【海外の反応】1980年まで「自閉症＝統合失調症」だった医学の黒歴史がガチで闇深い

Everything was schizophrenia back then. Happened to dissociative identity disorder too

I'm an old guy. I remember a boy in my school around 1970 who, in retrospect, was probably autistic. He was just considered to be a bad kid, although he wasn't anything ike the usual oppositional defiant kind of miserable teenager. Still, he was always getting punished. Big headache for the school, great problem for his parents who had to move school districts because of his disability. I hope he turned out OK.

Sadly, autistic teens and adults still routinely receive psychotic d/o diagnoses because most clinicians have no practical experience with Autism and the many ways it presents.

Historical context: Autism was originally believed to effect children only, so when they became adults the diagnosis became schizophrenia, which was seen as only adults. Obviously we know now autism is life long, but interestingly, schizophrenia still mainly only affects adults (mainly young adults, though—the risk for schizophrenia decreases with age), and very rarely children under 16. Anyway, in the 1940s, Hans Asperger (a literal N/azi), provided the first full understanding of Autism, that differentiated it as a seperate and unrelated from schizophrenia (the N/azi’s were obsessed with creating the perfect race, and disabilities like Autism got very much in the way of that, so they had to define it to know who to m*rder or sterilise basically).

I have Autism & schizophrenia, so having both is a fun time and a bit confusing for psychiatrists, especially because I’m a young woman with no history of drug taking and have both from bad family genetics (Autism and schizophrenia runs through all sides of my dads family. His mother’s side was also German, and his mum was schizophrenic and had she been born like a decade earlier I wouldn’t be here. She grew up in N/azi Germany and moved to England after the war).

There’s a book called Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer if you’re curious about the history of Autism and its N*zi connections.

i spent a couple of months in a county psych hospital as a teenager in the mid 70s and even then autism was such a common diagnosis that there were separate wards with roughly equal numbers of patients, one for autistic patients and the other for everyone else.

Homosexuality in DSM-I was defined as a sociopathic personality disturbance and in DSM-II as a sexual deviation.

Remembering Peter Winston

“BOY GENIUS,” the cover of the December 19, 1964, issue of the Saturday Evening Post proclaims. And inside, in Gilbert Millstein’s profile on Peter Jonathan Winston, titled “The Remarkable Life of a Little Genius,” the first thing we learn about the six-year-old Winston is that he is “alarmingly bright” yet “far more human—and fascinating—than the stereotypical child prodigy.” Little Winston is shown in a series of photographs, drawing math diagrams, arguing with teachers, and working with his mother on his homework.
Not long after Winston first enrolled at his school for gifted children on Long Island at the age of five, the headmaster, Benjamin Fine, a former education editor of the New York Times, asked him when his birthday was: “March 18, 1958,” Winston answered. Then he asked Fine the same thing, though quickly qualifying that he was only interested in the month and date, not the year. We can only imagine how the adults who observed this exchange might have reacted. Fine told him his birthday was on September 1.
“You’re lucky,” Peter responded. “Daddies can come to your party.”
“What do you mean?” Fine asked.
“Well, your birthday’s on a Sunday,” Winston replied. “It’s not a working day. But next year it’s going to be on a Tuesday. Normally it would have been on a Monday, but 1964 will be a leap year.”

He had already taught himself to make the snap calculation for any year between 1800 and 2000—before changing the subject to a more interesting discussion with Fine about positive and negative numbers. He was a mathematical prodigy.

At 18 months, he learned the alphabet by studying the spines of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and he was reading the volumes mere months after that. He mastered fractions by 3. He could tell people—as he did Sands Point’s headmaster—what day of the week their birthday would fall on in any given year using the “calendar in his head.” At six he memorized the names, ages, and terms of office of every president, along with the names, capitals and populations of all fifty states and the exact date they entered the union.

He later became interested in chess and devoted a lot of time to it. He excelled at the game and won a lot of tournaments. The highlight of his all too short chess career came when he beat the 6 time US Champion Walter Browne at the age of just 13.

Soon after his father’s death, the brilliance of Winston’s games were being written up in magazines. Before he was old enough to qualify for a driver’s license, Random House approached him with a book contract to explore chess. But already his stability and mental health were also increasingly becoming an issue.

1976, age eighteen, he was hospitalized and (incorrectly) diagnosed as schizophrenic.
He’d suffered a psychotic break and was taken to a local hospital, where he stayed for several weeks. The doctors there diagnosed him as schizophrenic and prescribed heavy doses of Thorazine. Later, he was labeled manic-depressive instead. Psychiatric issues led Winston to repeatedly, voluntarily, and with increasing urgency, return to mental hospitals, where he was given heavy doses of dangerous, mind-altering medication and often left in padded rooms. His diagnosis was later switched to one of manic depression.
Peter spent at least another year in and out of hospitals, largely at New York Psychiatric Institute in Washington Heights. “He was in a padded room, and I could barely recognize him,” Mr. Nasaw recalled of one of Winston’s earliest NYPI hospitalizations. “He was almost catatonic.

Winston would emerge from treatment complaining that his medication had tampered with his mind and fouled up his cognitive functions. Peter told friends that the Thorazine he’d been given had done something to his brain, and he grew increasingly frustrated that he couldn’t think like he used to. “He wasn’t as bright and sharp and quick,” said Mr. Polowan, who eventually became an internationally ranked bridge player. “He wasn’t a simpering idiot, but it was clear something that was lost. I think he was aware and fairly embittered about it.”

In the summer of 1974, after finishing joint 4th in the World Junior Championship, he finished first at the US Junior Chess Championship. He was in peak form, with a score of 5.5-1.5, against a very strong field. But the following year, he finished last, and in 1976 he failed to qualify. Peter still entered chess tournaments, but the promise he showed as U.S. junior chess champion had largely evaporated. Winston entered tournaments and was dominated by opponents whose ability was vastly inferior to his own, as previously exhibited . Sporadic flashes of brilliance couldn’t overcome losing streaks. On top of whatever prescribed medication Winston was taking, he apparently experimented with illicit drugs also. As he struggled to keep his life together, friends noted with alarm and deep concern that he abandoned any semblance of basic hygiene. He rarely bathed or slept.

In late 1977, as winter took hold in New York, Winston entered the Hunter College High School tournament and lost those nine games in succession. For a player rated as highly as Winston, this created a controversy. An administrator from FIDE ventured that the possibility of a player of Winston’s caliber losing all his games at the tournament was so statistically remote that instead the most likely scenario was that Winston had lost them intentionally. Officials refused to rate the tournament results. After losing his final series of games, Winston allegedly threw away all the medication he had been prescribed for his manic depression disorder.

Winston left the apartment before his mother or anyone else could do anything and wandered out into one of the most notorious blizzards to have ever struck New York. The storm shut down traffic from as far as Virginia all the way north to Maine. Winston was six weeks shy of his twentieth birthday. According to Weinman’s reporting, the NYPD has no record of anyone named Peter Winston disappearing, and his Social Security number has never seen any activity since.