*"Name Calling": Schizoid Personality Disorder!*

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I think there is natural variation with aspies. Most are introverted, but some are sociable. I think the sociable ones tend to get diagnosed with NVLD, PDD-NOS, ADHD, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder when they are in fact aspies, just louder ones. When looking at the DSM it describes an introverted person. Especially the bit that says "Lacks social and emotional reciprocity."

Well I had social reciprocity but people seemed to think it was the wrong type, at the wrong time.

As for extroverts, it needs to be known that not all extroverts are big socialisers. Some are very bossy and not at all interested in pleasing others, and prefer ordering them around. (My mother for example. She is an ESTJ and she behaves like an army general, barking orders at people. She is kind of like Vin Diesel).

And there are some NT introverts who are painfully shy and timid and care a lot about what people think of them.

I already had a look, the other day, at the schizoid's forum linked to the wiki page, and they sounded stunningly like a lot of wp'ers, just a tad less talkative perhaps.


That doesn't sound like the DSM for SPD. More like narcissistic PD, ( as you said ), or certain kinds of sociopathy. If it really is "deliberate"/"callous" etc.

And you might have considered my own behaviour of 20 years ago highly selfish, when I was in the grandiose stages of (hypo)mania, before I began excluding gluten, etc etc , and discovered my underlying Aspergers self.

I have noticed expressions of such an attitude towards others, here on WP, and not just now and then, ... ... so was "plankwrong" right?

I think not. WP is not full of SPD'ers in denial, but of people who might, if born 25/35 years earlier, have received the ( old style) diagnosis of SPD in adulthood. But times have moved on and now it is biology/chemistry/neurophysiology which is "responsible", and the attitude is less culpabilising. Selfish and SPD are out-of-date terminologies, in that the culture-specific judgements inherent in them have become too visible to pass muster as "objective".

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Last edited by ouinon on 21 Sep 2008, 4:34 pm, edited 3 times in total.

WP is full of people who don't have AS but wonder if they might. Since it's an open website that's how it works.

It is not the same as any other condition.

I had a relative say to me near the exact same thing as plankwrong said to alex, even down to feeling sadness

Therefore I conclude that either it is the same person or some website or book is promoting this attitude.

The biggest smear from this as far as Im concerned is that aspergers is veiwed as biological where as personality disorder is caused by the childhood.

The plankwrong, contradicted themselves by saying that people should only get qualified diagnoses but then undiagnosing people that they had only watched on a film.

the main point to know you have ASD is that you stim and cant recognise expression, thats definately not a pd thing.

You're missing the time dimension here. Names for things change through time, as cultural values/attitudes change.

SPD is almost completely in the past, overlapping with Aspergers a bit, but about to be left behind, along with so many other abandoned labels.

eg: Are you "sanguine" or are you "calm and positive"? Are you "choleric" or are you prone to anger and irritation?

The choices do not make sense, because "sanguine" and "choleric" are defunct terms. They were forerunners for more modern terms describing something similar if not exactly the same, from another century's cultural/scientific viewpoint.
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Last edited by ouinon on 21 Sep 2008, 4:53 pm, edited 3 times in total.

One of the things that I noticed in the description of SPD, and quoted in my opening post was that in fact they do suffer from perceptual scanning distortions/difficulties.
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Last edited by ouinon on 21 Sep 2008, 4:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Here it is from my OP:

No I'm not missing the time dimension at all, you are just using the one that suits you and you seem to believe it's the only one.

In the old days before that, they used to just lump all the 'maddies' together in bedlams, there was no distinction drawn at all between types. You seem to want to go back to that system.

One of the other differences that struck me is the lack of imaginative fantasy. Although I'm sure some criteria somewhere will tell you SPDers are fantasists, in my experience and at that support group they tend to laugh at people who have supernatural or fantastic notions.

They're sort of 'grim' realists.

My father is a "grim realist" as you describe but I think he is definitely more aspergers than schizoid. Just this morning he forgot his briefcase and phone because he was lost in a reverie, very likely about his favourite interest.

I think schizoids are people who have the social skills and have no problem with them, and dont have sensory problems, but just want everyone to go away for some reason.

double post

Last edited by Postperson on 21 Sep 2008, 7:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

sums it up, yeah. I get along with them, but they don't need people so in the end there's no point in knowing them.

edit: but back to the 'righteous' selfishness topic. Ayn Rand is a popular author with the schizoids.

The problem is not the description, but rather interpretation. Being loud and/or emotive is not the same as socially and emotionally reciprocal.

Being socially reciprocal means being able to participate at a developmentally appropriate level in routine social interactions involving reciprocity. If your engagement in conversations consist of contextually inappropriate, gregarious interest driven monologues, and 'echolaliac' one-liners, it's not socially reciprocal.

However gregarious, social engagement that ignores the rules of social reciprocity, such as the give and take of conversation (where people respond to each others contributions rather than routinely working the conversation back to their topic of interest), are not demonstrating social reciprocity.

The point of social reciprocity is that one responds with the right thing at the right time. Being socially gregarious yet failing to do the socially expected things at socially expected times, is not demonstrating social reciprocity. Rather, it is demonstrating that despite an evident desire to be socially reciprocal, one is still not able to demonstrate social reciprocity.

It is very unfortunate that the criteria are apparently too often applied by people who clearly to not properly comprehend them. Inferences that people with AS cannot be gregarious are not implied by the criteria, but I have encountered instances where that is apparently the interpretation applied by someone practicing clinically.

It seems to me that some practitioners are interpreting AS (a neurological condition) as though it were a personality stereotype, and applying the stereotype accordingly. This of course constitutes discrimination, and is probably unlawful discrimination in some instances (dependent on local legal facts).

Some people have the desire but have difficulty doing it, others just don't have the desire.

Complicating things, some people who don't have the desire just never did. Others used to and don't anymore. Some of those others, it was because of repeated failure, and eventually deciding "It's not worth it." And some who think they don't, define socializing very narrowly (as in, what we're doing on here they don't think of as socializing, whereas I do think it's socializing). Some of the others who think they don't, have never experienced a form of socializing they like, but will later be surprised by one they do like. (I am not saying this about any particular person, I just know it has happened repeatedly already, and therefore it's likely it will happen again.)

And from experience, some psychiatrists are more familiar with more traditionally psychiatric conditions than developmental ones. Therefore, they are more likely to turn to personality disorders than developmental disorders in the DSM. When an autistic person of a certain type sees them, they are likely to be diagnosed with schizoid PD rather than autism. (For instance, one psychologist, who later agreed with the autism diagnosis once one was made by a psychiatrist, at first said I was schizoid because I was extremely socially isolated and seemed to show little emotion.)

Also, supposedly the name came about because they were trying to research what correlated to schizophrenia. From what I remember (there may be new research proving me wrong, I learned this awhile ago), schizoid is not correlated but schizotypal is. Of course, see my other posts on this site for the problem with defining schizophrenia as a thing rather than a group of possibly-unrelated things (as in, too unrelated to legitimately be in the same category), and thus the problem with defining anything as related to "schizophrenia" as a whole. (I've actually read Kraepelin, Bleuler, etc., as well as modern thinking on the topic.)

And the topic of Randroids is yet another interesting category.

The main Randroid I know, though, is a sociopath who thinks it justifies his sociopathy, wouldn't qualify by most definitions as schizoid because he takes too much delight in interests... like harming animals. Not meaning this as a generalization about Randroids, just interesting how many different people seem to gravitate towards that stuff to justify arrogance, selfishness, etc. It's also popular with adolescents who are unlabelable with anything but going through an arrogant "let me do whatever I want" phase, and who think that eloquently stating why they should be allowed to do whatever they want is profound.

I agree that's the definition of social reciprocity used in the diagnostics, and that a person shouldn't be excluded from them based on not having that kind of reciprocity.

However, it's open for debate whether that's truly the only valid definition of reciprocity, outside of the world of autism criteria (where many, many words are used in ways that are far more specific than most people mean them in, and sometimes different from the way even other parts of psychology use them -- often because when autistic people are found to have whatever trait, they do not take the criterion away, they just claim the trait has a whole new definition crafted specifically to attempt to exclude autistic people from having it).