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The Autism-Schizophrenia Connection

(And What It Means to Me)

By Angel MannPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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If this grandmother has schizophrenia, could the granddaughter be autistic? 

I just read this article saying that autism and schizophrenia are genetically linked. Apparently this was already suspected but studies had only been done in western populations. A new study from Japan now adds more evidence based on the genetic studies of people around the world.

While we still don’t know exactly what causes autism, and there are probably tons of different things that lead to it, one connection is to CNVs. That stands for “copy number variants.”

I am terrible at science, so I don’t really know how to explain what copy number variants are, except to just quote the explanation from the article I read: “...repeating sections of chromosome that can arise when strings of DNA duplicate imperfectly.” According to the article, most people have these in their DNA, and nothing shocking comes of it. However, somehow it can cause certain other genes to be “accidentally” deleted. When this occurs along with other “mutations,” it can apparently lead to autism or schizophrenia.

I still don’t really understand all of the scientific aspects of this. But I was still very interested when I read it. Why?

Well, long, long, long before I was ever diagnosed with autism, my paternal grandmother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She spent much of her life in and out of psychiatric institutions, and underwent various treatments that were considered to be cutting edge in the 1950s and 60s. I’ve been told she got more than fifty electroshock therapy treatments.

As a young child, I did not realize that there was anything “wrong” with my Grandma, or that she had any sort of “condition.” In the innocent way that children evaluate without judging, I simply was aware that Grandma’s voice was loud and screechy, that she bounced her legs and fidgeted constantly while she sat, and that she was always saying things that seemed a little odd and that caused all of the adults in the room to groan, “Ma!” in unison. I didn’t even really know why the things she said made everyone so mad. Usually she’d be claiming that she’d heard someone talking on the phone about her. I never knew Grandma the way I knew my maternal grandparents, whose house my brother and I considered a second home. We only saw Grandma on special occasions. She was kind to us and clearly loved us, but we just never had that comfort level with her.

As I got older, my social and behavioral differences became more obvious… until at age 17, I was diagnosed with a “psychotic disorder.” The diagnosis seemed like a shot in the dark. The psychologist evaluating me seemed to have no idea what was wrong with me. I didn’t have actual symptoms of schizophrenia. I had never had a hallucination. I did believe in ghosts and UFO’s, but so do many other people, and that alone is not an indicator of a psychotic disorder. The doctor just took the facts that I clearly thought and behaved differently that others, added it up with the fact that my grandmother was schizophrenic, came up with the vague “Psychotic Disorder NOS” diagnosis, and prescribed me some antipsychotic medication that made me feel half asleep most of the time. It was at first explained to me as a “thinking disorder,” but one day I looked up my medication in a thick, dictionary-like book at the hospital and found out what it was for. I remember my mom trying to explain it to me, saying, “You know when suddenly everything starts to get spinny and confusing?” And I remember thinking, no, not really. But I nodded my head, yes, because I thought maybe she was attempting to describe the feeling I got when I became anxious and overwhelmed, when noises pricked my ears like needles and danger seemed to lurk everywhere.

As an adult, I did my own reading, and got my own doctors, and that was how I came to realize that I was actually autistic. I’ve been diagnosed with other things as well… ADHD, depression, and anxiety… which often come as side orders to autism. But no doctor who has ever met me, since that first one, has ever thought I had any sort of psychotic disorder… even after I told them about my grandmother.

What does this whole thing mean to me? I suppose, in a way, it is a validation of my autism diagnosis. It took me a long time to actually get my family to believe that I had autism. For reasons I never understood, they were much more willing to believe a doctor who said I had a psychotic disorder, rather than several doctors and tons of books and articles and checklists that said I had autism. Maybe it seemed more probable. After all, schizophrenia was already thought to be genetic, so the chances were high that a granddaughter would also have symptoms of it. My brother and I were Grandma’s only genetically-related grandchildren, so if someone was going to get that gene, I had a 50% chance of it being me. On the other hand, what were the chances that both schizophrenia and autism would hit a family within 3 generations? Pretty high, as it turns out.

I suppose this doesn’t really make a difference in my life as a whole. I am still the same person I was before I read this article. But I feel a little like I have another piece of the proverbial “puzzle” now.

RESOURCES

McRae, M. (n.d.). We Just Got Even More Evidence That Autism And Schizophrenia Share Genetic Roots [Abstract]. Retrieved September 13, 2018, from https://www.sciencealert.com/overlapping-pathogenic-copy-number-variation-autism-schizophrenia-japanese-population

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About the Creator

Angel Mann

I am an alien. I’ve been diagnosed with autism and ADHD, which explain some but not all aspects of my life. Maybe I really am from a different planet. Until that planet is discovered, I have to learn to survive here on Earth.

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