Some roots of the term "Autism"

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This excerpt is taken from the text Dementia Praecox by Eugene Bleuler which was first printed in 1950. Bleuler actually used this term eariler in his research though it is reiterated in his book. It is said that both Kanner and Asperger borrowed the term to describe the children they were studying from Bleuler in particular.

This old book I had gotten a couple years back and had completely forgotten I had it until I was doing some shuffling around in my apartment.

Interesting!

Sophist, I'm developing an interest in Nonverbal Learning Disability. Specifically how it is similar or different than spectum disorders. Or if it IS a spectum disorder.

Could you point me in the direction of some info on this?

Thank you,
BeeBee

BeeBee, this is an online article I read:

http://www.nldontheweb.org/Dinklage_1.htm

I am going to go looking for articles in the professional journals at the State Hospital Library this next week and see if there's anything on NvLD. I'll post anything I find that might be helpful because I am, myself, interested in it and think it a good possibility it's on the spectrum, too.

Interestingly, I happened across some of Kraepelin's work on "dementia praecox" that had some people who I think would meet today's definition, not Bleuler's of autism. This has made me think that we have been around in the mix of assorted people who later got considered "schizophrenic" since day one. Not because of the similarity of the word, but because they were occasionally describing people who had significant differences in language and social skills from birth.

I don't think it's an accident that autism was once "childhood schizophrenia," and I think the main reason we are separate now is political, not because of differences in the criteria. If you look at the criteria for schizophrenia, if there were no exclusion in there for autistic people, many autistic people would meet the criteria. Those parts of the criteria are just different words and purported origins for much of the same behavior, and I suspect that one of the many groups of people who was in there from the beginning is autistics. Again, not because of Bleuler's word autism but because of the observations of many different kinds of people including probably autistics, that Bleuler then figured all had the same thing going on (even though they/we didn't), and called us all "schizophrenic" based on his (false) idea of the causal mechanism.

I suspect that in the future even more people will fall off of that category for assorted political reasons. Diagnosis of catatonic schizophrenia has dropped off considerably over the years and I think that's because of increased recognition of assorted specific causes of that behavior including autism, depression, various brain diseases (of the real rather than imagined kind), etc.

anbuend, I quite agree. I truly think that Schizophrenia is very possibly a developmental disorder in itself and would like to do some research on the pre-psychotic developmental history of those individuals labeled as sz now.

Except for the obvious psychotic symptoms and a couple other differences, Autism and Schizophrenia are incredibly similiar. Which is no surprise why some Autties have been misdx with it in the past, including myself.

And of course, back when, Schizophrenia had an incredibly BROAD meaning and the diagnosis was up to the opinion of the diagnostician.

Considering that I would like to go into psychological research, this is one of my intended areas of study: researching the differences and similarities between Autism and Schizophrenia and finding out if there is more related than meets the eye.

Btw, interesting snippit I found in Summer 2004 Reintegration Today and I want to see if I can locate the actual study (or studies) done:

My suspicion is that even now, sz is so many things that it would be nice to scrap it and start over. (Not that I think they're going to, but stuff currently classified under it really seems far more heterogenous than even the entire autistic spectrum. I think it's Bleuler's and possibly Kraepelin's prejudices that got this stuff all considered the same thing.)



Yes, I was dxed with it in the past as well. I won't say misdxed exactly, though, because I'm not sure that there is a proper diagnosis lurking under there. Minus the autism, I would today be diagnosable with either catatonic or undifferentiated schizophrenia. Given that I am autistic and don't experience (or at least talk about) anything that psychiatry would regard as delusional or hallucinatory, though, I seem to get a pass on the diagnosis desipte meeting the criteria. (Not that I'm complaining, but if you can have a diagnosis of schizophrenia without hallucinations or delusions -- which you can -- then there's really nothing but some political views about age of onset separating "it" from autism.) If someone suddenly started experiencing what I experience and acting what I act like, and hadn't always been like this to one degree or another, then they'd be diagnosed as schizophrenic (catatonic or undifferentiated most likely).

There's also the fact, of course, that many autistic people do come up with some weird ideas. Like I decided at one point based on the mythology that I was reading (that was developed to explain autistic people) that I was not human. Instant "psychotic delusion" for those who want to look at it that way, and I have seen a few people who seem to have formed similar ideas (not the same idea, but formed them in a similar manner based on the information they were given) and seemed to be autistic, in Kraepelin's papers on dementia praecox.



Still does have a pretty broad meaning.



My suspicion is that the things that get called autism and the things that get called schizophrenia have been so mixed in the early identification of both "conditions" that they will be, at the very least, intertwined, because the research literature will have some of the same people in both categories. I don't think either category is perfect, but I think the category of autism is much more viable than the category of schizophrenia. (Given that the category of schizophrenia itself is based on Bleuler's assumptions of the causes of a bunch of different behavior, and I think by now people know Bleuler didn't know what he was talking about, at least not for everyone who acts that way.)

Not that the people grouped under schizophrenia right now don't exist, but that I think the category itself is... odd. I can't remember how I described it somewhere recently. It's as if someone has grabbed bananas, oranges, pineapples, limes, apples, grapes, and blackberries. And has said "Look, I believe these particular kinds of fruit are all caused by galrumphedness, so I'll refer to them as galrumphles." And lists "bifferism" as one characteristic of galrumphles.

Then later someone came along and found citrus fruits such as oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, etc (but maybe not all citrus fruit, and maybe a few fruits that are not citrus, such as bananas, just to make things interesting). And said, "Wait a minute, maybe I can call this 'citrus-y' condition bifferism."

So then you suddenly get people saying "Oranges and limes and bananas ARE NOT galrumphles!! ! They're BIFFERISM! They've been misdiagnosed!"

When really, the category of "galrumphle" has had some citrus-y characteristics all along because of some of the fruits that were included in it. And the category of "bifferism" may include a few things that are not related, but most are very similar. But the category of "galrumphle" has never really been founded on a quality that they all had to begin with.

(Substitute "schizophrenia" for "galrumphle" and "autism" for "bifferism" and that might make sense.)

That's of course imperfect as an analogy, but I think there was a lot of that going on in the genesis of both schizophrenia and autism as categories, and I strongly suspect that schizophrenia has outlived its usefulness as a category.

I forgot to add, I too find the history of autism and its intermingling with other categories to be extremely interesting.

I suspect that depending on how we looked and who we were around, we got put into a lot of categories that were grab-bag categories at the time, and to some extent still are despite them having gained a lot of legitimacy as supposedly-scientific categories.

Those categories would be:

* Feeble-mindedness (later often put into the still-too-broad-and-ambiguous category mental retardation)
* Lunacy/insanity/madness (later often put into the still-too-broad-and-ambiguous category schizophrenia)
* Neuroticism (haven't studied that one as thoroughly, but possibly the same people might be considered obsessive-compulsive or as having other things considered anxiety disorders today)
* Idiot savants (for those autistic people who are/were savants, this category being basically based on the confusion of people who don't understand the extremely uneven way some of our skills line up in comparison to NTs, and sometimes based on the inability of people to question their assumptions about the minds of their patients)
* Changelings (an older and less medicalized idea that also encompassed a lot of non-autistic people)

I suspect that in the old research literature in all of those, you will find many autistic people. Some people were classified as feeble-minded, I bet, who would be seen by another person as having dementia praecox or (later) schizophrenia or neuroticism or idiot savants. And vice versa. I don't think that what category we got put into always depended much on us as much as what people thought of us and what people saw in us at some fixed point in time.

The way the person is described in the literature, though, will be colored heavily by the impressions of the person writing the literature. A changeling will be described in terms of signs that make them seem demonic or inhuman according to what that meant at the time. A feeble-minded person will be described in terms of the medicalized concepts of mental deficiency. An insane person will be described in terms of madness, delusions, hallucinations, and detachment from reality. An idiot savant will be described in terms of contrast between extreme ability and disability. But what's going to happen, in all of the literature, is the lens they view us through will skew their description. They did write untrue things about us based on what their theories taught them was behind our behavior.

And that will be the challenge if you sift through the literature, is understanding that just because a doctor says there is a certain characteristic doesn't make it so, and just because a doctor fails to mention a certain characteristic doesn't make it absent. That will be the really difficult part, and has been the difficult part for me in reading old literature that points to autistic people's presence in that literature.

anbuend, also with regards to the above snippet I had posted on the Flu and prenatal exposure which makes up for about 14% of schizophrenia cases, I'd love to see what KINDS of schizophrenia are caused within that 14%. Parnoid? Disorganized? Or just plain ol' Undifferentiated?

I'd love to see if indeed Flu can be a specific cause or trigger for Schizophrenia, if it seems to cause a specific type in the majority of cases or not. Or if it doesn't and seems to cause all types, then that might be an underlying tie between the seemingly unrelated Schizophrenias.

/me is just giddy with excitement and so much future things to research!

Ha! The evil Flu! The flu shot is what triggered my oldest daughter's fibromyalgia during her freshman year of college.
Never get a flu shot.

It might. But then, rubella during pregnancy can cause deafness, and it can also cause autism. That doesn't necessarily prove a link between deafness and autism.

Where did you find this link between Rubella in pregnancy as a cause of Autism? I've heard of deafness but never read anything yet linking to autism.

I know at least one person who is autistic because of that. (And she's definitely autistic.) That's where I heard of it. It can also cause other brain-related things. (She's also autistic-and-proud more so than most people I've met, and I often use her as an example of why the "it was brain damage early on" theory of some forms of autism doesn't mean that autism is somehow less valuable a way to be.)

Humz... I wonder how many people on here had abnormal occurences prenatally, during birth, or perinatally...