I’m not really current at all (probably never was) with autism or ASD… but I think I’ve seen enough about it to see some of the underlying similarities between it and schizophrenia.
Both are likely caused by a wide ranging and diversified set of genes… each have a subsets of symptoms that are all blanketed under a singular diagnostic label. Both are near total mysteries to neurologists… but a lot of that is due to the dynamic configuration of each case.
What is similar is that schizophrenics and autistic individuals have a lot in common regarding their character. Anti-social, non-sensical, occasionally more brilliant at things than people… both are chronic illnesses. Both have a high degree of dysfunctionality in a person overall…
Because of the vague nature of autism… I would never identify with autism. However having schizophrenia and seeing how similar the diseases are in operation… I can identify in having similar aspects rumored to correspond with autistic processes in my mind.
Most of those I have managed to over come… Like high social-anxiety and things of that nature.
In any rate… I think brain disorders are going to be determined by genetic identification moving forward… and from there we are going to see fracturing of diagnostic labels into more appropriate sub-illnesses… and the treatments will be centered around restoring neuro-typical functionality in the face of the abnormalities that arise from consistent genetic divergence.
Really on a cellular level, it’s all gene expression and the proteins those genes create… so it’s a game of cellular chemistry instead neural receptors…
another neat thing is… that neuroscience is actually at an advantage when it comes to having illness like schizophrenia or autism to analyze… because a normal brain has a lot of natural process that go unnoticed or lack full documentation because they are easy to over look… unless you find those systems are responsible for an illness if they are altered… then suddenly the risks of manipulating those systems becomes clear… while also opening new doors for treatment because a new mechanism of the brain has been discovered.
You know… much like in the process referred to in this other post: