Yes even though they have entirely different traits people are stupid and they used the term schizophrenia as a catch all for anything that was seen as “abnormal”.

Nowadays it’s a little better, not as much as one might think, autism is the bucket term now, but I’ll try to give some better definitions.

Autism is a condition in which people lack in the more normal modes of thinking, and also social skills. Autists tend to have a few symptoms.

-Great difficulty in socializing

-High levels of sensitivity and high levels of neuroticism. (Don’t like being touched, don’t like their things being touched to a very high degree)

-A lack of common sense

-Often they fixate on a specific thing or set of things they really like, while they lack in general skills.

-They in some cases have difficulty understanding what people mean when they say stuff in social contexts, and often can understand specific things really well.

Schizophrenia

-They often have trouble staying awake fully in every part of their brain, leading to hallucinations in waking life.

-They often cannot understand allegory or metaphor really well, (they believe figures of speech to be literal) they can only understand something like religion as literal, not metaphorical.

-Schizophrenia tends to be a degenerative brain disease, where most people develop it between 29-35, and it usually worsens over life and their intelligence tends to drop faster than most adults.

-Schizophrenics tend to be antisocial, but not really by preference as much as autists. Which is one of the main differences. Schizophrenia is a degenerative brain disease where autism isn’t really degenerative or anything and autists tend to be much more antisocial but not paranoid and stuff.

-Schizophrenics tend to have extreme paranoia, and also they see patterns where there are none.

Schizophrenia is definitely the worst, and autism isn’t really bad in many cases. People can have a perfectly healthy and happy life with autism but schizophrenia is extremely destructive to people.

Both of these have almost no single known cause. Schizophrenia is thought to be highly genetic but a combination of many genes. Autism is less understood.

The first people who did a nature vs nurture study on schizophrenia discovered a new condition, that many of the family members of schizophrenia had, called schizotypal syndrome many of these people, although nearly perfectly healthy, tended to be weird, and also a bit antisocial. They had a great deal of superstition and fixations. They often were just weird though. Their house would smell weird. They would have odd colors. Things like this. It is thought that this is a precursor to schizophrenia. In cases where people just have schizotypal syndrome, this can be thought of as a case where diversity usually wins out in evolutionary terms. A diverse set of mental creatures is nearly always going to win over a very homogenous group of mental creatures, yet sometimes too many of these phenotypes end up in one child, and the neurodegenerativness might come from lifestyles factors associated with highly schizotypal living. (Taking lots of medicine, believing everything they hear on TV, like medication is safe to take when pregnant) Which most people would just understand as incorrect. Bad diet from poverty due to being weird. Having too many germs and mold in their house because they are scared of burglars so they are afraid to open the windows. Things like this.

Schizophrenia tends to still be a bit of a bucket term, and autism as well, but these are far better defined these days. The reason they are most likely on the rise is because of less real food, with nutrients, more poverty, and highly stressful modern lifestyles, and also many people spend a lot of time around manmade and synthetic materials in childhood vs spending time in nature, which can help the immune system learn to function correctly. Most germs in nature aren’t very dangerous to humans, because they haven’t evolved specific traits to infect humans. So your immune system has a strong advantage over these germs.

So if you don’t want your kids to develop these conditions, air your house out sometimes, let them play in nature, feed them high quality food, and keep their stress low, and make sure they have enough free time so that they can sleep at night. Also don’t take medication while you are pregnant unless you absolutely have too. People should know this without someone telling them this. Don’t take antibiotics unless you have a specific germ infection where it’s worth the tradeoff.

The immune system also likely plays a role in these conditions. Having a healthy immune system isn’t just about defense against pathogens, but also your own epigenetic regulation. Having a weak or overly reactive immune system will lead to autism like symptoms or schizophrenia type symptoms if your immune system. Neurons have very complex and idiosyncratic protein structures and if your immune system isn’t functioning correctly, your brain will get full of trash or overly washed out by your immune system.since it cannot manage your brain proteins correctly. So get an outside dog they help keep healthy germs so long as they are healthy, spend time in nature, eat wild fruit. Dont spend every hour of your life inside or around humans and all their germs. Try to practice germ hygiene around humans, don’t fear nature’s germs. They can’t really hurt you if your immune system is working correctly, where humans spread all kinds of human specific pathogens that can sometimes infect you even if your immune system is healthy, although this is harder, because your immune system knows your own germs and evolves your germs to be specific to your body.