Hi Functioning Aspies with a Breakdown in Mid Adulthood?

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I feel the same way. I started burning out when I was eleven or twelve. Have gradually lost a lot of things since then. Although honestly I think my brain was in a way just streamlining, dropping out everything I was bad at until it was impossible rather than just very hard, and keeping what I was good at even though those skills were underrecognized by others.

Apparently some kind of burnout happens in around 1/6-1/3 of autistics in adolescence (from a couple outcome studies), and the one that said around a third said that half of that third regained the skills, so possibly the other study didn't count it if you regained them. Wish I had the studies handy but they are in a stack of paper somewhere.

I suspect the numbers are even more if you count adulthood.

Unfortunately some people insist that autism just gets easier with each year. I always wondered on what planet.

Oh and I wrote that thing on "help I seem to be getting more autistic".

In that section of the book by Lawton, she basically said, "an excellent diet, avoiding sugar, and meditating" is the key to avoiding burnout. The adrenal glands need to be naturally supported and replenished.

More than half of her book Asperger Syndrome: Natural Steps Toward a Better Life for You or Your Child is devoted to nutritional advice.

Naturopathy Online was her website. Dr. Juniper Martin has taken it over. On January 27, 2010 Suzanne C. Lawton passed away at age 54 from endo-metrial cancer.

I am glad you did- apparently it has hit a note with a lot of people!

I developed a good friendship with another Aspie women about 20 years younger than me. Your story is very familiar to hers, except she did manage to become a registered nurse. She didn't last long with her career because the stress of trying to fit in was leading her towards a lifestyle beyond her ability to maintain. She quit. Both she and I have settled with our own families. I am only now learning how to be content. She has a long way to go. It is a long, hard, and difficult road for Aspies living in an NT world.

I never got to establish a career in spite of graduating college with good grades. I can empathize with every Aspie's story about how he or she is (and always will be) a target throughout life. Bullies never grow up. They just become more sophisticated and clever at doing things that make themselves feel bigger, better, and more powerful.

As more adults become aware of being Aspies and unite with others, the better this world will become for us. Generally speaking, a friendship between two Aspies is something far more powerful than one between two NTs.

Adrenal fatigue is not a real diagnosis. It's a false explanation for real symptoms, which is dangerous because then you're getting the wrong treatment or failing to get the right treatment. If it were real it would show up on standard bloodwork like genuine forms of adrenal insufficiency.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/adrena ... ue/AN01583

Chronic stress does lots of things to the body and brain but that is not one of them.

I think the real answer is closer to a phenomenon in post-polio syndrome. The people who get it the worst are the ones who pushed away their polio the hardest and had to achieve anyway.

When I was elevenish I began to burn out. When I was twelve it showed up in my schoolwork. Because I had tested as gifted age five (though never again) people thought I was bored and put me into a special accelerated program. I did even worse so when I was thirteen they put me in high school a year early. I started having massive meltdowns in class much like when I was a lot younger so I was pulled out and homeschooled. I had been freezing up a lot and other things so I was sent to a neurologist and neuropsychologist who noted I had no friends and seemed unemotional. When I was fourteen I was sent to college where I mostly tried to take art classes because that skill still existed. By halfway through the year I was suicidal and doing drugs to cope. When I got home and stopped doing drugs the stress came back tenfold and I attempted suicide. I got out of the mental institution fast because of witnessed abuse of me. Then I got put back in another one really fast. The doctor there took a developmental history and diagnosed me with autism. By that point some of my doctors even referred to me as low functioning. Then I also got a lot of misdiagnosed in psychiatry land that I dutifully cooperated with making them seem real because I thought I had to. By early adulthood the periods of inability to speak and difficulty moving had stretched to cover nearly the whole day and I was diagnosed with a parkinsonlike movement disorder that some autistic people get (and that some who get it have made the same comparison to postpolio).

I now never speak and use a motorized wheelchair both from that condition and others. I have lost at least 75 IQ points since that early diagnosis of gifted (although I think part of that is because I read early which inflated my scores but didn't progress much further in that or other departments by the time I was retested at 22, things look much different between 5 and 22). I never pass as nonautistic unless people mistake all my oddity for being a purely physical condition. I can never seem to avoid people calling me low functioning because I have lost every single mask I used to hide stuff with and because some expected skills never appeared, and of course having lost skills. I scored near the floor of the test of adaptive functioning they had a staff person fill out five years ago. And my physical health has crashed along with everything else.

The good news though is that I am happier than I was when I was constantly being asked to overperform. I have been able to stop and find myself and stop pretending to be whatever anyone else expected of me. I can't physically tolerate the strain of trying to pass, and learned that I didn't even as much pass, as other people saw my autistic traits but ascribed them to something else. I am very much more in touch with my strengths and weaknesses. And my life is overall better than it used to be despite it not measuring up at all in terms of the status symbols of my culture. I know I can never be who people wanted or expected so it's easier to let it go.

But seriously that part where every time things were hard, people made them harder?

Yeah, for me I burned out at about 30, though started to run on empty about age 26ish....

Im actally dxed as mild AS but I have these accompanying strange neuro problems, such as hyperacusis, hyper peripheral vision, weird visual tics, also constant stress from trying to move my fine-dyspraxic muscles...

So I think my burnout is of a different nature to many but it is still pretty bad.

I really wish I would have known this in my early 20s. I think it would have prevented a lot of failures. I wouldn't have hated myself so much.

I had my first breakdown around 21. I was admitted to the mental health unit. Then in my mid twenties when I was a year into grad school I had another breakdown and ended up quitting. This led to a series of breakdowns within a year. Now I'm on SSI/SSDI. I don't want to be on this forever, but when you are on meds, you need the insurance.

Started for me when one too many bad things were happening in my life, around the ages of 20 to 23.

Well, the normal stuff from high school made me leave the place due to the pain, but I got better from that when I left the place. I haven't gotten better from the aforementioned life thingies (well, I'm better than what I was, a lot better, but I'm not like I was before then).

Someone here said, wisely, that the social world is like an ocean in which we Aspies have to keep swimming to keep our head above the water but NTs just float without a care. Eventually we get tired or are hit by a wave, then we sink - we can be doing OK for along time, but eventually it gets too much for us.

For me, it got too much by my late 20s and I had a breakdown in 2000.

My only guess as to what the answer to that question is is that it's human nature for people to thrive on picking apart and devouring (i.e., make use of for self-gain) what they can when they can. Some are conscious of what they're doing and others are not. None in either one of the two groups though would admit it.

Shizophrenia breaks usually out at mid adulthood, the interessting factor is that its shares many secondary charactristics with autism spectrum dissorders so asperger could veil it when some of you shizophrenic charateristics get attributed to asperger....

Well, that's one WebDoc's opinion, and he may be correct in that it's not a recognized PHYSICAL diagnosis. However, I think the very existence of this thread and the fact that nearly every single poster responding thus far has had the exact same experience indicates that 'Adrenal Fatigue' as used to describe constant unnaturally high stress and anxiety levels, does in fact lead to (repeated) emotional breakdowns and incapacitation, which would very much establish it as a psychological phenomenon.

He's not taking into account this subset of individuals who already exist in a condition unlike the typical patient. Those of us for whom low grade anxiety is the daily norm and high anxiety is not just frequent, but a nearly constant, endlessly looping cycle. 'Adrenal Fatigue' may not seem a valid diagnosis for a neurotypical patient, apart from PTSD, but the notion that a constant feed of high adrenaline levels over months and years would cause breakdowns and burnouts seems a no-brainer to me.



What he's describing is IMHO not at all what we've been discussing here, and doesn't seem to be what Lawton was referring to. He jumped immediately from the term 'Adrenal Fatigue' to 'Adrenal Insufficiency', completely ignoring the very concept of FATIGUE. What causes me to completely breakdown is not some slight fluctuation in a hormone - it's weeks and months of intense mental and emotional stress, from being in a daily state of moment-to-moment anxiety. Hormones don't cause that, my neurological social dysfunctions cause it.

They just need to leave the "adrenal" out of it; it hasn't got anything to do with the adrenals.

A friend of mine died of Addison's Disease a few years ago. She had it since she was a teenager and the cortisone that kept her alive all those years did a lot of damage to her body and her mind. Here's link about adrenal fatigue. Her adrenal glands were non functioning and could not produce cortisol or adrenaline.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/adrena ... ue/AN01583

I am getting the same advice from others as well. My husband, to my knowledge anyway, isn't having affairs but he is constantly critical, tells me I'm selfish and I need to change, berates me for my inability to communicate emotionally, and has said I'm "fatally flawed". About a year ago he had a change in attitude where he won't even hug me or hold my hand, tells me I screwed up a perfectly good relationship with "my problems", etc. He'd never threaten suicide, he's too egotistical and scared of death for that, but I don't know how much more of his hatefulness I can handle. My cognitive functioning is my career, and if I lose even a good portion of those I'll be screwed.

~Kate

That's an interesting way to think of it -- streamlining. It did seem to me that as my ability to do certain things went away that what I was left with was a more natural/native way of thinking/processing. Not so good for my jobs or school or making breakfast, but a certain kind of stress went away as certain kinds of thinking became too expensive. I.e. as a teen I had an internal monologue, but that faded away, which quieted my mind down a lot (which was good).

(I still find reading difficulty very frustrating, though, and I'd cure that in a second if I could.)



Hmm, sounds like the same planet where everybody has a PhD and a job. Moo.



I like that article a lot. It was big relief to read someone describe burnout (and also now changes as I get older). Seems to help a lot of other people as well. I have bunches of posts with links to it in them.