Sorry long - but worth it for the attached post:

I'll admit my recent concern when reading about co-morbidity with something else that may be genetic from my moms family - my moms mom had 15 siblings, so my moms aunt - so that would be my great aunt or my (aspie) sons great great aunt - was supposedly in a facility since rather young- which is where people were put years ago - for schizophrenia - but later on looking back, at the possibility it was something else, (that and she was orphaned- during the depression) wrong diagnosis? that were common back then - the family tat is left thinks she was wrongly classified. (scary thing is when my mom visited her -- when she was old, old, old, she and my mom were so very alike) Anyway,my point is when I saw the thread mentioning a link - it caused a stir in me - cuz of only knowing the old sterotypes of the word.. and thinking yikes being co-morbid (someday) with that and ASD for my son might be well not helpful towards his happiness.  
Is schizophrenia a nuerotype or a sub-set of a neurotype, and do I care? I guess so huh...I'll have to do more research - I want to quote someones recent post here on some clinicians theories and diagnostic categories and categories and the problem with categorization etc., I love this post  :

One thing that might be worth thinking about is that autism is often misdiagnosed as schizophrenia... Is it possible that they got the wrong dx for your father?

Yeah ...
in short: it depends on the 'onset': in childhood (Disorders of psychological development including the Spectrum (F80-F89)) - or as an adult (Disorders of adult personality and behaviour (F60-F69)). Look here.

I don't think they have the wrong DX now - my dad has the hearing voices, hallucinations, paranoia etc... he is pretty clearly schizophrenic. But, here's the weird thing, my dad functioned normally all through his teens/twenties/early thirties - he had girlfriends, a social life, held down a good job, was even in the process of emigrating to the US... everyone commented that my dad was certainly 'eccentric' and didn't follow normal social rules - in fact he used to like pushing them, and didn't bother if people thought he was a bit... gay. My dad was very vain and rumour had it that he did 'experiment' in his youth, but just shrugged it off. Basically, if you told my dad to step left, he'd step right. Anyway, he married my mum, and then they had me, and apparently he was totally preoccupied with me, took me everywhere with him... then when I was 2, he had a massive stroke. He'd had a smallish one the fortnight before, but then he had a massive one that left him paralysed down one side, unable to speak, basically trapped inside his own body etc.

He can walk and talk now, but he still doesn't communicate, or interact with people. He has extremely repetitive behaviour, and doesn't make eye contact with anyone. If he has to talk to you, he'll look at the wall, but not you. He has extremely structured routines and cannot cope if they are out of sync. No medication has managed to get him back to the way he used to be - where he was eccentric, and displayed outwardly Aspergian traits (if I really am that much of my father's daughter, as everyone claims, then I really find it hard to believe my dad isn't on the autistic spectrum). No-one knows what to do, so he's just basically been dumped by the NHS as a schizophrenic, thats it.

I'm positive my dad most likely had Aspergers before his stroke - what I wonder is, if the brain wiring dictates autistic behaviour, if the stroke has possibly caused some form of regression? I don't mean this in any way to court controversy, or offend anyone - but there are cases of individuals who were diagnosed as being at the lower end of the spectrum in childhood, who would now be classed as HFA/Aspergian. So if its possible to progress, then surely, after sustaining a serious brain injury (i.e. a stroke), it can also be possible to regress? Just food for thought.

Taking that a bit further one can doubt the validity of any and all neurotypes. They're all fictional conglomerations to which no individual person can validly to possess. What is the neurotype of a gay bipolar HFA male or an asexual schizotypal aspie woman?  I sure that all of these adjectives result in different neurological patterns when comparing statistically significant samples compared to the norm or the other gender.

NT:  "Not 'Tistic"

Controversy? I don't think so. No scientist would speak in terms of "a neurotypical individual" as if there were a precise definition to apply.

Your statement is essentially correct. You seem, however, not to fully understand the term. It is not "fictional", it is a statistical construct. "Normal" is a range of quantified values commonly defined to be within two standard deviations of the mean, and usually encompases 95% of the statistical population (aka, whatever is being measured).

"Neurotypical" is a neutral variant of "neurologically normal". The phrase "neurotypical individual" is a linguistic convenience; a shortened form of saying, "an individual whose quantified data regarding neurological functioning falls within the normal range". In this sense, it should be obvious that there can be no single individual that is the neurotypical individual.



Supposedly, the "typical" American family has 2.3 children. This has spawned droll (and frequently morbid) jokes for decades regarding the disposition of the 0.3 child. (So, what does the 0.3 child look like? It can't be healthy.) Obviously, there is no single family that has 2.3 children, and it is equally obvious that not every family has the same number of children, and many have no children at all. It makes more sense to say that the mean number of children in the American family is 2.3.

love the graph and the visual of the .3 child - yikes! :O)