We conducted a comparative textual analysis of tweets of users who believed their auditory hallucination came mind control weapons

❚❘ CONDITIONS THAT HINDER EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

A person’s interpersonal life is dependent on that person’s facility for making his or her thoughts, feelings, and needs known to others and on that person’s receptiveness to the attempts of others to share similar data with him or her. Communication, a multifaceted phenomenon, is the result of efforts by individuals toward this end. Communication can be considered in simplistic terms as the sending and receiving of messages, as both elements must be present for communication to take place. However, the fundamental transaction of message sent and received does not presuppose that communication has occurred. Often, it has only partially occurred or has been aborted entirely as a result of the circumstances surrounding the occasion when the communication attempt was made. These circumstances may be environmental, emotional, verbal-skill oriented, phenomenological, or resulting from a host of conditions present within the individuals who are attempting to relate.

An analogy may help to clarify the concept of the effect of circumstances on the effectiveness of sending and receiving messages.

People act more prosocially when they know they are watched by others, an everyday observation borne out by studies from behavioral economics, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. This effect is thought to be mediated by the incentive to improve one's social reputation, a specific and possibly uniquely human motivation that depends on our ability to represent what other people think of us. Here we tested the hypothesis that social reputation effects are selectively impaired in autism, a developmental disorder characterized in part by impairments in reciprocal social interactions but whose underlying cognitive causes remain elusive.

Autism and schizophrenia share a convoluted history. Before autism had its own entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, people with autism were diagnosed with childhood-onset schizophrenia. When autism finally got its own category in 1980, the criteria prohibited dual diagnoses of autism and schizophrenia, perhaps to steer clear of the previous confusion.

Autism and schizophrenia continue to be quite separate in terms of research and clinical care. Even though specialized clinics exist for each condition, they are largely siloed from each other. The following case studies illustrate the problem.