alt Hacker News> is schizophrenia a spectrum disorder like autism?
I'm a non expert but I believe some people are starting to see it that way. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=schizophrenia+spectrum+disor...
Also there's huge overlap in symptoms between bipolar I with psychosis, schizoaffective disorder, and schizophrenia. People sometimes move around between these diagnoses throughout treatment, different doctors have different opinions, patient behavior changes, etc.
I personally think these symptoms come about through many different causes and the labels are somewhat inadequate. They capture a symptom profile rather than a full understanding.
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The overlap is not huge at all. Beside psychosis, they have no overlap, and the quality of the psychosis in the two illnesses is far removed from each other.
I remember reading in Courtenay Harding's (now very old) book, Recovery from Schizophrenia: Evidence, History, and Hope, that populations with a higher prevalence of bipolar tended to have a lower prevalence of schizophrenia, and vice versa. The implication was that the same thing was being expressed differently in differing contexts. I would be curious if more contemporary studies bore this out.