Schizophrenia vs. autoimmune encephalitis

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share my story here of being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia for almost a year and eventually receiving a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s Encephalitis (which is a type of autoimmune encephalitis).

https://neuropsychamateur.com/2018/01/1 ... tis-story/

I want to spread this information in order to help people receive proper diagnosis as there could be other out there suffering from autoimmune disease without knowing it. I was treated with antipsychotics for more than half a year and did not respond to them. In fact I only got worse and had a suicide attempt. It was only after high levels of thyroid antibodies were found that I was referred to a neurologist and given a diagnosis.I have now been treated with high dose intravenous steroids and prednisone. I have definitely improved since the time when I was on olanzapine, completely non functional. I encourage others to test for thyroid and autoimmune conditions!

Research shows that autoimmune attack is behind some cases of schizophrenia:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... renia/amp/

Interesting, I hope they figure these out more in our lifetimes and develop better treatments.

That's extremely interesting- I'm OCD, and there's not only a fine line between that and schizophrenia at times (lots of articles on that floating around), but I think I may be a victim of PANDAS... wherein an infection causes the brain to be attacked by the immune system and causes OCD and other related things. I had an unidentified infection as a very young child, and from around that age, I became increasingly paranoid and fearful, OCD thinking, etc. It seems perfectly plausible that the same kind of causality could trigger something like schizophrenia.

I've read some articles where they state that at this point researchers are not certain what exactly schizophrenia is - it could actually be a number of diseases that exhibit similar symptoms. One of these diseases could be chronic autoimmune encephalitis and therefore these patients should actually be treated with immunosuppressants, and not antipsychotics.

When I was put on risperidone/olanzapine in 2015/16, I actually became worse and lost my job - I could not function, I could not put thoughts together. I felt so lethargic that I could not get out of bed and also I kept having panic attacks where I would become physically paralyzed. I did improve after I was treated with high-dose intravenous steroids. I also eliminated foods such as gluten, dairy, refined carbohydrates, and chocolate, which I think could be causing my autoimmune reactions. I am not 100% well but definitely thousand times better than I was in 2016 when I could no longer work. Now I am working full-time and taking some graduate courses. My Anti-Tg and Anti-TPO antibodies have drastically reduced and this correlated with reduction in my symptoms.