Thank you for opening up about your pain for our edification. (It's hard to put a cherry on top of some things.)
As a nitpick, I don't believe in "dyscalculia" or "spelling disorder" (but English spelling is wack) - my prior is more towards "IQ in the lower ranges". Like not every elevator goes to the top floor. But with math, for one thing it's really terribly taught, and you really need to be rooted in your own storehouse of knowledge that you were (perhaps guided to be) able to tell for yourself. "Dyslexia" and ADHD I am also deeply suspicious of. It's like if a child can't be still, silent and obedient, in a system they may have never asked to be put in (as such schooling is mandatory), there must be something wrong with them - the system is never questioned. And I couldn't imagine having to learn to read in school - if I hadn't had lots of books as a preschool kid and basically figured it out on my own (along with being read to), I don't think I would have picked it up there, or perhaps I would have become "slow".
Perhaps a little bit of "schizoid" is adaptive, inasmuch as that's a tendency to have personal interests apart from the hive mind. Like how else are humans supposed to get ahead? So much of our knowledge comes from the work of eccentric, wealthy amateurs. It's a good thing psychologists weren't really so much of a thing. You'd almost rather fight with ecclesiastics than with people who think they're being scientific. I can't have much partiality to them, though a few good folks have practiced it.
Still, as my friend put it, "there are some people out there who are really [ducked] up, and we need to [unduck] them." It's easier for the rest of us not to see that every minute, at least in nice places.
>>It's hard to put a cherry on top of some things.
That was indeed a poetic way of putting it.
I think that dyslexia and dyscalculia are supposed to only be spoken of in the cases in which a person has a significantly lower ability to read or count compared to their overall IQ. So those disorders are supposed to be an unusually uneven IQ, with dips in specific places.
Whether you want to call her autistic, schizoid or supercalifragilisticlespialidocious won't make much of a difference. Those are all labels without any medical entity and they are not even reliable diagnoses. It's all circular reasoning. The DSM is not the result of research on construct validity, it's the result of consensus.
If you want more information, I can refer you to books and articles on this.
What you're describing as schizoid is what autism was defined as in the 90s at least at the popular level. Probably 99% of people using the term still understand it that way. Hence who cares what more modern books say. Science ended in 1999 with the y2k bug anyway.
I am in a hurry, but I cannot help myself and I am making a few comments:
1. This whole mess is the result of 50 years Leftist occupation of the academia, brainwashing, anti-scientific propaganda "ex catedra", etc. It (again, as always) literally harms people health. (Anyone remember Lisenko? Well, the modern psychology with its "gender theory" and autism or attention-deficiency for everyone is not better)
2. You son does not have autism, nor schizoid disorder. He is simply a genius or mild version of it. We ought to learn to recognize people as DIFFERENT and stop putting them into the same Procrustean bed, but again - it is very hard when we are brainwashed for generations with "people are equal".
3. You said you are writing this because you ran out of ideas. I don't know what is possible within the legal framework in Sweden, nor the possibility of practical realization, but there are quite interesting studies about the relation between diet and psychological disorders. I won't dwell into details, so I don't write anything stupid, but I am VERY curious to see the result of eliminating grain and diary from your daughter's diet, or even attempting carnivore diet.
I think schizoid personality disorder is the typical personality disorder among geniuses. Many of those would have served the human race better if they learned how cope with their weak sides. Being a genius is good. Being a genius that can deal with people and function in society is even better.
The problem with people with pathological demand avoidance (as I have now learned that it is called) is that telling them what to do is nigh on impossible. Including telling them what to eat. (My daughter does avoid dairy because she prefers vegan food and that certainly didn't improve her symptoms, but I can't see any way that anyone could convince her to avoid gluten).
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 ...
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.
Thank you for opening up about your pain for our edification. (It's hard to put a cherry on top of some things.)
As a nitpick, I don't believe in "dyscalculia" or "spelling disorder" (but English spelling is wack) - my prior is more towards "IQ in the lower ranges". Like not every elevator goes to the top floor. But with math, for one thing it's really terribly taught, and you really need to be rooted in your own storehouse of knowledge that you were (perhaps guided to be) able to tell for yourself. "Dyslexia" and ADHD I am also deeply suspicious of. It's like if a child can't be still, silent and obedient, in a system they may have never asked to be put in (as such schooling is mandatory), there must be something wrong with them - the system is never questioned. And I couldn't imagine having to learn to read in school - if I hadn't had lots of books as a preschool kid and basically figured it out on my own (along with being read to), I don't think I would have picked it up there, or perhaps I would have become "slow".
Perhaps a little bit of "schizoid" is adaptive, inasmuch as that's a tendency to have personal interests apart from the hive mind. Like how else are humans supposed to get ahead? So much of our knowledge comes from the work of eccentric, wealthy amateurs. It's a good thing psychologists weren't really so much of a thing. You'd almost rather fight with ecclesiastics than with people who think they're being scientific. I can't have much partiality to them, though a few good folks have practiced it.
Still, as my friend put it, "there are some people out there who are really [ducked] up, and we need to [unduck] them." It's easier for the rest of us not to see that every minute, at least in nice places.
>>It's hard to put a cherry on top of some things.
That was indeed a poetic way of putting it.
I think that dyslexia and dyscalculia are supposed to only be spoken of in the cases in which a person has a significantly lower ability to read or count compared to their overall IQ. So those disorders are supposed to be an unusually uneven IQ, with dips in specific places.
Whether you want to call her autistic, schizoid or supercalifragilisticlespialidocious won't make much of a difference. Those are all labels without any medical entity and they are not even reliable diagnoses. It's all circular reasoning. The DSM is not the result of research on construct validity, it's the result of consensus.
If you want more information, I can refer you to books and articles on this.
What you're describing as schizoid is what autism was defined as in the 90s at least at the popular level. Probably 99% of people using the term still understand it that way. Hence who cares what more modern books say. Science ended in 1999 with the y2k bug anyway.
I am in a hurry, but I cannot help myself and I am making a few comments:
1. This whole mess is the result of 50 years Leftist occupation of the academia, brainwashing, anti-scientific propaganda "ex catedra", etc. It (again, as always) literally harms people health. (Anyone remember Lisenko? Well, the modern psychology with its "gender theory" and autism or attention-deficiency for everyone is not better)
2. You son does not have autism, nor schizoid disorder. He is simply a genius or mild version of it. We ought to learn to recognize people as DIFFERENT and stop putting them into the same Procrustean bed, but again - it is very hard when we are brainwashed for generations with "people are equal".
3. You said you are writing this because you ran out of ideas. I don't know what is possible within the legal framework in Sweden, nor the possibility of practical realization, but there are quite interesting studies about the relation between diet and psychological disorders. I won't dwell into details, so I don't write anything stupid, but I am VERY curious to see the result of eliminating grain and diary from your daughter's diet, or even attempting carnivore diet.
I think schizoid personality disorder is the typical personality disorder among geniuses. Many of those would have served the human race better if they learned how cope with their weak sides. Being a genius is good. Being a genius that can deal with people and function in society is even better.
The problem with people with pathological demand avoidance (as I have now learned that it is called) is that telling them what to do is nigh on impossible. Including telling them what to eat. (My daughter does avoid dairy because she prefers vegan food and that certainly didn't improve her symptoms, but I can't see any way that anyone could convince her to avoid gluten).
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 ...
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.