Autistic Burnout

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I suffered from burnout last year. Horrid experiance, I felt on the edge of a great abyss that I i had fallen into would have lead to some kind of breakdown that I would never have been able to escape.

Luckily before it was too late I pulled the plug. But not before it cost me everything I had achieved up until that point. Thankfully I had a family to come back to and a second chance to start again. I don't think other people would have been so fortunate.

A very hard and costly learned lesson in work/life balance.

Last edited by Laz on 28 Feb 2011, 11:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

There's already been an article -- I think in the New York Times -- about children given ABA and thought "recovered" (simply because they'd been taught to pass, and in behaviorism autism is reduced to simply behaviors rather than causes) who suddenly flounder in adolescence. Most autistic people who've been through similar would have predicted that.

Big time. Our county has only just began to scratch the surface of how endemic the problem is of undiagnosed/misdiagnosed aspergers and the unneccesary burden this is on the mental health services

Hmm, interesting. I never went through this phase of trying to appear normal- except for when I was between the ages of 12 and 14 or so. I guess I just never gave a damn.

I have always been quite happy to be alone and by myself. I only feel burned out when I hang out with friends/acquaintances for a while then don't then go back to doing that. During that period of aloneness I like REALLY go into myself and seem to forget about how the rest of society functions. Then when I go back into it it is like I have to readjust myself.

Does anyone else know what i mean?

Yeah, this sounds similar to what happened with me (except I worked from home and took on too much of that work, and then went to school, and then the work again - but the consequences were similar). I don't mind being alone so much, but otherwise, yeah,



I think burnout can easily lead into depression, and I think it is easily misdiagnosed as depression, but I'm going to trust people know what they mean when they talk about this.

When my burnout happened (three times over a two year period), I kept trying to maintain the facade and keep up the same level of work I had been doing before I hit the wall. I may have looked depressed but I was pouring more and more energy into holding ground, or even losing it steadily. With each crash I lost things that I liked and enjoyed doing. I did not lose my enjoyment of those things, but rather the ability. A psych who saw me at the time might think that since I cut off my primary social outlet and stopped working that I was depressed. But I wanted to continue to do these things. When I could not do those things I tried school again, which again led to my spectacular crashing and burning, and again - I didn't want to stop school and I was even generally in a good mood once the panic attacks stopped, but I hit this wall.

After the third time I ended up just becoming more asocial and less able to function and still tried to maintain the facade despite I wasn't able to maintain anything else, and ended up spending, oh, years, basically doing nothing but my special interests. And I am lucky in this because I did not end up homeless or worse, although I did end up feeling pretty depressed, depression doesn't account for everything I experienced - and I doubt it does for Molecular_Biologist, either.



Thanks for this.




Fixed. I knew this, but for some reason I didn't think of you when writing the post. I had Apple_in_my_eye in mind when I wrote 19, as I'd just found something he'd written before I started the thread.



I'm going through this right now, and I much prefer it to the burnout experience.



I've found letting go of the facade - even as bad as it could be - leaves me with a lot more energy, and it seems to me that holding onto it actually made my depression worse because I didn't have much left to cope with the depression. I haven't caught much flack from family (whom I deal with a lot), but I did run into trouble when I visited friends last weekend. I don't think I have some of the social skills I even had last summer, and I think one of my friends was getting frustrated with me because of regular communication issues (I wasn't taking time to process everything she said to me before responding - I don't really enjoy that myself).



Probably. It seems like both could happen at the same time. You have a breakdown (burnout), get diagnosed with autism, decompensate because you now know why, and you have two things going on. I've gone through the burnout in the past and the decompensation now, if I am using the word in the same way you are? Please let me know if I'm wrong. I usually just go with dropping/letting go of the front/facade instead of decompensation.



I wasn't on anti-depressants much (every attempt at them failed badly) but the rest of this I can relate to. I certainly was treading water for years. Also what you said about not forcing yourself into difficult situations (although I admit I did this just this past weekend, and I wonder if I can do it again next month or even if I should even though it's a way to see friends, and I still like seeing friends).

I'm glad for the anecdotes, although I guess there aren't any more resources other than the one I linked? That seems to be a huge gap, given how many of us go through this.

I was in many ways very passive as a child. Not in terms of my personality, which is anything but passive. But in terms of the way I interacted with the world, both socially (I was absolutely textbook Lorna-Wing-style passive kid that way except for occasional forays into other situations) and otherwise.

I never exactly had "looking normal" as a goal, as I would never have been able to conceptualize that. But what I did have, was sort of... it felt like these forces outside of me would require me to do incomprehensible things for incomprehensible reasons. It's hard to explain in English because the concept is one that I don't think exists in this or most other languages. But anyway, these forces (coming from other people, but that's not how I experienced them) set certain requirements in my life, and I would do everything possible to meet those requirements, afraid of not doing so. But I was so oblivious to so many parts of the world that I didn't even know where these requirements were coming from, which is why it's hard to explain.

Anyway, so I threw all my energy into meeting these requirements. I did so with huge, enormous, unbelievable gaps in my knowledge and understanding of the world around me. I lacked much understanding of language, I lacked much understanding of the objects in my surroundings, things like object permanence would sporadically go missing (impermanent object permanence?!), just lots of massive gaps in my understanding. My native mode of understanding was through very concrete sensory patterns. And I used mostly that kind of understanding, coupled with "intellectual sprinting" sometimes into the conceptual world that I could never manage to stay in, to meet those requirements as much as possible.

The problem was, meeting the first requirements meant meeting even more stringent requirements. The more I did, the more people (or from my perspective, incomprehensible forces) wanted of me. They didn't realize entirely that they were wanting incredible feats from someone missing perceptions of the world that they didn't even know existed because they took them for granted so much. It was like building huge teetering towers out of blocks that were set down on very shaky foundations with massive holes in them. And the higher I built those towers, the higher these outside forces wanted me to add to them. All of these things being in areas that were about as far from my natural set of skills as possible.

So underneath all this required BS, I was a person who struggled with basic understanding of the world around me, of language, of recognizing objects, of all kinds of things, including things that most people don't even know they know, so they don't know it's possible not to know those things. I learned to parrot language at people in extremely plausible ways, by memorizing which sounds normally went after which other sounds. The actual meaning in language eluded me for a time longer than most people could have possibly been aware of. That's part of what I mean about sensory patterns. Instead of the idea of the words, I was almost always relying on the sound of the words. And I could, being hyperlexic, convert the sound of the words to the assorted squiggles-on-paper called writing, and back again. So I had many sources of words, and relied hugely on memory and sensory pattern. I didn't just do this with words, though. I did it with everything.

Anyway, eventually the towers they had me building came crashing down in a huge way. Instead of stopping and taking a look at what was going on, they decided I must just not be doing all these things because I wasn't challenged enough. What followed was a nightmare of being pushed far beyond the limits of nearly anyone's endurance intellectually, let alone someone with all these massive gaps in their understanding. And then I crashed so badly that there was absolutely no mistaking it anymore, and just about immediately got diagnosed. (I was 14 at that point, although the crashing had begun somewhere around 12. They just managed to misinterpret that so badly that they drove me into the ground until I attempted suicide, rather than letting things happen a little more gracefully.)

Anyway, none of that performing of what these requirements said was something that I had any understanding or control over. It had nothing to do with my personality, it had nothing to do with what I wanted, or what I did or didn't care about. It would have required a good deal more understanding than I had, to be able to understand and refuse what was going on.

It's extremely hard to explain what my world looked like at the time (or for that matter looks like now most of the time), to people (including many autistic people) who've likely always had understanding that I never had. It was like... there were all these sounds, sights, scents, other sensations, that were everywhere. They sort of flowed together in various ways. And that was practically the entire world. Ideas sometimes existed, but often as just these strange fleeting things that made no sense, or as what happened when I geared myself up into sprinting mode, ran up into the land of concepts, did a whole lot of incomprehensible juggling acts, and went (or fell) back down to where I usually lived.

This isn't a place where you know you have choices, or even understand what a choice is. It's a place where something happens and you react, without even consciously doing anything. Where outside forces act on you without your understanding what they are or where they come from, or what they mean. Meaning is an odd thing in this place. Meaning of the conventional kind is missing, but there are other kinds of meaning and understanding that are fully operational. But they're totally different from the usual kinds.

And that's how things usually looked from my perspective. And still look. And they look that way regardless of whether I "appear normal" or "appear autistic" at the time. Nothing in this place is changed by appearance, because appearance (of that sort) is not what this place is about. It doesn't register there. It's terribly frustrating to try to describe it though because the same word will take on opposite meanings when you try to use it, like "meaning" and "appearance". Everything comes back to these foundations. That's why I can't build very many skills, not on purpose anyway, nor in the usual manner. They go up in towers above this place, then they crash down because nothing that isn't rooted in this place ever lasts. (That's why I can seem to have to learn the same thing twenty times and only temporarily have the knowledge each time before it goes away again. Meanwhile something I'm not trying to learn can be happening in the background until suddenly a skill pops up out of nowhere.)

I went through a phase of burnout that led me to being diagnosed. I walked away from my career, was pressured into going back to school by my family, and then abruptly left that too. Burnout is very different than depression. In my case I wasn't feeling down or blue. I actually felt relief from escaping the things that exhausted me so much. I got tired of putting on an act for people and constantly having to emulate others.

Pretty much the same sequence here.
Yeah. With me the first lead to the second, and the answers came later.

I don't think I started trying to present "normal" until my late teens/early 20s when I got out on my own and started living with roommates who made it clear my ways were annoying and strange to them. I don't think I had a lot of self-awareness before then, and most of it was tied up in one single thing that I couldn't let go of or stop thinking about, and everything else went into my special interests, as putting energy into school became less and less effective over time.

I do think a lot of stuff in my childhood was comprehensible, although I couldn't say how much right this moment. I know I understood a lot of what I read (which was the focus of my attention), but I can't say I understood the people around me or what they expected of me. I remember being accused of lying so much I started lying because I thought the correct answer was to lie - but I knew what truth and lies were, as well. I remember explicitly trying to work out the point of insults and how to use them, and stopping when I was told that people doing like to be insulted.

I didn't realize I was fronting or whatever until very recently. I didn't think I was doing anything that other people didn't do. I just kept applying more and more and more ideas of who I should be on top of who I was, and this constant increasing effort weighed me down more and more. It took realizing that it wasn't actually me I was holding onto, and then letting go of all that. It took learning that this was a common strategy among autistic people for me to realize that I was spending energy on something that wasn't helping me and may have caused me a lot of harm.

So I've been questioning a lot of my self-awareness lately, because how could I not realize all these ways I functioned (or didn't function) were unlike neurotypical functioning?

Yes, this. Exactly. Thank you. It can look like depression but it is not depression. I had depression because I was continuing to try to perform at the same level and present the same front despite the burnout and I believe now that maintaining that front was responsible for much of my depression for years. I have other reasons for depression as well, but that it intensified so much after the burnout and trying to pretend the burnout didn't happen, you know?

The facade cracked the first time I touched a tuba. Since then, it has continued to fall away. Life is short. I wasted too much of mine being miserable. From here on out, I want to do things on my own terms. Once I stopped expending three quarters of my energy trying to look normal, I could do so much more.

Probably. It seems like both could happen at the same time. You have a breakdown (burnout), get diagnosed with autism, decompensate because you now know why, and you have two things going on. I've gone through the burnout in the past and the decompensation now, if I am using the word in the same way you are? Please let me know if I'm wrong. I usually just go with dropping/letting go of the front/facade instead of decompensation.


I think we are using the word similarly. Dropping the mask too far was in direct conflict with remaining employed and self-sufficient. I got stuck in the middle until the middle grew too thin, and gave way. Meanwhile, I'm still redecorating my brain - running into masks and facades needing to be kicked to the curb. I tell myself that I'm just doing spring cleaning early this year.

Feels good, doesn't it?

Yeah, I can relate to this. Kicking masks and facades to the curb and redecorating my brain? Absolutely.

I ran into the very interesting experience of not actually knowing who I am. I'm not sure what to make of that. It's weird how much of my identity I tied up in fronting, and trying to work out what I actually want and need without them is taking some work. It's worth it, though. I'd rather not know at all then believe I'm someone I am not. It probably helps that my depression has been much lighter (virtually nonexistent) in the past three months.

This is the point that I am at now. It is a little overwhelming for me. Recognizing these things has certainly eased my depression but I am still full of anxiety.

I think I'm going through this right now. The most difficult thing to deal with is people expecting me to do the things I've always done, because I've always done them, so why couldn't I do them now? And it's in my nature to believe them, but it causes a lot of anxiety. Why do I have an easier time believing the people who expect too much from me than the ones who say it isn't my fault? I wish I could let go of this once and for all and just relax. I'm really trying to do that, but with limited success.

Yeah - right now I am fortunate enough to not have a lot of expectations placed on me, so my anxiety's really low - although it was much higher before I even started looking into autism again. All things considered, I feel so much better - psychologically - than I have felt in a long time I don't even know how to describe it.

This one thing, though, is something I'm nervous about even mentioning to my therapist, let alone to family or NT friends. I think on some level I worry that it'd be easily be confused with a "lack of stable sense of self" (I have been misdiagnosed borderline, although no one who knows me believes it, so this is pure insecurity) and even though I don't feel any emptiness at all, I just worry about that coming up again as a possibility. Like, that it would be taken more seriously because of this. But since it's not a source of any kind of pain or worry, I'm not sure it needs to come up.