Autistic people experience psychosis at a higher rate than the general population. And people with schizo spec disorders are likely to have strong autistic traits even long before they develop psychosis. On top of this, both diagnoses have a big general overlap in traits and experiences. And that’s why I think we need to discuss “auschizm” just like we’ve started discussing auDHD
Kat asked me if I could help her out with adding some sources, and I realized a lot of the articles I’ve read about this during uni are behind a paywall, so here’s a link to a google drive folder with some relevant studies for those interested!
A good place to start could be Barneveld et.al. (2011)’s article. Based in the fact that up to 35% of autistic youth go on to develop a schizophrenia spectrum disorder (dependent on the study), Barneveld and co. studied the connection between autistic and schizotypal traits in autistic youth. They found significantly higher rates of schizotypy in autistic youth than in control groups, across both negative, positive and cognitive symptoms. Higher scores on autistic symptoms scales was associated with higher scores on schizoptypy scales.
Another interesting study in there, by Eack et al. (2013), compared a group with schizophrenia with a group with ASD and a healthy control group on a number of cognitive and social-cognitive parameters. They found that there was no significant difference between the autistic and schizophrenic group, but both groups did significantly worse than the control group. (For reference, social cognition refers to basic social skills like reading other people etc., that are a part of the diagnostic criteria for ASD. So in other words, on average the schizophrenic people struggled similarly with social skills as the autistic people in this study).
I can also recommend reading Rapoport et al. 2005 and 2012 (and maybe Cannon (2002)) for elaboration on schizophrenia as a unique neurovelopmental disorder, which presents with delays in language development, motor skill development, cognition and social-emotional functioning in childhood way before psychotic illness onset.
So yeah, in short, there is a huge overlap between the autistic community and the schizo spec community in a bunch of interesting ways!
I hope this helps someone as a place to start looking into this!
Sources to back up my claims! ❤️
Schizospec disorders/conditions are developmental disabilities like autism is.