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Bleuler, who named schizophrenia, found that the parents and family of schizophrenics were a bit "odd" and socially withdrawn more than 100 years ago.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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16737381/
There is definitely such a thing as schizotypy but you've never heard of it because it is not as fashionable as autism and definitely not as fashionable as having autism and ADHD and dyslexia. Schizotypy may be behind this syndrome
https://www.amazon.com/Loners-Life-Path-Unusual-Children/dp/...
and may be the reason why I graduated from elementary school the way Ender Wiggin did. (People who noticed there's something a little odd about my HN posts are noticing I have just a touch of "thought disorder", which is much more fundamental, I think, to the schizophrenia spectrum than the auditory hallucinations that get talked about endlessly or the delusions which only troubled me once) So there's a grain of truth in the above comment.
I have often been appalled at how badly people on the schizophrenia spectrum get cared for.
Right now I have a friend who is almost certainly schizophrenic (no professional diagnosis) but doesn't believe she has a problem who lives with an elderly person who is a bit of a bleeding heart who's had a stroke and may have to evict her because he can't live with her anymore. She comes out to our place to visit but has a hard time staying more than 24 hours because cell phones don't work at our spot and she can't indulge in her pastime of blowing up people's phones. (e.g. she can easily leave 10+ messages in a few hours on our machine again) If she cooks she'll season our cast iron pans with 1/2 a cup of oil, won't believe that we're really going to eat all the apples we have on hand and will make apple cobbler as soon as we're not watching her)
Another friend had schizoaffective disorder (my diagnosis, she never got a professional diagnosis despite multiple hospitalizations) and had bad enough thought disorder that it would take her a few hours to smoke her first cigarette of the day despite being badly addicted to cigs. She lived with us for a year and a half until one night her dad tried to wake her up after she'd been awake for days and she freaked, threatened my wife with a knife, and then ran into the night. She took her own life a year and a half after that.
Because I am the way I am I find people like that easier to understand and live with than most people would, in fact on some level "normal" people seem stranger to me.