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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My 13 year old daughter has severe autism and I have a personality disorder, the difference is quite large.
My daughter was fine until 2 years old where she was progressing normally for a child.
One day she started fitting, rolling her eyes back in her head and shaking either stuck in a kneeling position or flat on the floor, she would wake up after several minutes screaming in pain and then sleep for anywhere between 7 to 14 hours.
Her speech immediately reversed and she could no longer balance properly where even crawling was a struggle and she refused to look into people’s faces.
If anyone shouted or showed any type of playful aggression she would freeze in place like a rigid doll, I was the only one to get her out of it as she is a daddies girl.
Now 13 she is one of the kindest people I have ever met with not an evil bone in her body, mentally she is around 6 to 7 and learning to read and write still and if anything scares her she has no clue what to do and freezes instantly.
She was born this way and it is her brain forever.
Mine is personality disorder.
Due to poor upbringing I was out into foster care and boarding schools from 8 years old to 16 and it left a very poor imprint on my mind as a child so bad that it messed with my personality where it is dysfunctional.
I’m sure you have seen an abused animal before where they are on guard 24/7 snappy and defensive, that is me forever.
It’s not a choice just hardwired into who I am due to abuse beyond the normal ranges.
Autism is born into and permanent.
Personality disorders are from trauma and “can” be treated but with varying degrees of success per individual.
They are very very different.
One is a permanent change and one more or less is caused by trauma.
It’s like the difference between asthma and bronchitis, they have similar symptoms and affect the same part of your respiratory tract, but their root causes are very different and the conditions of their resolution are different
Short version:
For people with autism spectrum disorder, negative symptoms and issues come from differences in brain chemistry and development, which COULD totally impact your personality, as a sort of downstream effect, but don’t have to. For people with personality disorders, their distinct, inflexible personalities ARE the root cause of the problems.
Long version:
People with ASD absolutely can be irritable, rigid in their unique thought patterns, and have difficulty relating to others. But this is likely due to the way they sense and process the world around them, and how that is more taxing and stressful than it is for non-autistic people. They may also have a long history of poor treatment from others, which has impacted their outlook on the world. If you were to teach this person coping skills, educate their family about the nature of the disorder, and make sure they have appropriate accommodations for work/school, you might see an improvement in their mood and increased interpersonal effectiveness. Essentially, their personality was never the real problem.
Personality disorders are a complicated and occasionally controversial subject in psychology, and they are harder to explain and understand than other disorders. In our case, let’s imagine a similar situation to above: taking a person with a diagnosed personality disorder, doing specialized therapy, educating family members, and getting accommodations. In this case, you would NOT generally expect improved mood and increased interpersonal effectiveness, at least not without years of work. This is because the personality is the source of the negative symptoms. You can change their surroundings all you like, but at the end of they day they will always approach new situations and relationships in the same problematic ways.
Think about your own life. Could you will yourself to be extroverted? Pessimistic? Trusting? Charming? Do you think a therapist would help much, if at all? Is this even something that would occur to a person to do, or is it something that you have to be told? All tough questions, and that’s what makes personality disorders different from other kinds, ASD included.
It’s the difference between a broken foot and being born without a foot.
From what we know right now- people are born autistic, but not born with depression.
Personality disorders are just that, a issue with someone’s personality.
Autism isn’t specifically a disorder, the person just works differently than the average human. And the world and society is designed for the average person, not someone whose brain processes the world around it differently.
To use an analogy if you drove a car into a lake, and it sunk, you wouldn’t go “well that car was broken”. Car isn’t made for driving on water. It works great on roads tho.
Many autistic people work perfectly fine when in an environment curated for them. However it’s impractical to make the world change to fit them, thus to go back to the analogy the car has to drive on water even tho its not designed for it, and so it gets some modifications and changes so it at minimum doesn’t sink.
So autistic people are taught behavioral therapies and some people medicated to make sure they don’t “sink” as it were.
Where as someone with a personality disorder is a boat with a hole in it. Its MEANT to be able to float and drive on water but its got a defect preventing that from happening.
In most cases of autism it’s very difficult to label the impacts of it as bad so much as different.
You could call the thinking rigid. You could also call it more logical and consistent. It also doesn’t generally fit in with other personality disorders because it’s a fundamental differing from birth.
Autistic people are also disproportionately positively impacting society in terms of innovation. Between all the autistic engineers, research doctors and scientists, your life has been saved or drastically improved by autistic people more times than you can probably imagine.
Autism is classified as a developmental disorder. It also has a strong genetic basis.
While personality disorders are linked to genetics, their is very direct evidence for genetics leading to symptoms relating to autism.
It is categorised as a developmental disorder because symptoms often begin at a young age (including infancy) such as differences between children with autism and the wider population with eye contact and seeking comfort from attachment figures. It is also useful to consider autism as a developmental disorder for treatment, as a person with ASD will often have a different developmental trajectory to the wider population.
It’s classified as a permanent disability instead in a lot of places, depending on the severity, which makes more sense for how it works.
Autism has heavy overlap with sensory processing in addition to thinking patterns. There’s not really a “personality” disorder that fits needing to take the tags off of clothes, or can’t stand the smell of bacon etc.
It sort of was in the mid 60s – I got a dx of sociopathy ponyed up to my dx of autism. ‘shrug’ I make the assumption that it was because I wasn’t processing human interaction like normal.
It wasn’t that I got better or anything like that, my mom went to a hella lot of trouble training me to act like a neurotypical – I can chat with someone and look them in the eyes, I can touch or be touched casually, I don’t crunch away or stiffen up. I can converse about all sorts of things, I don’t monolog about hobbies.
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