u/Franco_Aspieschi

This question was motivated by reading this post^(1), whose OP's attitude has a lot in common with mine. As my nickname says I am aspie, and as I have already posted^(2), for me being schizoid without anhedonia is not part of the problem but part of the solution. This can be easily understood by having a cursory look at aspies' posts in r/aspergers expressing so much suffering from not being able to establish or keep relationships, mainly of the romantic kind.

Clearly even being a schizoid without anhedonia may entail problems, mainly due to other people's expectations on you, such as workmates inviting you to join them for a drink after office, or relatives asking why you do not have a girlfriend/boyfriend and marry, and so on.

But apart from these problems arising from the external environment, it is clear that the subjective quality of life of anhedonia-free schizoids is radically different from that of anhedonia-laden ones. Honestly, if God offered me to live hundreds of years with full physical and mental health and functionality while still being aspie & schizoid, I'd take it.

Which gives rise to two questions:

First the one in the title: Do anhedonia-free users have Schizoid Personality DISORDER or just Schizoid Personality TYPE?

Then, if the answer is "TYPE", a logically subsequent one: Should anhedonia-free users get the heck out of this subreddit and leave it to users who truly have Schizoid Personality DISORDER?

PD: After posting I learned that rule 8 "No purist attitudes" already answered the second question with "NO".

Links

1 https://www.reddit.com/r/Schizoid/comments/1vnqivu/i_love_being_schizoid/

2 https://www.reddit.com/r/Schizoid/comments/1vf3ftq/on_the_issue_of_asd_and_spd_coexisting_in_the/

First an academic question: is the issue of whether one person can have both ASD and SPD already settled in official psychiatry?

I pose the question at the academic level because at the practical level the issue was settled for me in 2011 on the basis of overwhelming direct empirical evidence (my case) plus a theoretical layered model of personality profile versus neurodiversity profile: personality, including disorders, being at the software level and neurodiversity being at the hardware level. To put it shortly, if your hardware (most probably your brain wiring) is atypical, it is just to be expected that the software that will run on that hardware will be atypical to some extent too.

(To note, the fact that the possibility of copresence of ASD and SPD was discussed at all was quite remarkable, because the possibility of copresence of ASD and other personality disorders such as AvPD or OCPD was always taken for granted.)

Secondly, I'd like to share an analogy of the functional (not etiological!) relationship between ASD and SPD that I realized at that time. For that, let's hypothesize the existence of Nocturnoid Personality Disorder (NPD), such that people who have NPD prefer to be awake at night and sleep during daytime, and actually dislike being exposed to sunlight. (Insert vampire joke here.)

With that hypothesis, the analogy is: NPD is to albinism like SPD is to autism/Asperger's. That is, just as for an albine to have also NPD would not be part of the problem but part of the solution, for an aspie to have also SPD (particularly its anhedonia-free flavor which is the most common in aspies) would not be part of the problem but part of the solution.