I see the connection of (1) 5-10% of people are born with the genetic predisposition of schizotaxia, (2) most of those people are going to experience negative social learning that leads to the schizotypal personality organization, (3) 100% percent of people who develop schizophrenia spectrum disorders were born with schizotaxia, perhaps 10% of them will go on to develop serious psychosis. I think what they are observing is the co-occurrence of (2) and (3)

See

https://www.amazon.com/Loners-Life-Path-Unusual-Children/dp/...

and

https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experim...

The latter book is a bit controversial because it sees schizotypy as "you have it or you don't have it" and there are many reasons to believe it is dimensional as pushed here

https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-dimensions-Advances-Mental...

but the dimensional team can't tell compelling stories around the practical psychopathology the way Lenzenweger does. Notably Bleuler, who named schizophrenia, found that the parents and family of schizophrenics were a bit "odd" and socially withdrawn more than 100 years ago.

It irks me that you can find just a handful of conference proceedings on a condition which affects tens of millions of people in the U.S and that both ADHD and Autism have boomed in popularity because they both are associated with expensive or addictive treatments. Since nobody has a way to monetize schizotypy (if anything antipsychotic drugs could make you more unhinged) there is no budget to popularize it.

It's more important than people think because the genetic liability to schizophrenia is connected to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy

that maybe the gene for schizotypy + environmental stress makes you schizophrenic or if you have 8 schizogenes you are schizotype but 15 makes you schizophrenic. Either way for every schizophrenic person there are many more schizotypes, this condition is almost never diagnosed but I think can be resposible for this syndrome

https://www.amazon.com/Loners-Life-Path-Unusual-Children/dp/...

and it can cause troubles relating to people, with executive function, etc. I'm pretty sure a lot of self-diagnosed "autists" and "ADHD" cases really have this common mainly genetic condition. See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disord...

You're right. To my credit, I haven't in years. It's an example of the "splitting" at the root of "schizo" which helps me be able to be a member of two contradictory groups at the same time until the contradictions build up and I get expelled from both. It is not so much about being deceptive but about sincerely seeing the humanity in everyone and trying to play both roles, though there is a way you get drawn into increasing levels of duplicity if you go down that route.

It's also a demonstration of how the "false self" comes out of having the experience of having to hide a vulnerability from people. (I really was prone to paranoid ideation, but the way I was treated in elementary school "proved" they really were out to get me. Boy was I furious at a friend of mine who showed contempt for the private school he went to because my parents were able to get me into private school for just one year and I was treated like... a human being and actually made some friends.) Schizotypes can oddly be very cagey sometimes yet they struggle to avoid random offputting statements that get them in trouble.

When I hear "I was bullied as a kid", I can't help but think of

https://www.amazon.com/Loners-Life-Path-Unusual-Children/dp/...

and the interpretation of that book in

https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experim...

and wonder if Asperger's is just a fad diagnosis for this.

I'll point out the related concept

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=schizotypy

which has quite a few papers in the research literature but the concept has not escaped into clinical practice.

The classification is controversial, particularly it's not really clear that schizotaxia is something you have or don't have (taxonic) or whether it is something dimensional that you might have more or less of.

Schizotaxia is believed to be a neurodivergence that is genetically determined, schizotypy is the personality organization that you get when you fail the Turing test in Kindergarten and get treated accordingly. See also

https://www.amazon.com/Loners-Life-Path-Unusual-Children/dp/...

This book comes the closest to telling a coherent story but it is completely bought into the taxonic approach

https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experim...

and he completely denies the possibility that you could find something positive in schizotaxia/schizotypy and also doesn't answer my emails. Other than that there are a few conference proceedings that have a few that is more balanced but muddier.

"Schizophrenia tends to run in families, but no single gene is thought to be responsible."

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/schizophrenia/ca...

Paul Meehl was associated with the hypothesis of schizotaxia and schizotypy in the 1960s, he believed the first was caused by a single dominant gene. Schizotaxia would cause you to have 'synaptic slippage' which would cause negative social learning which would cause you to develop as a schizotype, which is related to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disord...

Schizotaxia, for instance, makes you liable to paranoia, but if it makes you a bullying magnet in school and the authorities blow off your concerns and refuse to protect you you learn that they really are out to get you which has many kinds of negative impact on your development which leads you to become a schizotype who might further develop schizophrenia if you are unlucky.

Maybe 5% of the population is schizotypal, maybe 5% of those develop schizophrenia.

Schizotypy is a form of neurodivergence that is similar in prevalence to autism and ADHD but unlike the others there are not institutions in place to diagnose it so if you present as a schizotype to a therapist under distress they will probably say you have "adjustment disorder with depression|anxiety|conduct concerns" and if they get so far as to think there is a developmental problem they will probably think it is autism or adhd since those are fashionable to have. (So fashionable that people who don't know anything about psychodiagnosis self-diagnose with autism or ADHD but a person who reads about psychology as a hobby might take decades to have that fateful moment where they read a long list of 20+ signs and symptoms and find they have 15 of them... But the similarity to autism is apt since schizotypes develop 'special interests' and tend to be loners because they learn that it is completely unsafe to reveal their difference to other people, even if they have no idea what that difference is.)

It is not so safe to tell people you are a schizotype because of the stigma associated with schizophrenia and the fact that schizotypy is not well known among either the public or medical professionals. Some authorities think the pediatric syndrome described in this book

https://www.amazon.com/Loners-Life-Path-Unusual-Children/dp/...

is usually schizotypy.