ABSTRACT
It is important to give an overview of these conditions in order to illustrate the indistinct boundary between psychosis and non-psychosis. Adult patients with autistic spectrum disorder are still misdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and consequently given inappropriate treatment. In 1943 the American Leo Kanner described a condition which he termed childhood autistic disorder. The children he described usually had a marked intellectual disability together with various disturbances of communication and interaction with other people: an autistic isolation. In 1944 the Austrian Hans Asperger described a similar syndrome except that the child was of normal intelligence or exceptionally gifted. It is still not clear whether these two syndromes represent variations of the same basic disorder or if they differ from one another. Today we work with a spectrum of autistic disorders. Our understanding of autism is far from complete: it is not clear if and how childhood autism corresponds to the autistic-like disorders which are found in schizophrenia. So it is important not to draw definitive conclusions with regard to childhood autism syndrome and adult schizophrenia. However, it does seem, at least with Asperger’s syndrome, that there are cases of intellectually highly developed children who develop schizophrenia. Childhood autism has only been tentatively linked to childhood schizophrenia.
