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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Hi! I have autism and a personality disorder (kind of a rare diagnosis, honestly). My special interest is psychology.
The thing with autism is that it’s considered a developmental/neurological disorder in the DSM V (the manual that diagnoses mental illness). This is because the symptoms are present from birth. Your brain (and body in some cases) are built differently! Symptoms of autism can be physical as well as mental due to the different formation of the brain and sometimes joints and organs during birth. For instance, many autistic people such as myself have gastrointestinal problems and joint problems! Don’t get me wrong, there is therapy for autism. It just focuses on learning to live as you are, though. It focuses on coping with the way you see the world and your surroundings.
On the other hand, I am also diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Some traits it has are shared with my autism, but some of my thinking patterns that are strictly from the BPD can be restructured through CBT or DBT, two different forms of therapy that focus on changing the way you think. You cannot do this with autism, although social skills and other skills can be faked or “masked”, in my case at least they were never fully learned.
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