Autism and SPD: Two Different Shades of Grey

Hello; I haven't been able to post for a while because of technical difficulties. As you may be aware, I have mentioned autism quite a bit in this blog, even though this blog does not center around autism in the slightest. One may wonder as to why I have. The answer is simple: most people with SPD nowadays get misdiagnosed as being autistic; I was no exception to this. One may ask whether or not this matters, and I would say that it does. It can cause a great amount of identity dysphoria and psychological regression in the misdiagnosed person, as well as the fact that other people continue to believe that they are something that they are not. Personally, I can say that a good decade of my young life was conflicted by these issues for the aforementioned reason. This is especially true when the misdiagnosis is introduced during adolescence (which was true in my case), since this is the developmental period where one develops their own sense of identity. It can really destroy one's mind and soul.

But enough of that. I will state why autism is oftentimes confused with SPD, and it is this: both autism and SPD cause a tremendous amount of interpersonal dissonance and social awkwardness. And there is virtually little to no difference as to how these are manifested in either group. However, the causation of the surface features are quite different between the two. In autism, there is a lack of emotional understanding and empathy; essentially this means that their emotions work differently than the normal person's and that they cannot relate to others emotionally. Cognitively, however, they are perfectly logical and concrete, and as such they generally have no problem in relating to other people's thoughts and ideas; most autistic people are surprisingly fairly normal outside of their limited social abilities.

With SPD, one's emotions are no different than from anyone else; while they may have a flattened affect, they understand the emotional and intuitive processes of the normal person, or at least the ability to do so isn't especially limited. In terms of thoughts, though, they are usually very tangential and off-the-wall, making seemingly unrelated connections between ideas and coming to absurd conclusions; their minds are considered to be very bizarre to many, and most with SPD have little to no insight as to why this is so. As such, they cannot relate to normal people despite having normal or near normal emotional faculty.

From this, it becomes apparent that while autistics and those with SPD may have symptoms that seem nearly identical on the surface, the underlying dynamics between the two are almost completely different. It is important to keep this in mind.