i’ve been reading about personality disorders and I feel like a lot of the symptoms fit autism as well. both have a rigid and “unhealthy” patterns of thinking, functioning and behaving, troubles perceiving and relating to situations and people, the early age of onset, both are pernament
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Autism isn’t a personality disorder it’s a structural abnormality in the brain from overconnection of neurones. It causes significant suffering, completely different from that of a personality disorder.
As someone who is autistic and thought they had a PD thanks to poor diagnosis criteria. Fair question.
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I’ve been diagnosed with autism twice actually. I’d like to point out that I don’t have a rigid or unhealthy pattern of thinking, I have no behavioural issues or issues with ‘functioning’, and I do very well in most situations including social situations.
I had very abnormal behaviour growing up, but it never inhibited me, in a lot of ways it benefited me greatly.
Having autism does not guarantee harmful behaviour, which is why it’s not a personality disorder.
For the same reason being a woman isn’t considered a disorder.
It’s a type of human brain, one of many types.
And we’re moving away from saying one type is “in order” while others are disorders.
These types are biochemically different.
People with such brains have different things that are easier and harder for them compared to people with other brains.
Some are able to lead fully functional lives, others aren’t.
Those that aren’t can be diagnosed with a disorder, to assist them in getting help.
At the same time, the problem isn’t with their personality. Their personality is a byproduct or a symptom. The two common ways to define the problem are either biochemistry or skills to drive your particular brain.
Autistic people process data differently. For example, if you show a photograph of a person to a neurotypical child, they will focus first on the face of the subject, and especially the eyes. Autistic children do not do that: they tend to focus on the background, on clothes, or anything else that grabs their attention.
Personality disorders do not work that way.
Many autism spectrum people also have sensory integration issues. The brain has difficulty interpreting if sound, light, smells, taste, or touch signals are “too loud” or “too quiet”. What may be quiet to you is an overload of input to the autistic. Establishing a pattern of routines or limiting exposure to sensory input helps to regulate this.
Autism can still be empathic but like the senses, the brain doesn’t know how to handle all that extra information. It becomes easier to avoid eye contact, talk too much or too little, appear hyperactive or extremely quiet. The brain doesn’t know how to adjust the limits on what it receives. Imagine a music stereo but every time you adjust the volume for your favorite song, the volume is either 0 or 11 with no in between.
The personality of the autistic can come from trying to compensate for these integration levels. The reason autism is such a wide spectrum is because those internal controls vary from person to person. Too loud for one person is too quiet for someone else.
Not all aspects of autism are ‘unhealthy’. It’s not all about negative traits. Some people with autism excel at things. Not being able to read a face very well because my brain relies on auditory signals does not make me comparable to someone who is, for example, a narcissist.
Categorizing something as a “personality disorder” means there isn’t any other evidence of neurological dysfunction except on the person’s “personality”, their interactions with other people on a social level. Of course all psychiatric conditions will have impact on social interactions somehow, the question is whether that is all there is. It is quite obvious that autism is quite a bit more than that, so it isn’t considered to be in that category and that says absolutely nothing other than that, given our generally complete ignorance about how mental events arise from physiological neurology. (Not absolutely complete, of course; there are plenty of hypotheses and explanations, but generally complete ignorance nevertheless.) Whether a psychiatric condition is considered a “personality disorder” or a “neurological disorder” or a “mood disorder” or whatever isn’t important, or even useful, information, it’s simply a convenient classification for descriptive purposes.
You can treat personality disorders and address the root cause in therapy and different interventions
With autism you can’t really address the root cause as you’re born with it. You can teach strategies and ways to cope with day to day life and improve social interaction but the autism will still be there
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