autistic adults more likely to experience hallucinations?

I understand completely. I'm sorry your friend had to suffer so badly.  I don't know why doctors are like that? Surely they entered the profesion to help people? 

LateToTheAlphaQuadrant said:

Every physical symptom I have is put down to my diabetes and everything else is put down to anxiety. 

Neurodivergence is not the only thing treated that way. I have a massively overweight friend and every doctor she saw for years put her digestive problems down to her weight. She wasn't treated seriously until she nearly died. She had to spend 7 months in hospital after a touch-and-go op and, even then, it took a few more years to sort out. Yes, they treat her seriously now, but her problems had nothing to do with her weight.

Honestly, I have suffered with visual hallucinations. When I was 15 and 24, but both times I was under an extream amount of stress. Apart from autism I have suffered from OCD since I was 4, had my first panic attack at 11, and currently have agoraphobia, OCD, GAD, Panic disoredr and various phobias. I know where it came from though, I had a very neglectful and abusive childhood, went on to have a relationship just the same. The trouble I find is that doctors are lazy. Every physical symptom I have is put down to my diabetes and everything else is put down to anxiety. 

That is very true and something I have direct experience with - it's easy to confuse symptoms when a diagnosis isn't present (for the individual and those around them).

I wonder if the studies that claim autistic people are three times more likely to be schizophrenic are including all the people who get misdiagnosed with mental health illnesses before someone realises they're actually autistic? It's very hard to get a diagnosis removed once you've been given it, even it later proves to be false, this is really bad for things like schizophrenia because unlike something like measles which you get, it runs its course and you get better, schizphrenia is life long.

I agree that it makes it easier to gaslight autistics.

That sounds like a study that should lead to further studies not be used as a fact and basis for treatment.

It also feels a little like gas-lighting and being told you are hallucinating and making things up, when it's just you have heightened regular senses and perhaps other keen senses that aren't understood but should be used for further study? Like those feeling like they are touched, has anyone actually studied that further to see if they were reacting to electro-magnetic fields or something like that? 

It just feels like it's an excuse to tell someone who is autistic, 'don't believe yourself, you are probably just making it up'? It doesn't feel good at all.

I wonder if the statistic also relates to studies that claim the population of autistic people are apparently 3x more likely to be schizophrenic?

Would still be a skewed stat as not all schizophrenics also suffer with hallucinations (or are autistic for that matter), but wouldn't be surprised if it's one of those stats that become true just by being quoted/bent out of shape. 

That's a very small sample of people.  Now, people are going to think that we all hallucinate.

Exactly my point, the questions asked of people in the research paper could be interpreted by autistic people as including real stimuli (noises or odours) that only they seem to detect, or that they detect long before anyone else, rather than them experiencing 'phantom' sensations from stimuli that do not objectively exist.

TheCatWoman said:

I'm one of htose irritating people who spend hours with a paint chart finding exactly the right shade or white

You too? Last year it was time to paint all the white walls in my new-build house and it took me 6 solid months finding the exact shades for each room. I spent a small fortune on testers.

The worst thing is that making such huge assumptions based on such tiny sample sizes are very common.

The voices in your head, all the commentary that goes along with doing stuff, or not, is called self talk, it's not an halloucination, it's how normal brains work, it would far more interesting to find people who don't have self talk.

I'm one of htose irritating people who spend hours with a paint chart finding exactly the right shade or white, a lot of people can't tell the difference but I can, this is a function of the rods and cones in my eyes. There are jobs for people like me, just as there are for people like me who have a "perfumiers nose", I can tell what scents are in perfumes, the same with food, I can taste something and more or less tell you whats in it. Not many people can do those things, and again they are highly sought after in some industries, but no one ever does a job advert for people who are really good at smelling things. Then some academic comes along and takes a tiny sample and labels it strange, unusual and weird, when its really not and is can be recognised, named and sought after in other professions

I am definitely highly sensitive in several ways, but I don't think that counts as a hallucination since what I'm experiencing is real, just heightened in intensity.

It seems like a very insubstantial hook to hang anything on. The sample size is very small indeed to enable confident extrapolation to large populations. Also, the reportage places the word 'hallucination' very prominently, but in the actual paper, hallucination forms a very small part of what are labelled 'anomalous perceptions'. For example, the 'hearing things more loudly' and 'smelling things others do not' components of anomalous perceptions, could merely reflect the higher sensitivity to certain stimuli that is a recognised aspect of autism. I hear and smell things that others do not, but my sensitivity is more acute than most, the sounds and odours exist, but other people notice them later than I do.

Given that sample size, I think the 'three times more likely' claim is quite the stretch, unless further research has been undertaken to confirm the hypothesis.

There are apparently 30 citations of that research paper, according to https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1085598043 — I'd hope that at least some of those have done more work on this.