So... because your shitty mental healthcare system misdiagnosed you, you want to throw out the category of diagnosis they misapplied? That's the very definition of a "skill issue," your family is just schizoid while (for example) mine is autistic. An inconvenient and disorienting mix-up for you, to be sure, but that's on the lazy idiots who misled you, not the idea of autism.
Edit: Just realized from another of your articles you're in Sweden... your mental healthcare system is notoriously paternalistic in the worst possible way (formerly outright eugenicist until very recently iirc), and the way European welfare bureaucracies tend to handle things like autism and schizoid is absolutely shameful. I have a close friend being abused by Swedish paychiatrists as I type this! So definitely blame the system for this one.
Although Sweden has a number of problems, the autism/schizoid issue is a global one, because the major diagnostic manuals for psychiatry say that only adults can have schizoid personality disorder. No one, nowhere seems to have an answers to what to call the children who will get schizoid personality disorder the day they turn 18.
I have Schizoid Personality Disorder, fitting the diagnostic criteria almost perfectly. "Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self" by Harry Guntrip is worth a read to attain a good understanding of Schizoid Personality Disorder. I'll have to give the books you referenced a read too. Unfortunately (modern) psychology seems to be geared towards pathologizing everything.
I scored 30/36 on the "Reading the mind in the eyes" test. I have studied Paul Ekman's work on subtle / micro expressions, and the Facial Action Coding System, so that may have given me an advantage. Prior to that training, I likely would have attained an average score too.
Have you ever heard of the "Schizoid vs Psychopath" theory of history? I skimmed through the comments and didn't see it mentioned anywhere. Apologies if I missed it.
The theory breaks down humanity into three groups: the Normies, the Psychopaths, and the Schizoids (sometimes called Autists - I agree with you that this is the incorrect label).
The normies are your baseline humans, the naked apes, the smart primates who do primate things. They have the light of God in their eyes, that divine spark of creativity, but they're also very mammalian; they don't think too deeply about metaphysical or ethical questions, it's mostly a case of monkey-see-monkey-do. "Normie conformie".
The Psychopaths (really, Cluster Bs - the Narcissists, Borderlines, and Histrionics are part of this group as well) are the intelligent tik-tok machines of manipulation, the vampires and undead, who lack the true creative spirit within them. They become experts at masquerading as normal people, and harvest the emotional loosh of the normies. These are your Lenins and Stalins, your WEF, the deadlights of consciousness who need the blood of others to be shed for the sake of their emotional manipulation games. They lack true affect, and manipulate the masses our of evil and boredom. The Normies are almost utterly incapable of perceiving them or understanding them, and will frequently get worked up into violent mobs, destroying one another, because they can't believe that such people exist.
The Schizoid is the one who preys upon the Psychopaths. Because the Schizoid lacks a strong desire for social approval, the manipulation games of the elite don't work on them. If they're interested in the outside world, they're interested in the truth; not the popular delusions of the time. As such, the enchantment spells don't work properly upon them. Unlike the Psychopaths, the Schizoid cares about the Normies, even if they don't care about Normie obsessions. So when they see the Psychopaths rising to power and abusing people, many of them will dedicate themselves to destroying that evil.
This sounds familiar. I don't know where I have heard of it, maybe it is just something I have seen in passing or that Anders and I have talked about. It is both intriguing and simplified and I hope to return to the subject rather soon.
BTW, your central thesis is something I also realized some years ago. I've long been a fan of the Internet Autists on 4chan, and eventually came to the conclusion that it wasn't autism, it was schizoid behaviour. You did a better job explaining all of it, and you dug deeper, I only mention my similar conclusion to bolster the credibility of your claim.
Do you know that image of a face where it you look at it in high resolution it appears to be smiling, but if you squint or reduce the resolution it then appears to be frowning? I find many (for lack of a better word) "conspiracy theories" on there that fit that model.
They perfectly describe a phenomenon at a high level, but when you zoom in to the nitty gritty it changes into something more mundane. I'm still chewing on that fact, trying to figure out what it means.
You make some very valid points in this article. I don't believe "autism" or the "autism spectrum" is a disability, especially not those of us who would've been diagnosed as Asperger's before it was merged with autism. I think it's about time people realized that those of us with Asperger's and those of us with true autism are actually pretty wildly different.
I also love your description of how someone with a quirky personality can easily be misdiagnosed as autistic. Kim John Payne talks about this in his book Simplicity Parenting.
I'm so sorry for what you've been through with your daughter. It's pretty clear that she's suffering with something other than autism, even if it's in addition to autism.
Sorry to hear about your daughter, Tove. I hope she matures out of her insular world, to some degree.
Our own daughter has had difficulties - not that I think she's mentally ill, mostly just lacking self confidence and difficulty making friends (and almost certainly discalculia) - but at age 22 she is making great strides in determining her own path - and learning to deal with people better, without being a walkover.
"men are less inclined than women to use their IQ points to analyze their romantic relationships. Instead they have a leisurely approach to romance. Women, on the other hand, treat romance as intellectual work."
Perhaps similar to something I recently said to my wife (in presence of my daughter, who found it both frustrating and amusing) when she (as frequently happens) presented me with an issue she was having, and I responded with some exasperation, that I didn't know what to do about it. She snapped back that she was just making conservation. I told her men don't make conversations, we fix problems!
PS since first hearing about Asberger's about 20 years ago, I'd admit that I might have some symptoms of high functioning autism myself, though I've never really studied it. Mostly my propensity for getting lost in thought and not listening to (to the point of not hearing) what is going on around me, and having to make an effort to return to the social/emotional realm. I can solve quite difficult problems in creative ways under noisy or stressful circumstances, focusing for hours at a time, but might tend to forget about other things while I do so ...
If it gives you any hope - i can see myself in Alma & I had to grow up at a certain point because I realized I needed to support myself & I didn’t want to be destitute. But I was a very mentally ill self absorbed teen
It certainly does. Was there anything special, apart from wanting to support yourself, that made you grow up into a mentally sane adult? Or did it just happen? (That is the impression I get from the children in Sula Wolff's sample: sometimes they just grew sane and sometimes they didn't. It just happened or it didn't happen)
Oh a huge wake up call for me was having to work in a warehouse & being around other people who had worse circumstances than I did & seeing their struggle to survive. At some point I had to work. I’m not sure if this works for everyone because some people may just not have the self awareness or meta abilities to be able to consider the long term & see themselves accurately
I feel like the sad thing is when you’re on the high end of the neurotic nutso you desperately need good mentors to keep you on the straight and narrow. If you follow your own whims you drive yourself off a damn cliff. But that becomes impossible at times with people who have these kinds of personalities
As I got older I was faced with the reality that people weren’t going to pay for me forever. I also have a high standard of how I want to live. I couldn’t hold down a job, I couldn’t seem to maintain relationships. My Mom was also not the type to baby me lol, she was hard on me & would straight up tell me from early on she thought I was being a loser - she didn’t have remotely any kind of tolerance for my nonsense. At the time people would have thought this was too harsh - but tbh I think this saved me in the long run. Not having high self esteem in the face of being a dysfunctional person who was falling into limerence with every random guy I met was probably a good thing - I struggled with this problem for years & it would suck up ALL MY FOCUS. But I will contemplate further and see if I have any other insight.
My mom always treated me like i was more capable than I was being, expressed disappointment, was harsh with me at times - did not mince worse, zinged me, all that jazz. Seems harsh at the time but I appreciate it in the long term. She never treated me like I was some invalid even though I clearly had mental issues
That certainly is encouraging in my case, because that kind of frankness is the main "fault" that Anders and I are guilty of towards Alma. I would find it impossible to raise siblings otherwise: Pretending that abnormal behavior is normal is no good for the other kids of the family, who are supposed to learn what is normal... If honesty could be on the plus side after all, then there might be some kind of hope of making things work.
I don’t think that’s a fault, as long as you’re not going overboard. My mom sometimes got too emotional & went overboard with her criticism. The easier thing to do when you have a difficult kid is to appease them & let them rule the roost & control things. I don’t think that’s the right thing in end, I don’t think that’s best in the long term. I really do hope your daughter is capable of self reflecting & adjusting herself. I think it varies from person to person who is able to do this in the end. You have to want to change but also be of sound enough mind to actually change.
How old are you, plus-minus? I feel that right now the parenting style you describe is very difficult because no one backs it up. I tried and tried to find someone else - a psychologist, a teacher - who would tell Alma that her parents were right, the world actually is full of demands. But no one would help us with that. All professionals were just "building confidence", leaving the unpleasant truth-telling to the parents.
Oh from what I read Ted the Unabomber was not happy about his social issues. He actually contemplated a lot why he had social issues & would have preferred to be socially normal. I believe he had bad social experiences starting in high school where he was unpopular (I don’t think his personality helped, he was a bit arrogant as genius boys can be) & I possibly picked on. He was clearly EXTREMELY sensitive and was prob as high in neuroticism as you can be, he overreacted to things. I have this same problem. So a single dumb negative experience can cause a very strong & irrational response that often leads to self destructive behavior - I had this problem when I was younger to an extreme degree. Like trying to date once, it not going well, and then NEVER doing it again. Something like that. A single failure or negative experience can trigger avoidance & a myriad of other maladaptive responses. He clearly had this problem. But from my reading he was not actually happy with his social issues, I feel like he developed some kind of anxiety problem & the horribly abusive MK Ultra social experiment they did on him as a teen in college seemed to have triggered his descent into being a full hermit. He had friends & was more social in college before being subject to the abusive experiments (which I could see being horrible for someone if his temperament) - his friends report he completely withdrew from people afterwards.
I believe at one point later he wrote his mother an angry letter blaming her for all his problems with people - because she had yelled at him once over laundry or something like that. He was upset about it, not a true antisocial imo, he would have preferred to be social. I think he felt incapable of being social.
I love the fact that you are investigating these things with an open mind. I wish the same for everyone.
At the age of 55 I was diagnosed with autism. That was more than eight years ago.
I don’t know if I would still be diagnosed with autism if I was reevaluated today because I’ve heard that you need to have someone who witnessed you not being able to speak at all within the first few years of your life.
Even though I have often questioned my diagnosis, every time I look at the diagnostic criteria, one of the first things that hits me strongly is the issue of severe social deficits.
This is very true of me even though I don’t always see it directly, but can always see it when calmly analyzing the aftermath of social interactions in which I was involved.
I love the idea of being around people, generally.
But only some of the time I see it as a positive experience regardless of how much I am physically, mentally and emotionally drained by it.
But it is demoralizing to often return to the awareness that people seem to feel they have no choice to avoid me because of how socially inept I am as a result of the extreme anxiety that my brain tends to automatically generate whenever I am around people.
Trying to list everybody on the spectrum of the same classification is related to removing all binaries to include everybody for the same thing: Communism.
As the parent of a now 36 year old daughter misdiagnosed with all sorts of labels that eventually settled into Asperger's, I'll say that a diagnosis is only as useful as 1, the quality assistance it helps you procure for the child and 2, an increased ability for parents to understand why their child does the things s/he does that cause difficulties at home and abroad.
In our case, the former was not just sadly inadequate but detrimental in almost every case, including the pharmaceuticals prescribed. This included a stay at a children's hospital where draconian measures were implemented despite the state of the art facilities and exceptionally credentialed staff... or maybe because of. The field of psychology/psychiatry is a minefield of personality disordered practitioners and harmful pseudo science that I'd avoid at all costs, knowing what I know now. I doubt it's improved in the past two decades, given that the medical arm of the industry hasn't.
The role of heavy metals in both mental illness and autism spectrum disorders shouldn't be underestimated. That's another very likely cause of the increase in diagnoses of one kind or another and the obvious increase in Alzheimer's among adults. Exposure is everywhere now.
I will add that my daughter functions independently in her 30s, though her personality is less social and more in her own world than most. On the whole, she figured out what she needed to do to get by and she does it. No thanks to any intervention on anyone's part but her determined, if exhausted, parents.
One thing that you could try is ketogenic therapy since you can find quite a few cases of people improving or completely putting into remission eg bipolar. TLDR is that diet/gut microbiome can cause metabolic system-wide derangement in some people, which obviously messes up the brain.
It also indicates a problem that is general across the social sciences: inability to build a coherent set of well-defined categories. Which suggests they are not really sciences, they are just pretending to be such.
I haven't heard of the brain energy approach. There probably is some truth in it - some mental illness definitely is physical illness, like Alzheimers disease. But in general I believe in a socially based definition of mental illness: Mental illness is personality types and mental states that clash with a person's social environment. For example, people with schizotypal personality disorder were probably once outstanding shamans. Now they are just mentally ill.
Your point about autism being a grab-bag for things that are distantly related to each other is bang-on.
Reading your description of your daughter, I wondered about this. Most studies have been in the UK, and one guy who has it wrote a very enlightening book from his own perspective (mid-20s). The labels are less interesting to me than the behavior cluster. In case it's helpful:
I have only read half of Harry Thompson's book, but it is obvious to me that Harry Thompson is the 21st century version of the “schizoid” children that Sula Wolff studied. He is exactly the kind of person that was included in her study.
“The core features of schizoid are subjective: feelings of being different from other people and cut off from your "self" (hence the name), a feeling of being a bystander or observer in your own life, and occasional outright depersonalisation, ceasing to think of yourself as a person at all.”
Harry Thompson writes:
“I have very similar irrational fears such as when people ask to borrow one of my razors, sit on my bed, or ask to wear my shoes – even if someone needs to quickly grab something from outside. The reason being is that sometimes external objects (and sometimes people) can feel as though they are extensions of me.”
So to summarize things, I guess that in modern terms, my daughter has “pathological demand avoidance". Which was obvious to everyone around her. I just didn't know that there was a diagnosis with that name.
What will happen if your child is unable to work? Will they still have a place to live and be able to afford necessities like food? If she is able to cook, and able to shop, it sounds like she might be able to do the basic tasks of daily life for herself if she has enough money. I have a brother in law who has schizophrenia (in the US) and he is unable to work, so depending on how much my in-laws have saved up, how long they can continue working, and how long my brother in law lives, eventually he will be homeless (he cannot live with us, because some of his paranoid delusions involve us and our children).
>>What will happen if your child is unable to work? Will they still have a place to live and be able to afford necessities like food?
In theory, yes. In practice, I doubt it. In Sweden the expression "falling between two stools" is frequently used to describe people who in theory should be helped by some institution, but who no institution feels responsible for. I imagine that my daughter will be such a case once she turns 18. It doesn't exactly help that she doesn't cooperate with anyone. Wikipedia says that schizoid personality disorder is thought to be very common among homeless people and I can easily see why: years before I read that we started to fear that Alma will end up homeless. Before she left us we planned to provide her with accommodation in a small, detached house in the future, but that obviously doesn't work as long as she is openly hostile towards us.
I'm a late-diagnosed autistic (female body gender, so that probably helped with the masking a lot), and I read the bit you wrote about the eye expression test that everyone is basically guessing and reconstructing.
You're right, but what I've learned over the years is that for autistic people, this is (in terms of computers) an **active process**[1], while for everyone else, it is a part of the operating system.
The difference might sound superficial, but it's really not – think of it as speaking a second language that you only started learning as a grown-up. Given the same amount of training/exposure, you will still not be as comfortable as somebody who grew up with your language. (For another illustration of what I mean, try doing it drunk!)
---
[1] For many (including myself), the emotion-analysis-process is running in the background and not requiring any attention. Regardless of that, it still drains processing power and social battery, and it's next-to-impossible to turn it off.
How do you know that you are actively processing the information, if it is being done without conscious effort? Is it because you remember a time when you actively learned to interpret facial expressions?
Yes, in hindsight. I started doing it around the time I was 5 years old. Also, social interactions get less exhausting if I turn away from people. Zoom calls drain me less if I turn off the cameras, etc. etc. :)
I know nothing about autism. I believe that it is being massively overdiagnosed, because many people with small positions of authority and less learning have incentives to diagnose it.
On schizoid personality disorder, Kirk Honda (Psychology in Seattle) has produced a series of six ninety-minute podcasts ("schizoid personality deep dive", parts 1-6). I am tentatively prepared to listen to him because he has done the research, right back to the French precursors of Freud, and through Jung, Bleuler, Klein, Guntrip and ten or so other important contributors.
He is a professor of psychotherapy and openly admits in the course of these podcasts that before starting the "deep dive" he had misconceptions about SzPD. This is not surprising for several reasons: schizoids are not violent or suicidal so not a priority; they avoid interpersonal contact including with therapists, therapeutic insight into any one case takes a minimum of six months and often more than five years, most often never, because the patient never trusts the therapist; the very word causes even trained therapists to confuse it with schizophrenia, schizotypal, schizoaffective; and schizoids very rarely come into the orbit of therapists. When they do, it is almost always because of associated depression. He says that completely missing the disorder, or misdiagnosis as schizophrenia or autism is by far the most common occurrence for schizoids.
The core features of schizoid are subjective: feelings of being different from other people and cut off from your "self" (hence the name), a feeling of being a bystander or observer in your own life, and occasional outright depersonalisation, ceasing to think of yourself as a person at all.
But the DSM and the ICD ignore subjective criteria, which is why they come up with checklists of behaviours that may or may not apply, and are not really much use.
Right in line with your experiences, Tove.
University education has been extended to people who are not capable of understanding what they are taught. That is how we have ended up with this situation of petty tyrants wanting to fit everyone who troubles them into the Procrustean bed of autism.
>>The core features of schizoid are subjective: feelings of being different from other people and cut off from your "self" (hence the name), a feeling of being a bystander or observer in your own life, and occasional outright depersonalisation, ceasing to think of yourself as a person at all.
Is sounds like schizoid personality disorder went the same way as autism before it went into oblivion: in Sula Wolff's research, it was broadened to include unsocial people in general. The core criterium you describe sounds much like the protagonist in Albert Camus' The Stranger.
Psychologists are annoyingly pragmatic. They say things like "if a diagnosis can be of help to the patient, if should be there, otherwise not". Such lack of stringency distorts definitions very rapidly.
So... because your shitty mental healthcare system misdiagnosed you, you want to throw out the category of diagnosis they misapplied? That's the very definition of a "skill issue," your family is just schizoid while (for example) mine is autistic. An inconvenient and disorienting mix-up for you, to be sure, but that's on the lazy idiots who misled you, not the idea of autism.
Edit: Just realized from another of your articles you're in Sweden... your mental healthcare system is notoriously paternalistic in the worst possible way (formerly outright eugenicist until very recently iirc), and the way European welfare bureaucracies tend to handle things like autism and schizoid is absolutely shameful. I have a close friend being abused by Swedish paychiatrists as I type this! So definitely blame the system for this one.
I don't want to throw out any category https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/when-will-psychiatry-invent-the-barcode. I just want only those that actually live up to the diagnostic criteria of autism to be diagnosed with autism.
Although Sweden has a number of problems, the autism/schizoid issue is a global one, because the major diagnostic manuals for psychiatry say that only adults can have schizoid personality disorder. No one, nowhere seems to have an answers to what to call the children who will get schizoid personality disorder the day they turn 18.
They should also be called schizoid, of course, but I suppose that’s too obvious for The Man to find acceptable. Or maybe “potentially schizoid”?
I have Schizoid Personality Disorder, fitting the diagnostic criteria almost perfectly. "Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self" by Harry Guntrip is worth a read to attain a good understanding of Schizoid Personality Disorder. I'll have to give the books you referenced a read too. Unfortunately (modern) psychology seems to be geared towards pathologizing everything.
I scored 30/36 on the "Reading the mind in the eyes" test. I have studied Paul Ekman's work on subtle / micro expressions, and the Facial Action Coding System, so that may have given me an advantage. Prior to that training, I likely would have attained an average score too.
Thank you for your data. And the book tip. Reading.
Have you ever heard of the "Schizoid vs Psychopath" theory of history? I skimmed through the comments and didn't see it mentioned anywhere. Apologies if I missed it.
The theory breaks down humanity into three groups: the Normies, the Psychopaths, and the Schizoids (sometimes called Autists - I agree with you that this is the incorrect label).
The normies are your baseline humans, the naked apes, the smart primates who do primate things. They have the light of God in their eyes, that divine spark of creativity, but they're also very mammalian; they don't think too deeply about metaphysical or ethical questions, it's mostly a case of monkey-see-monkey-do. "Normie conformie".
The Psychopaths (really, Cluster Bs - the Narcissists, Borderlines, and Histrionics are part of this group as well) are the intelligent tik-tok machines of manipulation, the vampires and undead, who lack the true creative spirit within them. They become experts at masquerading as normal people, and harvest the emotional loosh of the normies. These are your Lenins and Stalins, your WEF, the deadlights of consciousness who need the blood of others to be shed for the sake of their emotional manipulation games. They lack true affect, and manipulate the masses our of evil and boredom. The Normies are almost utterly incapable of perceiving them or understanding them, and will frequently get worked up into violent mobs, destroying one another, because they can't believe that such people exist.
The Schizoid is the one who preys upon the Psychopaths. Because the Schizoid lacks a strong desire for social approval, the manipulation games of the elite don't work on them. If they're interested in the outside world, they're interested in the truth; not the popular delusions of the time. As such, the enchantment spells don't work properly upon them. Unlike the Psychopaths, the Schizoid cares about the Normies, even if they don't care about Normie obsessions. So when they see the Psychopaths rising to power and abusing people, many of them will dedicate themselves to destroying that evil.
This sounds familiar. I don't know where I have heard of it, maybe it is just something I have seen in passing or that Anders and I have talked about. It is both intriguing and simplified and I hope to return to the subject rather soon.
BTW, your central thesis is something I also realized some years ago. I've long been a fan of the Internet Autists on 4chan, and eventually came to the conclusion that it wasn't autism, it was schizoid behaviour. You did a better job explaining all of it, and you dug deeper, I only mention my similar conclusion to bolster the credibility of your claim.
Thank you!
I believe it was first formalized on 4chan.
Do you know that image of a face where it you look at it in high resolution it appears to be smiling, but if you squint or reduce the resolution it then appears to be frowning? I find many (for lack of a better word) "conspiracy theories" on there that fit that model.
They perfectly describe a phenomenon at a high level, but when you zoom in to the nitty gritty it changes into something more mundane. I'm still chewing on that fact, trying to figure out what it means.
You make some very valid points in this article. I don't believe "autism" or the "autism spectrum" is a disability, especially not those of us who would've been diagnosed as Asperger's before it was merged with autism. I think it's about time people realized that those of us with Asperger's and those of us with true autism are actually pretty wildly different.
I also love your description of how someone with a quirky personality can easily be misdiagnosed as autistic. Kim John Payne talks about this in his book Simplicity Parenting.
I'm so sorry for what you've been through with your daughter. It's pretty clear that she's suffering with something other than autism, even if it's in addition to autism.
What resources do you recommend on schizoid?
Sorry to hear about your daughter, Tove. I hope she matures out of her insular world, to some degree.
Our own daughter has had difficulties - not that I think she's mentally ill, mostly just lacking self confidence and difficulty making friends (and almost certainly discalculia) - but at age 22 she is making great strides in determining her own path - and learning to deal with people better, without being a walkover.
"men are less inclined than women to use their IQ points to analyze their romantic relationships. Instead they have a leisurely approach to romance. Women, on the other hand, treat romance as intellectual work."
Perhaps similar to something I recently said to my wife (in presence of my daughter, who found it both frustrating and amusing) when she (as frequently happens) presented me with an issue she was having, and I responded with some exasperation, that I didn't know what to do about it. She snapped back that she was just making conservation. I told her men don't make conversations, we fix problems!
PS since first hearing about Asberger's about 20 years ago, I'd admit that I might have some symptoms of high functioning autism myself, though I've never really studied it. Mostly my propensity for getting lost in thought and not listening to (to the point of not hearing) what is going on around me, and having to make an effort to return to the social/emotional realm. I can solve quite difficult problems in creative ways under noisy or stressful circumstances, focusing for hours at a time, but might tend to forget about other things while I do so ...
If it gives you any hope - i can see myself in Alma & I had to grow up at a certain point because I realized I needed to support myself & I didn’t want to be destitute. But I was a very mentally ill self absorbed teen
It certainly does. Was there anything special, apart from wanting to support yourself, that made you grow up into a mentally sane adult? Or did it just happen? (That is the impression I get from the children in Sula Wolff's sample: sometimes they just grew sane and sometimes they didn't. It just happened or it didn't happen)
Oh a huge wake up call for me was having to work in a warehouse & being around other people who had worse circumstances than I did & seeing their struggle to survive. At some point I had to work. I’m not sure if this works for everyone because some people may just not have the self awareness or meta abilities to be able to consider the long term & see themselves accurately
I feel like the sad thing is when you’re on the high end of the neurotic nutso you desperately need good mentors to keep you on the straight and narrow. If you follow your own whims you drive yourself off a damn cliff. But that becomes impossible at times with people who have these kinds of personalities
As I got older I was faced with the reality that people weren’t going to pay for me forever. I also have a high standard of how I want to live. I couldn’t hold down a job, I couldn’t seem to maintain relationships. My Mom was also not the type to baby me lol, she was hard on me & would straight up tell me from early on she thought I was being a loser - she didn’t have remotely any kind of tolerance for my nonsense. At the time people would have thought this was too harsh - but tbh I think this saved me in the long run. Not having high self esteem in the face of being a dysfunctional person who was falling into limerence with every random guy I met was probably a good thing - I struggled with this problem for years & it would suck up ALL MY FOCUS. But I will contemplate further and see if I have any other insight.
My mom always treated me like i was more capable than I was being, expressed disappointment, was harsh with me at times - did not mince worse, zinged me, all that jazz. Seems harsh at the time but I appreciate it in the long term. She never treated me like I was some invalid even though I clearly had mental issues
That certainly is encouraging in my case, because that kind of frankness is the main "fault" that Anders and I are guilty of towards Alma. I would find it impossible to raise siblings otherwise: Pretending that abnormal behavior is normal is no good for the other kids of the family, who are supposed to learn what is normal... If honesty could be on the plus side after all, then there might be some kind of hope of making things work.
I don’t think that’s a fault, as long as you’re not going overboard. My mom sometimes got too emotional & went overboard with her criticism. The easier thing to do when you have a difficult kid is to appease them & let them rule the roost & control things. I don’t think that’s the right thing in end, I don’t think that’s best in the long term. I really do hope your daughter is capable of self reflecting & adjusting herself. I think it varies from person to person who is able to do this in the end. You have to want to change but also be of sound enough mind to actually change.
How old are you, plus-minus? I feel that right now the parenting style you describe is very difficult because no one backs it up. I tried and tried to find someone else - a psychologist, a teacher - who would tell Alma that her parents were right, the world actually is full of demands. But no one would help us with that. All professionals were just "building confidence", leaving the unpleasant truth-telling to the parents.
*mince words
Oh from what I read Ted the Unabomber was not happy about his social issues. He actually contemplated a lot why he had social issues & would have preferred to be socially normal. I believe he had bad social experiences starting in high school where he was unpopular (I don’t think his personality helped, he was a bit arrogant as genius boys can be) & I possibly picked on. He was clearly EXTREMELY sensitive and was prob as high in neuroticism as you can be, he overreacted to things. I have this same problem. So a single dumb negative experience can cause a very strong & irrational response that often leads to self destructive behavior - I had this problem when I was younger to an extreme degree. Like trying to date once, it not going well, and then NEVER doing it again. Something like that. A single failure or negative experience can trigger avoidance & a myriad of other maladaptive responses. He clearly had this problem. But from my reading he was not actually happy with his social issues, I feel like he developed some kind of anxiety problem & the horribly abusive MK Ultra social experiment they did on him as a teen in college seemed to have triggered his descent into being a full hermit. He had friends & was more social in college before being subject to the abusive experiments (which I could see being horrible for someone if his temperament) - his friends report he completely withdrew from people afterwards.
I believe at one point later he wrote his mother an angry letter blaming her for all his problems with people - because she had yelled at him once over laundry or something like that. He was upset about it, not a true antisocial imo, he would have preferred to be social. I think he felt incapable of being social.
I love the fact that you are investigating these things with an open mind. I wish the same for everyone.
At the age of 55 I was diagnosed with autism. That was more than eight years ago.
I don’t know if I would still be diagnosed with autism if I was reevaluated today because I’ve heard that you need to have someone who witnessed you not being able to speak at all within the first few years of your life.
Even though I have often questioned my diagnosis, every time I look at the diagnostic criteria, one of the first things that hits me strongly is the issue of severe social deficits.
This is very true of me even though I don’t always see it directly, but can always see it when calmly analyzing the aftermath of social interactions in which I was involved.
I love the idea of being around people, generally.
But only some of the time I see it as a positive experience regardless of how much I am physically, mentally and emotionally drained by it.
But it is demoralizing to often return to the awareness that people seem to feel they have no choice to avoid me because of how socially inept I am as a result of the extreme anxiety that my brain tends to automatically generate whenever I am around people.
Trying to list everybody on the spectrum of the same classification is related to removing all binaries to include everybody for the same thing: Communism.
37:00 - 39:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wIWTHgnRtQ
As the parent of a now 36 year old daughter misdiagnosed with all sorts of labels that eventually settled into Asperger's, I'll say that a diagnosis is only as useful as 1, the quality assistance it helps you procure for the child and 2, an increased ability for parents to understand why their child does the things s/he does that cause difficulties at home and abroad.
In our case, the former was not just sadly inadequate but detrimental in almost every case, including the pharmaceuticals prescribed. This included a stay at a children's hospital where draconian measures were implemented despite the state of the art facilities and exceptionally credentialed staff... or maybe because of. The field of psychology/psychiatry is a minefield of personality disordered practitioners and harmful pseudo science that I'd avoid at all costs, knowing what I know now. I doubt it's improved in the past two decades, given that the medical arm of the industry hasn't.
The role of heavy metals in both mental illness and autism spectrum disorders shouldn't be underestimated. That's another very likely cause of the increase in diagnoses of one kind or another and the obvious increase in Alzheimer's among adults. Exposure is everywhere now.
I will add that my daughter functions independently in her 30s, though her personality is less social and more in her own world than most. On the whole, she figured out what she needed to do to get by and she does it. No thanks to any intervention on anyone's part but her determined, if exhausted, parents.
One thing that you could try is ketogenic therapy since you can find quite a few cases of people improving or completely putting into remission eg bipolar. TLDR is that diet/gut microbiome can cause metabolic system-wide derangement in some people, which obviously messes up the brain.
You can google/youtube: 1) Chris Palmer 2) Matt Baszucki, who healed his bipolar after ~4 months on keto diet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQWh_ofvziE
I wonder how much, if at all, this fits in with the Brain Energy approach.
https://brainenergy.com/
It also indicates a problem that is general across the social sciences: inability to build a coherent set of well-defined categories. Which suggests they are not really sciences, they are just pretending to be such.
Though there are attempts to build such. E.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_knowledge_system
I haven't heard of the brain energy approach. There probably is some truth in it - some mental illness definitely is physical illness, like Alzheimers disease. But in general I believe in a socially based definition of mental illness: Mental illness is personality types and mental states that clash with a person's social environment. For example, people with schizotypal personality disorder were probably once outstanding shamans. Now they are just mentally ill.
Your point about autism being a grab-bag for things that are distantly related to each other is bang-on.
Reading your description of your daughter, I wondered about this. Most studies have been in the UK, and one guy who has it wrote a very enlightening book from his own perspective (mid-20s). The labels are less interesting to me than the behavior cluster. In case it's helpful:
https://neurodivergentinsights.com/autism-infographics/autism-pda-explained
https://www.amazon.com/PDA-Paradox-Little-Known-Autism-Spectrum/dp/1785926756
I have only read half of Harry Thompson's book, but it is obvious to me that Harry Thompson is the 21st century version of the “schizoid” children that Sula Wolff studied. He is exactly the kind of person that was included in her study.
One passage led me to believe that Harry Thompson fits into Gregvp's orthodox definition of schizoid personality disorder, written in this comment https://open.substack.com/pub/woodfromeden/p/the-anti-autism-manifesto?r=rd1ej&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=77543949
“The core features of schizoid are subjective: feelings of being different from other people and cut off from your "self" (hence the name), a feeling of being a bystander or observer in your own life, and occasional outright depersonalisation, ceasing to think of yourself as a person at all.”
Harry Thompson writes:
“I have very similar irrational fears such as when people ask to borrow one of my razors, sit on my bed, or ask to wear my shoes – even if someone needs to quickly grab something from outside. The reason being is that sometimes external objects (and sometimes people) can feel as though they are extensions of me.”
So to summarize things, I guess that in modern terms, my daughter has “pathological demand avoidance". Which was obvious to everyone around her. I just didn't know that there was a diagnosis with that name.
I'm so glad that was helpful.
PDA really can improve as they get older. Our best wishes for your daughter, and for your family.
What will happen if your child is unable to work? Will they still have a place to live and be able to afford necessities like food? If she is able to cook, and able to shop, it sounds like she might be able to do the basic tasks of daily life for herself if she has enough money. I have a brother in law who has schizophrenia (in the US) and he is unable to work, so depending on how much my in-laws have saved up, how long they can continue working, and how long my brother in law lives, eventually he will be homeless (he cannot live with us, because some of his paranoid delusions involve us and our children).
>>What will happen if your child is unable to work? Will they still have a place to live and be able to afford necessities like food?
In theory, yes. In practice, I doubt it. In Sweden the expression "falling between two stools" is frequently used to describe people who in theory should be helped by some institution, but who no institution feels responsible for. I imagine that my daughter will be such a case once she turns 18. It doesn't exactly help that she doesn't cooperate with anyone. Wikipedia says that schizoid personality disorder is thought to be very common among homeless people and I can easily see why: years before I read that we started to fear that Alma will end up homeless. Before she left us we planned to provide her with accommodation in a small, detached house in the future, but that obviously doesn't work as long as she is openly hostile towards us.
I'm a late-diagnosed autistic (female body gender, so that probably helped with the masking a lot), and I read the bit you wrote about the eye expression test that everyone is basically guessing and reconstructing.
You're right, but what I've learned over the years is that for autistic people, this is (in terms of computers) an **active process**[1], while for everyone else, it is a part of the operating system.
The difference might sound superficial, but it's really not – think of it as speaking a second language that you only started learning as a grown-up. Given the same amount of training/exposure, you will still not be as comfortable as somebody who grew up with your language. (For another illustration of what I mean, try doing it drunk!)
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[1] For many (including myself), the emotion-analysis-process is running in the background and not requiring any attention. Regardless of that, it still drains processing power and social battery, and it's next-to-impossible to turn it off.
How do you know that you are actively processing the information, if it is being done without conscious effort? Is it because you remember a time when you actively learned to interpret facial expressions?
Yes, in hindsight. I started doing it around the time I was 5 years old. Also, social interactions get less exhausting if I turn away from people. Zoom calls drain me less if I turn off the cameras, etc. etc. :)
I know nothing about autism. I believe that it is being massively overdiagnosed, because many people with small positions of authority and less learning have incentives to diagnose it.
On schizoid personality disorder, Kirk Honda (Psychology in Seattle) has produced a series of six ninety-minute podcasts ("schizoid personality deep dive", parts 1-6). I am tentatively prepared to listen to him because he has done the research, right back to the French precursors of Freud, and through Jung, Bleuler, Klein, Guntrip and ten or so other important contributors.
He is a professor of psychotherapy and openly admits in the course of these podcasts that before starting the "deep dive" he had misconceptions about SzPD. This is not surprising for several reasons: schizoids are not violent or suicidal so not a priority; they avoid interpersonal contact including with therapists, therapeutic insight into any one case takes a minimum of six months and often more than five years, most often never, because the patient never trusts the therapist; the very word causes even trained therapists to confuse it with schizophrenia, schizotypal, schizoaffective; and schizoids very rarely come into the orbit of therapists. When they do, it is almost always because of associated depression. He says that completely missing the disorder, or misdiagnosis as schizophrenia or autism is by far the most common occurrence for schizoids.
The core features of schizoid are subjective: feelings of being different from other people and cut off from your "self" (hence the name), a feeling of being a bystander or observer in your own life, and occasional outright depersonalisation, ceasing to think of yourself as a person at all.
But the DSM and the ICD ignore subjective criteria, which is why they come up with checklists of behaviours that may or may not apply, and are not really much use.
Right in line with your experiences, Tove.
University education has been extended to people who are not capable of understanding what they are taught. That is how we have ended up with this situation of petty tyrants wanting to fit everyone who troubles them into the Procrustean bed of autism.
>>The core features of schizoid are subjective: feelings of being different from other people and cut off from your "self" (hence the name), a feeling of being a bystander or observer in your own life, and occasional outright depersonalisation, ceasing to think of yourself as a person at all.
Is sounds like schizoid personality disorder went the same way as autism before it went into oblivion: in Sula Wolff's research, it was broadened to include unsocial people in general. The core criterium you describe sounds much like the protagonist in Albert Camus' The Stranger.
Psychologists are annoyingly pragmatic. They say things like "if a diagnosis can be of help to the patient, if should be there, otherwise not". Such lack of stringency distorts definitions very rapidly.
The Stranger! Yes, that's a very good connection to make.