AS and Schizoid (again...)

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Viewed from the outside looking at an AS person...

What about the point of view from the inside?

I certainly didn't feel impaired until people started to call me impaired.

I thought that the world was full of interesting details such physical objects and nature, while other people were just in the background.

I was called "impaired" for paying less attention to people than I culturally should have done and more attention to "socially inappropriate" things like the physical surroundings.

I was observant, but just in the "wrong" way according to some people.

One problem that I see in many diagnosis criteria of AS is that they seem to relie more in the external, observable behiavour than in the reasons of these behaviour.

For example, if a children play allways alone, could be vary reasons to that: a) she likes to play alone; b) she is shy; c) she doesn't know how to play with others; etc. However (at least according to the DSM and the research criteria of ICD), all these is "lack of emotional reciprocity" and "failure to...".

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I did/do feel impaired, so I'd ask: what's different and makes me impaired but not you?/Make me feel impaired but make you feel not impaired?

As means aspergers or what and spd can also refer to what I have sensory processing disorder.

Maybe my tendency to externalise the blame.
To blame others or the system (perhaps unfairly) for my difficulties when things go wrong.

It's also very rare for me to feel ashamed of myself or feel I'm defective. For years I was told that I was okay and that the professionals had "got it wrong".

This maybe due to the attitudes I've been exposed to when growing up:
"Do what you wanna do, don't mind about them, they're being silly!"
"They're bullying you because they're nasty, ignore them."
"Sometimes that's just how things pan out, you did your best, move on."
"It's how things are. If you call that number, they won't be able to help you. You'll still be in the exact same situation as before."

So, I used to kind of naturally assume that the fault lay with other people.

If people didn't talk to me: I concluded that they were being deliberately unfriendly and nasty. Or, just legitimately didn't like me. Not everybody can be friends with everybody after all.

It simply never seemed to occur to me that I might share some of the blame for them ignoring me or being passive about socialising.

As far as I was concerned, I'd tried my best and it was basically their fault and their loss for being awkward and ignoring me. I moved on.

Eventually I nearly gave up approaching people because they seemed unfriendly or hostile when I tried.
So instead, I usually waited for them to approach me.
This worked out much better, but I had to sometimes wait for a long time.

I was completely oblivious to any impairments I had.
Even when others said I had impairments, I adamantly denied it because I didn't feel ill. I thought that other people were being boring and nasty by excluding and ostracising me.

I was oblivious to the fact that other people gathered in cliquish groups for mutual protection.
All I thought was:
"Don't they get bored talking to the same people all the time?"

Any social failures I had I either thought that was just bad luck, life or nasty people having unrealistic expectations of me.
I thought that people trying to pathologise my life and experiences wasn't helping.

I was especially oblivious when people accepted me for who I was and listened to me. My so called impairments didn't seem to be a problem for these people at all. I didn't feel impaired then. I felt positively alive. I can understand why people like hanging out with their friends, you get an incredible boost of happiness when people appreciate your company.

Unfortunately, experiences my like that have been very few, so in my isolation, I'm very grateful for the few good social experiences that I have had.

Socialising is a two way processes.
It's had to work out at which end the miscommunication is sometimes.

I'm reluctant to accept the blame for miscommunicating, given my upbringing. But now I see that part of the fault does indeed lie with me.

You are confusing schizophrenia (from which Crowe's character, John Nash, suffers in A Beautiful Mind) and schizoid personality disorder. They are not anything alike.

SPD is a very bad abreviation to use, because in the context of AS and similiar/associated condition could mean:

- Schizoid Personality Disorder (like in these thread)
- Sensory Processing Disorder
- Semantic Pragmatic Disorder
- (more any thing?)

This is precisely why I believe AS is something more than a simply categorisation. If someone was antisocial then they won't speak to many people, not have sex often, often have strange ideas and so on. Hence, you may as well call someone who is antisocial simply antisocial, calling them Schizoid makes no difference, it does not describe anything more than an antisocial person. By contrast, if a significant percent of antisocial people had traits that are not simply part of being antisocial, that bare little relation to antisocial behaviour yet a significant number of anti-social people had them, this suggests there is something unique, different (different from what wrong planet terms NTs) about them. For example, being anti-social does not then entail hallucinations and abnormal thought patterns yet a subset of anti-social people do, hence we call them schizophrenic. For AS, having low eye contact, logical thought patterns, literal interpretations, obsessive thinking, permanent social skill difficulties, ect are not things which being anti-social entails yet a significant subset of anti-social people have them, hence we label them AS.

Personality disorders (okay, Schizoid is the only one I've read up about) only seem solid because they are categorical descriptions that contain no more information than their basic description: someone anti-social and that which being so entails. It does no explanatory work beyond categorisation. If there is something specifically unique about the people we call Schizoid, science currently isn't getting at it. AS has some diverse symptoms, but so diverse it suggest there is a biological/genetic/chemical/neurological difference (don't ask me which one though). That's the methodology I endorse for psychiatry anyway. I accept that it cannot detect single issue disorders easily and if something like AS turns out to be two different things then that causes major issues…

So wait, you think that the most severe personality disorders are the ones that are "made up"; schizotypal, in particular, which shows a clear genetic relationship to schizophrenia?

The simplest definition of AS that I've found [that captures Hans' work] is (without getting into any details):

Poor social competence = you totally suck at socialisation, which probably means you don't and won't have any friends for much of your life, which leads to social isolation.
Excessive preoccupation with a specific interest = focusing on that one thing all of the time, rather than doing things you "should" be doing; not doing schoolwork because you'd rather read about your interest is the prototypical example (and no one can force you to do otherwise).