Autistic spectrum disorders and schizophrenia in the adult psychiatric setting: diagnosis and comorbidity.

Abstract

Adult psychiatric service users with ASDs are often misdiagnosed. This could be in part due to the fact that adult psychiatrists are not familiar with the diagnosis of ASDs. The high prevalence of psychotic symptoms in this sample is likely to depend on the specific setting of the study, i.e., that people with more severe forms of ASD than those typically followed-up in the national health service were reaching our public inpatient and private outpatient services. The high comorbidity rate between ASDs and schizophrenia could be related to shared neurobiology, but also to arbitrary restrictions imposed by current diagnostic systems.