Ultra-rare gene variant appears as schizophrenia or autism in one island family

For most of a century, psychiatry has kept its disorders in separate rooms.

Schizophrenia in one.

Bipolar disorder in another.

Autism somewhere down a different corridor entirely.

The arrangement was orderly, and it organized clinics and insurance codes and the words that families carried home from the appointment.

It was also, as anyone who ever sat with real patients understood, a little bit of a fiction at the edges.

The diagnoses were tidy.

The family histories were not. ...