different lenses – something psychiatry is very good at.  I’ve found the autism diagnosis more useful.

There’s a book by I think Sula Wolff that’s pretty old and outdated but I think it argues that schizoid personality in childhood is usually autism or connected to autism in some way.  Which would make sense given that the only outward signs are having flat affect and social isolation (and the rest, especially at an early age, tend to be inferred by the doctor), and quite often those two things, when extreme, in a child, point to the autism spectrum.

But then I’m not big on psychiatric categorizations anyway.  I’ve done a lot of studying of them, but I have trouble believing in them, even autism has gaping holes in it.  But we have to use words, so we use the words we have, and autism is a useful word for me right now at this point in time, so I say I am autistic.  Maybe in fifty years they’ll have some new word for me, and some new other word for other types of autistic people, and then some autistic people will get back-shunted into categories like schizophrenia again (which itself may be broadened, narrowed, or split up), and there’ll be things like multi-complex developmental disorder, and all these new words, and some of the new words will be as bad or worse than the old ones, others will be better, and the cycle of non-science in psychiatric classification will go on.