What do you think causes meltdowns?

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Personal example from last night:

Flash drive in my car (stores music and dashcam video) got corrupted somehow. So I went on my computer to reformat it and fix it. Easy enough job, took like five minutes.

I turn off my computer and pull the flash drive out. Somehow I pinch it and it goes flying - underneath my computer tower.

So now I have to unplug everything and pull my computer tower out to get to my flash drive. Ughhh, fine.

I pull the tower out, get the flash drive, go to the car and plug it in. Everything works. Yay! I go back inside and plug my computer back in. I felt like doing some web browsing so I turn it back on. Computer doesn’t boot and gives me a beep code instead.

Great, something became loose when I moved the tower.

So I unplug everything again, open the computer, and reseat my RAM. Doesn’t work. I reseat my graphics card. Doesn’t work. At this point I’m about this close to losing my s**t. I literally take everything out and put it all back in one item at a time, doing a separate boot for each individual item to make sure nothings gone bad.

That works. No more beep code. Phew

Close up computer. Plug it in. Start it up. Now I have no video.

Great. The BIOS reset the video output when I pulled the graphics card.

All I want is to browse cat pictures on Reddit! It took a lot to not meltdown at this point. But I calmed myself down and started troubleshooting the video.

So now I check each DisplayPort output. My tower has 5 of them between the motherboard, graphics card and some random USB type C PCI card I have in there that has DisplayPort for some reason. Nothing.

Check HDMI output. But I need a cable for that, so after looking around the house for a bit I decide to just grab one from my Nintendo Switch.

Thankfully HDMI works! So I go in, change output to the DisplayPort that I want, plug my Nintendo switch back in to the TV and problem solved!

Finally back to where I started - 2 hours later. All because I wanted to format a flash drive.

I see two key elements.

1. A present level of frustration. If already high, it may not take much of a trigger.

2. How quickly or suddenly a trigger event occurs.

I think its a combination of stress and overstimulation.
As a child I had meltdowns quite a bit. (The self harming type) and it usually happened when in a stressful situation. Where visual and auditory stimulation was abundant. School was the worst cause of it.

first hand knowledge ,that locking your child in a closet and leaving them in there,during a meltdown does great damage to a Aspies sense of family .And sense of understandings

That is insane. I can relate in some ways.
I hope you manage these authorities with appropriate boundaries and distance.

I know aspies don't like sympathy because it can be manipulative and impractical, so I won't say "I'm sorry that happened to you".

Brain Inflammation, imho

A lack of sleep and/or experiencing discrimination can trigger me into mental distress.

my sister, asking too many questions, making me so overwhelmed, making me cry, being overloaded & want to screem.