When Autism Becomes the Default: What Happens When Diagnostic Ambiguity Only Resolves One Way

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Having worked in mental health for well over a decade, there is a pattern that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. A wide range of social and interpersonal difficulties are now being understood through the lens of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In many cases this is appropriate and reflects a broadening of clinical awareness. However, it also reflects a shift in how diagnostic ambiguity is being resolved in practice. It is perhaps not incidental that, as of December 2025, a national review into mental health, autism and ADHD diagnoses has been commissioned by Wes Streeting, reflecting growing unease about how these categories are being applied.

What is less often acknowledged is that the same presentations in ASD sit close to another part of the diagnostic map. Cluster A personality disorders, particularly schizoid personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder, describe individuals who can appear strikingly similar at a behavioural level. They may present as socially withdrawn, emotionally restricted, and interpersonally ambiguous. The difficulty is not that clinicians are confusing two clearly separate conditions, but that the conditions themselves overlap in ways that require careful differentiation, and that this differentiation may not always be happening. Current clinical practice appears increasingly likely to resolve that overlap in one direction.

A man in therapy

What Are Schizoid and Schizotypal Personality Disorders?

Cluster A personality disorders are often poorly understood in clinical practice and are frequently reduced to vague descriptions of individuals who are “odd”, “eccentric”, or “withdrawn”. This lack of precision makes it easier for these presentations to be absorbed into other frameworks. A more exact description is needed, particularly when differentiating from autism.

Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD) is defined by a pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of emotional expression in interpersonal contexts. The key features are not simply behavioural, but motivational and experiential:

  • A consistent preference for solitary activities
  • Little or no desire for close relationships, including family relationships
  • Limited interest in sexual or romantic experiences with others
  • Reduced experience of pleasure from social interaction
  • Emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affect
  • Indifference to praise or criticism
  • A tendency towards introspection and a rich internal world

What distinguishes schizoid presentations is that relationships are not experienced as confusing, effortful, or anxiety-provoking in the way often described in autism, but as largely unnecessary. The absence of social engagement reflects a lack of intrinsic reward rather than a failure of social understanding.

Schizotypal Personality Disorder (STPD) is characterised by a pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits, combined with cognitive and perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behaviour. It shares the interpersonal detachment seen in schizoid presentations, but includes additional features:

  • Seeing personal meaning in ordinary events (without fixed delusions)
  • Odd beliefs or magical thinking that influence behaviour
  • Unusual perceptual experiences, including bodily illusions
  • Odd thinking and speech (e.g. vague, circumstantial, metaphorical)
  • Suspiciousness or paranoid ideation
  • Limited or mismatched emotional expression
  • Behaviour or appearance that is eccentric or peculiar
  • Lack of close friends or confidants
  • Ongoing social anxiety that does not reduce with familiarity, often linked to mistrust of others

Beyond these observable features, schizotypal presentations often involve subtle but important changes in how reality is experienced. Individuals may describe their thoughts as not entirely their own, experience connections between events that others do not see, or feel that the world carries an unusual or heightened significance. The difficulty is not simply social interaction, but the organisation of experience itself. Both conditions involve social detachment, but the underlying reasons differ. In schizoid personality disorder, detachment reflects a reduced need for relationships. In schizotypal personality disorder, detachment more often arises because the social world itself feels altered, harder to trust, or more difficult to make sense of.

Similar Behaviour, Different Underlying Organisation

At a behavioural level, autism and Cluster A personality disorders can look remarkably similar. Social withdrawal, limited affect, atypical communication styles, and in some cases restricted or repetitive patterns of behaviour can be present in both. If clinical judgement relies primarily on observable behaviour, it is understandable that one framework may be preferentially applied.

The distinction lies in what those behaviours represent. Autism is typically understood as a neurodevelopmental difference affecting how individuals perceive and process the social world. Difficulties arise in reading social cues, inferring intentions, and responding in a fluid and contextually appropriate manner. The social world is present and often desired, but difficult to navigate. Alongside this, many autistic individuals show patterns of restricted or highly focused interests, with attention becoming intensely directed towards specific activities or topics. These interests are not simply hobbies, but can reflect a preference for predictability, structure, and depth, in contrast to the uncertainty and complexity of social interaction.

In schizoid presentations, the central issue is not difficulty in navigating relationships but a diminished motivation to engage in them. In schizotypal presentations, the issue extends further, to the way in which the social world itself is experienced, with interactions shaped by unusual interpretations and a less stable sense of shared reality.

Empirical work supports this distinction. Studies have shown that autistic and schizotypal traits often overlap, with similar outward behaviours reflecting different underlying mechanisms. Neurocognitive research suggests that while social functioning may appear similar, the processes underpinning that functioning are not equivalent. In practice, this means that behavioural similarity alone is an insufficient basis for formulation.

The Trauma-Informed Response

A common rebuttal to Cluster A formulations is the “trauma-informed” lens, which frames schizoid or schizotypal traits primarily as defensive adaptations to early developmental adversity. While often well-intentioned, this kind of “trauma-creeping” can serve a similar reductive function to the autism default: it replaces a structural understanding of the personality with a historical one. Reducing a presentation primarily to trauma can be as incomplete as reducing it to neurodivergence. Many individuals experience significant early-life adversity without developing the characteristic distortions in thinking seen in schizotypy, or the marked lack of interest in relationships seen in schizoid presentations.

By collapsing Cluster A into trauma, we risk overlooking the specific organisation of the individual’s inner world. Trauma may help explain the conditions in which a personality develops, but it does not fully describe the structure that emerges. A trauma-only lens can lead to a generic focus on safety and stabilisation, without engaging with the unique internal logic of a person whose detachment is not fully explained by threat or defence.

Why Autism Becomes the Default Explanation

The tendency to favour autism as an explanatory framework is not simply a matter of individual clinician preference but reflects broader changes in clinical practice and discourse. It is also often experienced by patients as a validating and relatively non-stigmatising formulation. Autism provides a developmentally grounded account of longstanding social difficulty, is widely recognised, and is embedded within service structures that can offer support and accommodation.

In contrast, personality disorder diagnoses, particularly within Cluster A, occupy a more ambiguous position. They are less frequently discussed, less well understood, and often associated with limited intervention pathways. There are also fewer training opportunities in the NHS, and assessment typically requires more time, structure, and clinical confidence. Structured assessments such as the SCID-PD require time, training, and clinical confidence, whereas autism screening tools such as the AQ-10 can be administered quickly and are widely used as an initial filter. This asymmetry alone shapes what is more likely to be identified in routine practice.

There has also been a shift in training and clinical discourse. Within the NHS, there is now greater emphasis on autism-specific training, for example through initiatives such as the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism. As a result, clinicians are more familiar with recognising autism across a broader range of presentations, including those that would previously have been overlooked. At the same time, autism has become a more acceptable and, in some cases, more desirable formulation for patients and families. It is recognised as a disability, can provide access to support and accommodations, and is often framed in terms of difference rather than disorder, sometimes even associated with strengths.

The diagnostic boundaries of autism have also broadened considerably, encompassing presentations that range from subtle and high functioning to severe and non-verbal. While this inclusivity has benefits, it also increases the likelihood that heterogeneous presentations are brought under a single explanatory framework.

When ambiguity arises, the question of whether a presentation might reflect autism is more likely to be asked than whether it might reflect a particular personality organisation. Once that question is foregrounded, it begins to shape the entire assessment and formulation.

The Risk of Under-Formulation

It remains unclear to what extent overdiagnosis is occurring, particularly in adult services where assessments often rely on retrospective accounts and are conducted within systems under significant pressure. The question is not yet settled, which is precisely why it continues to attract scrutiny. Focusing too narrowly on overdiagnosis, however, risks missing a more subtle and potentially more widespread issue. In many cases, the difficulty may not be that a diagnosis is incorrect, but that it becomes sufficient too early in the process of understanding. Once autism is identified as a plausible framework, alternative ways of conceptualising the presentation may receive less attention. Formulation can narrow prematurely, not because competing explanations have been ruled out, but because they are no longer actively explored.

In practice, this narrowing of formulation is often visible in the language used within teams. I have been in hundreds of multidisciplinary team meetings where I have heard the phrases “he must be neurodivergent” and “she’s definitely got a personality disorder”—the latter typically referring almost exclusively to emotionally unstable personality disorder. These kinds of statements do not simply describe a formulation; they close it down. They signal that a conclusion has been reached before the underlying structure of the presentation has been fully examined.

When a presentation is understood primarily through the lens of autism, the focus of clinical work tends to shift towards accommodation, support, and the management of functional difficulties. These are appropriate and often necessary interventions. However, they can also limit further enquiry into how the individual experiences other people and the relational world more broadly.

Cluster A personality formulations attempt to capture this level of experience. They are concerned not only with observable behaviour, but with the meanings attached to other people and the internal logic that sustains patterns of detachment or distortion. They ask different questions: What does closeness feel like? What is assumed about other people? How stable is the sense of self across situations? Without this layer of understanding, clinical formulations risk remaining incomplete.

Neither autism spectrum disorder nor Cluster A personality disorders are conditions that can be “cured”. Both describe enduring patterns of functioning rather than acute problems to be resolved. However, the clinical approach differs in important ways:

  • Autism: focus on psychoeducation, environmental adaptation, social communication support, and functional accommodations
  • Cluster A personality disorders: focus on longer-term psychological work, including exploratory therapy, mentalisation-based approaches, and interventions aimed at understanding relational patterns and internal experience

Conflating the two does not simply risk diagnostic imprecision. It risks directing individuals towards interventions that do not fully address the nature of their difficulties.

Conclusion

The overlap between these frameworks is substantial, and in some cases both may be relevant. It is important to consider whether clinicians are willing to hold that ambiguity long enough to explore what each framework captures. Autism offers an account of difficulty in navigating the social world. Cluster A personality disorders attempt to describe how the social world is experienced in the first place. If one framework consistently replaces the other, then a significant aspect of the individual’s experience may no longer be examined. It is in that narrowing of enquiry, rather than in any single diagnostic decision, that important clinical detail risks being missed.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

18 COMMENTS

  1. I find neither cluster a or autism assesments or diagnosis convincing. I notice a lack of outcome studies in this piece.

    I think the take off of autism assesments and diagnosis is a suucessful marketing campaign and nothing to do with helping people. Replacing cluster a assesments with some autism assesments does not seem an advance to me.

    I see this piece as a marketing pitch by a perticular brand of psychology.

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  2. Dear Mandeep, you are using a dysfunctional framework . Anyone who has seen the DSM handbook over the decades would know it would create issues such as you are describing. I was at an Ohio Social Work and Counselor Board CEU required workshop on DSM by I think David Lima MSW who had much of the CEU business at the time. The presenter and this was 1996? presented the DSM as hogwash. He said they gathered together and just picked out things throwing the labels at the wall. Please let it go and work on a new and different kind of framework.

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  3. Pejorative diagnoses by mental health “professionals” in regard to what constitutes the supposed eccentricity and other defective character traits of individuals falling within the DSM’s Cluster A spectrum are nothing but totally subjective, culture-bound judgments that only reflect the prejudices and values prevailing in a given social milieu at a particular moment in time.
    Were the early Christian hermits who isolated themselves in caves and deserts in prayerful contemplation all suffering from putative schizoid or schizoaffective disorders? What about Jain mendicants who wander about naked and starve themselves to escape the bonds of samsara, or shamans who imbibe mind-altering substances in order to achieve a state of higher consciousness? Are societies in which such people are held in high esteem afflicted with some type of mass psychopathoogy?
    In short, the author is simply regurgitating the simplistic stock arguments of the western-oriented biomedical paradigm, which pathologizes any thinking and behavior it finds incomprehensible, thereby reducing the range of human experience to categories that lack universal scientific and medical credibility.

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  4. This article is ill-suited for MIA.

    First, it seeks to resolve diagnostic ambiguity by inferring other DSM diagnoses which is odd because diagnostic ambiguity isn’t resolved by referring to other diagnoses that, just as much, suffer from ambiguous definitions.

    It then provides me with an account of the various conditions that are poorly formulated:

    Autism is presented as a ‘neurodevelopmental difference’. Now, it’s actually a neurodevelopmental disorder and since it’s ‘neurodevelopmental’, I would expect there to be some decisive evidence of abnormal ‘disordered’ neurodevelopment. Unfortunately, there is none despite nearly 50 years of claiming otherwise. It shall be pointed out that this timespan of things being claimed but never proven is roughly equal for autism, depression, ADHD and anxiety.

    In addition, going from superficial behavioral indexation to ‘explanations’, really claims in regards to cognitive architecture which seeks to define the outward manifestations purely in terms of assumed cognitive problems has little meaning as long as there is a lack of proof that e.g. every single autism case involves difficulties in specific cognitive domains. Now, no such proof exists. All attempts made to find a unifying account for autism failed. There is, however, significant political resistence to discontinuing or fragmenting the autism spectrum, which should show what the real motivation is.

    “Alongside this, many autistic individuals show patterns of restricted or highly focused interests”

    This is probably one of the most unfortunate definitions ever brought forward and I reckon it’s motivated by insurance policies and not science, because it conflates a lot of issues that, we know, are neurologically unrelated; Basic motor stereotypies seen in cerebral palsy or encephalitis are conflated with problems of nerve metabolics (e.g. akathisia or catatonia), often due to anti-psychotics and simil. which are conflated with behavioral rigidity (which includes resistance to demands and not wanting to go to school) which are conflated with random interests which are conflated with self-soothing motor movements that any normal human does, although arguably less than most people diagnosed with autism. I’m undoubtedly aware of many cases of ‘autism’ which are clearly organic in origin but never defined as such precisely because of diagnostic obfuscation. Autism really isn’t that puzzling a condition once you look for alternative diagnoses.

    “In schizoid presentations, the central issue is not difficulty in navigating relationships but a diminished motivation to engage in them.”

    Interestingly enough, autism was, for a very long time, understood to denote a disinterest or inability to maintain or enter social relations which is what the Greek word ‘autism’ means; “selfness”. It’s interesting how the word has now come to stand for a hypothetical construct at odds with its ethymology. Which probably hints at that autism should have long been discontinued as a diagnosis.

    Addendum; I don’t agree with the notion that both personality disorders and autism can’t be “cured” because it falsely implies that a lack of standardized treatment for both translates into both diagnostic units necessarily being life-long which they’re not.

    Second addendum; Making the unfounded distinction between autism as functional impairment and personality disorder as “description of how the social world is experienced in the first place” helps no one. 1. Personality disorders involves functional impairments. 2. The social world is ‘necessarily’ experienced differently in autism (and really in every single human). 3. Probably the most relevant point. Looking at the DSM-5, I don’t see how the social world is accounted for in personality disorders. It’s not either in the case of autism, but I would really go away from regarding the DSM-5 as an authority. The book is well-known pharma slop.

    Personal note; I fail to see what new information anyone would get from the article. Maybe the board is even willing to let me publish a thorough deconstruction of such diagnostic frameworks.

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    • I agree. The whole premise assumes that there *are* diagnostic categories that are ‘real’ or ‘valid’. Feels like this was written for somewhere else and the author was looking for place to pitch it. I see these types of pieces floating around on here.

      Personally, I feel the more interesting explanation/framework for the rise in autism diagnoses / the neurodiversity movements – instead of getting mired in the minutiae of listed symptoms of all the artificially constructed disorder categories that exist in the DSM- is to wonder if people are trying to reconcile their creeping realizations that either over half of society is mentally ill in some way, or there is something wrong with the concept of mental illness. Autism and ADHD are perhaps the only DSM delineated ‘disorders’ that don’t actually necessarily need to point to a ‘disorder’- perhaps just personality subtype/neurotype/ way of being a person – and the things that may seem ‘disordered’ about them are simply a mismatch between how well this personality type fits into the modern world/ school/their environment (and the effects of years of negative social experiences because of this). Even if you are keeping with the framework of mental illness as some kind of a biological entity (which I and most on this site do not believe) there is room in the concepts of Autism and ADHD to recognize that you can ‘be’ either autistic or ADHD, without thinking that this means there is something inherently wrong with you because of it.

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      • Yes, the Neo-Kraepelian doctrine with its focus on clearly delineated disorders with differing singulary etiologies and causes is failing so badly that I have trouble thinking of the psychiatric institution as anything other than a substitute for previously established religious institutions which were plagued by similarly idiotic because self-contradicting dogmata.

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  5. Thank you for saying this. This has been a concern of mine for some time, especially the overuse of the ‘Autistic’ traits to describe a myriad of what are often transdiagnostic behaviours and experiences – this closes down professional curiosity and obscures patterns that may in fact indicate other conditions.

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  6. This presupposes the validity of PD and ASD diagnostic entities. The entire PD concept should be obliterated due to its prejudicial nature and tendency to subject patients to further harms by medical staff.

    All of these entities are behavioral descriptions. Autism is not made through a neuro exam and never has been. That’s why it has become so broadly applied with people even “identifying'” as autistic.

    Finally, autism is still heavily stigmatized although I grant less than “personality disorder”. Finally, I just read Mental Health in Primary Care (Gask) and it has an entire chapter on PD and no coverage on autism so I disagree that training focuses on autism. A literature review would show ample training in PD in primary care and certainly in mental health fields.

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  7. Thank you to everyone who has commented. I think some of the criticism is fair, particularly around the danger of treating DSM categories as if they are fixed, objective disease entities. That was not my intention.

    My argument was not that Cluster A diagnoses are more “real” than autism, or that personality disorder frameworks are unproblematic. They clearly are problematic and can be used in prejudicial ways.

    The point was narrower: in current clinical practice, certain forms of social withdrawal, interpersonal ambiguity, emotional restriction, unusual communication, and relational difficulty may increasingly be understood through autism, while other possible formulations are not explored with the same seriousness.

    Whether we call these diagnoses, formulations, narratives, or descriptive frameworks, they shape what clinicians notice and what they miss. My concern is that when one framework becomes dominant, clinical curiosity can narrow.

    So the argument is not “replace autism with Cluster A.” It is: hold ambiguity for longer, ask better questions, and avoid letting any one label become sufficient too early.

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    • Mandeep, I very greatly admire your dedication and your scholarship, thank you.

      Can you offer any definition/s of “personality,” please?

      Comfort and joy, and mirth and lots of them!

      And thank you!

      Tom.

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      • Whatever about a “TV personality,” I know of and can imagine no satisfactory or scientific (in the best sense of that word) or universally acceptable definition of a human “personality.”

        Failing that, it seems more than absurd (or less than – whichever is the stupider), without defining “a personality” or being able to, let alone to agree on any attempted definition, and without then defining what a normal or average or usual or acceptable or conforming or healthy or “ordered” or “orderly” or “well-ordered” one might be – to speak of “personality illnesses” (any more than of “mental illnesses”)….or of “personality disorders.”

        This strikes me as about as stupid as speaking of “pain-receptors,” as as originating in the same kind of uncritical, superstitious, religious and scientific (in the worst sense of the term), “SURE!-Of-COURSE-I-can-see-the-Emperor’s-beautiful-clothes;” thinking and parroting as…I myself indulged in for more decades than I like to recall.

        “Oh, what idiots we all have been. This is just as it must be.” – Niels Bohr.

        Niels Bohr – Wikiquote https://share.google/gFBZZX3RSJFKhKxFp

        Comfort and joy!

        Tom

        Personality – Etymology, Origin & Meaning https://share.google/U1QgjBGzcEH1rrhdY

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    • Commenting on; “the danger of treating DSM categories as if they are fixed, objective disease entities. That was not my intention.”

      Unforunately, nothing in the article suggests that you don’t treat DSM categories as anything other than fixed, objective disease categories. This is unwarranted reification and I call it (nominal) fetishization; it’s especially pronounced in autism despite some very grave problems once you go beyond and try to elucidate symptom – cause correlations.
      Needless to say, psychiatric diseases are socio-economic constructs with clear political ramifications and personality disorders are quite commonly regarded as a form of slandering because they reduce interpersonal problems of communication, conduct etc. to one person.

      Commenting on; “in current clinical practice, certain forms of social withdrawal, interpersonal ambiguity, emotional restriction, unusual communication, and relational difficulty may increasingly be understood through autism, while other possible formulations are not explored with the same seriousness.”

      I don’t know where I’ve heard this from but psychologists/psychiatrists rarely work with more than 10 different diagnoses (despite the 350 or so in the DSM-5)

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  8. My autism spectrum disorder is an obvious condition with which I greatly struggle(d) while unaware until I was a half-century old that its component dysfunctions had formal names. Then again, had I been aware back in the 1970s and ’80s I likely would’ve kept it a secret nonetheless, especially at school, lest the A-word [autism] gets immediately followed by the F-word [freak].

    From my recollection and understanding: while children with ‘low-functioning’ autism spectrum disorder seem to be more recognizable thus treated in school systems, high-er (as opposed to high) functioning ASD students — who tend to not exhibit the more overt, debilitating symptoms of autism — are more likely to basically be left to fend for themselves, except if their parents can finance specialized education.

    If it is feasible, parents should seriously consider not enrolling their high-er functioning ASD child in regular, ‘neurotypical’ grade school. The combination of my CPTSD and undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder was often mistaken for ADHD during grade school, for which I was shamed and scolded.

    As a boy with an undiagnosed ASD, my public-school Grade 2 teacher was the first and most formidably abusive authority figure with whom I was terrifyingly trapped. Though there were other terrible teachers, for me she was uniquely traumatizing, especially when she wore her large, dark sunglasses when dealing with me.

    Rather than tell anyone about my ordeal with her and consciously feel victimized, I instead felt some misplaced shame: I was a ‘difficult’ boy, therefore she likely perceived me as somehow ‘deserving it’. But not being mentally, let alone physically, abused within or by an educational system is definitely a moral right; I was simply unable to see this.

    Perhaps schoolteachers should receive training in high-er functioning ASD, especially if the rate of autism diagnoses is increasing. There could also be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition.

    Neurodiversity lessons, while not overly complicated or extensive, might help reduce the incidence of chronic bullying against such vulnerable students. It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with high-er functioning ASD are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a ‘choice’.

    It would also elucidate how “camouflaging” or “masking,” terms used to describe higher-functioning ASD people pretending to naturally fit into a socially ‘normal’ environment, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase. And that this exacerbation is reflected in the disproportionately elevated rate of suicide among them.

    As a moral rule, a mentally as well as a physically sound future should be EVERY child’s foremost fundamental right — along with air, water, food, and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.

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    • In my view, no child should be enrolled in a “neurotypical” school. Those who appear to “fit in” are still not served well, they’re just better at adapting to developmentally inappropriate expectations for the most part. We need a new model of what school should look like!

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  9. While I don’t know the precise/entire cause-and-effect of my chronic anxiety and clinical depression, my daily cerebral turmoil mostly consists of a formidable combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, with the ACE trauma in large part the result of my ASD and high sensitivity. I self-deprecatingly refer to it as my perfect storm of train wrecks.

    Coexistent conditions, such as mine, likely amplify the turmoil usually suffered by people living with less complicated conditions. ACE abuse thus trauma, for example, is often inflicted upon ASD and/or highly sensitive children and teens by their normal or ‘neurotypical’ peers — thus resulting in immense and even debilitating self-hatred and shame — so why not at least acknowledge that consequential fact in a meaningfully constructive way? It could be very helpful to have books written about such or similar coexistent cerebrally-based conditions.

    As it currently is, The Autistic Brain fails to mention the real potential for additional challenges created by an autism spectrum disorder coexisting with thus exacerbated by high sensitivity and/or adverse childhood experience trauma. The book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal, on adverse childhood experience trauma, fails to mention high sensitivity or ASD. And The Highly Sensitive Man has no mention of ASD or ACE trauma.

    I’ve read much of the book WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing, by Dr. Bruce D. Perry (M.D., Ph.D.) and Oprah Winfrey. It is exceptionally enlightening, although I’ve thus far not come across any mention of the complications caused by coexistent conditions.

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  10. My diagnosis at 8 was Aspergers and now it is called Autism 1. Many people who are older were labelled with Schizoid Personality because they used to think autism was a form of schizophrenia. (It’s not but people can have both autism and schizophrenia). Autism is not a mental illness nor are “personality disorders”. They are neurodivergent conditions because the person always has them. I don’t suffer from autism. I struggle with an environment that is not neuroaffirming.

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