She’s working essentially three jobs and is extremely tired - is that really autistic burnout, or just regular exhaustion? I saw someone on TikTok who got diagnosed with ADHD because they felt unable to go to school, work a job, go to the gym, see friends, and still do necessary life stuff like cooking etc without running out of energy. At what point are we going to say that expecting people to do so much is not realistic and that it’s unethical to diagnose people with disorders just because they can’t keep up with the work of three people?
I've been hearing about "Autistic burnout" for years and I still have yet to see a single reason how it doesn't have 100% overlap with the concept of "burnout". In fact NYT gets all their recommendations from a book on burnout, which just goes to show you how autistic burnout and burnout are the same thing, they have 100% overlap, there isn't a difference, I have never heard a person talk about "autistic burnout" and didn't suggest we react to it in a way that was in any way different from regular burnout.<p>I also have a huge caution of making autism look like it has a lot of unique and special mental phenomena going on, literally anything that can cause autistic like symptoms can result in an autism diagnosis because it's a heterogenous diagnosis defined by others perception of you. There is if anything an especially diverse amount of reasons why autistic people would feel "burnt out" relative to most people.<p>The person in the article is working multiple jobs and when she breaks down her conclusion is she's a victim of her mental disorder. No that's stupid. What she experienced is simply what happens when you work multiple jobs, your body tries to protect itself from the damage by making you stop. There is nothing wrong or aberrant going on, what's wrong is peoples desire to live lifestyles that only hurt them and their self-perception that they're mentally disordered if they can't force themselves to do them.
I now wonder if I have had this but never knew because I didn't know I was Autistic. I had a job and was given a different position but I just stopped working after a while and was fired. Everything I tried to do afterwards just felt like a struggle.<p>I had assumed it was all just anxiety and depression but no treatment seemed to work.<p>Ten years later I get prescribed Ketamine for depression and things start to change. After reading some articles that talked about myths around autism I realised that I had been dismissing it as a possibility. Now that I have started talking about it with family, psychologist and psychiatrist it all starts to make sense.
I remember a time when autistic meant that a person was unable to interact with others outside of a tightly controlled and consistent environment. Now autistic is being used to label people that just need to 'veg out' at the end of the day.
Dead set, to any other Spergs out there struggling with sleep, get yourself some sublingual melatonin.<p>Absolutely life changing stuff, and a month's supply is under $20.<p>Just keep in mind it's a circadian rhythm stabiliser, and not a sedative. Take it at the same time every day, even if you're not going to bed (but are around home; never take it while out of home), and keep the dosage lower than you'd think.
"found that 72 percent of autistic adults scored highly for suicide risk, compared to 33 percent of the general population."<p>Wow these seem like high numbers for both groups.
I am pretty autistic in nature and I get super burned out. I have so many interests and I pursue them all simultaneously and I work seven days a week.<p>My tendency is to push myself far beyond my limits. When I get exhausted I start blowing up and yelling at people.
I'm somewhere on the autism scale, I've had multiple vague diagnoses but only one in particular from a neuropsych who attributed my specific form of ADHD (auditory) as likely caused by autism.<p>For me, rounding out the end of my 20's it feels like my energy / motivation is reaching an era of "wondering if I should press the gas as I'm careening towards a yellow light on the highway going about 78mph in a 60mph zone".<p>In the past, I've had trouble really laying out complex tasks in a way I can get them done, and encountered crippling procrastination and blocks to just starting things. Stimulants have helped but only marginally, it's quickly becoming kind of a existential crisis as friends have accomplished more than me and I largely attribute my lack of success to a lack of focus and well... just being unable to get that much done in any given day. Comparing to friends in my group who think I'm smart is the most painful. I definitely make below average as a dev in the US, and for two years of a roaring economy I did okay but feel like I've largely been passed by my friends / colleagues who can actually force themselves to try.<p>I'm starting to worry that as time goes on, I'm actually moving down the class ladder and it's starting to really scare me. Curious if anyone else has dealt with this? Preferably in a way that isn't just "accepting you don't know how to improve"?
I'm autistic, and I recently had a bout with burnout, really the first since I realized that I am autistic.<p>This time, it was three weeks of struggling before I realized I was burnt out, and after some minor adjustment I got through it just fine.<p>The trick is <i>knowing</i> that you're burnt out. One of the big features of autism is being unaware of or unable to interpret your own internal state. That makes it way, way too easy to slide all the way down the slippery slope of burnout until you're in such a bad place mentally and physically that there's no longer a way out. In previous jobs, this turned into a deep seething resentment for my workplace and either quitting or getting fired spectacularly. Last time it happened to me I ended up lashing out at everyone and everything around me. I lost my job, my friends, my boyfriend, and my house. I had to start a new life in a different city.<p>Being autistic and being unaware that you're autistic is actual hell. You know you're different, but you don't know why or how. You don't know that you have different needs from your peers, so you try to get by with what everyone else is doing, and it usually doesn't work. Endless frustration and self-doubt. You just can't <i>do</i> what everyone else seems to be able to do easily, it's like taking a test on a subject you've never heard of and everyone but you is given a textbook to work from.<p>One of the hardest and most important things is to be aware of yourself and your mind. It does things on its own and you're along for the ride most of the time, but you can steer it if you know how. Problem is you <i>don't</i> know how, and you don't know that you even <i>can</i>.
Leaving aside the impossibility of comparing one person's burnout to another's ("autistic people [...] experience it on a whole different level"), the second paragraph also works for depression:<p>> While most people undergo periods of burnout — physical, cognitive and emotional depletion caused by intense, prolonged stress — [depressed] people, at some point in their lives, experience it on a whole different level. [Depressive] traits can amplify the conditions that lead to burnout, and burnout can cause these traits to worsen. They may become unable to speak or care for themselves, and struggle with short-term memory. This harms their ability to perform well at jobs, in school or at home.
Is this title by the NYTimes a stealth dig at autistic people with their use of the wording The Battery's Dead, implying that autistic people are robots or machines of sort?<p>In other respects, this title is the result of liars and cheats who following the doctrine "bullshit baffles brains".<p>A perfectly legal way to abuse people which happens to make money.