Today, the vast majority of researchers, clinicians, and professionals in the autism world don’t know about autistic burnout.  Autistic burnout is an idea that comes from autistic adults, and given how little contact there is between autistic adults and the community of researchers supposedly dedicated to learning more about autism, most researchers will never have had a chance to learn about it.  Indeed, as far as I’m aware, the only people investigating autistic burnout from a research perspective are Dora Raymaker and the wonderful participatory researchers from the AASPIRE Partnership.  Whenever I bring up the idea of autistic burnout to a neurotypical person, I almost inevitably have to explain what it is.

In case you’re not familiar with autistic burnout, I’ll define it now before I go farther.  Autistic burnout is the consequence of accumulating stress and exhaustion from trying to constantly cope as an autistic person in an overwhelming, often hostile world.  As autistic people, we are expected to camouflage our autistic features and appear more neurotypical; to pretend constantly, all the time, that you are someone you are not is exhausting.¹ We are frequently subjected to sensory overloads and expected to push through them and continue functioning; to have to continuously cope with overwhelming sensory input is exhausting.  Basically, autistic people have stressful lives, and coping with this stress is exhausting.

This accumulated fatigue not only leaves people tired and struggling to find motivation to complete basic tasks, but it has spiralling consequences across many areas of life.  Mental health can decline;² anxieties can worsen; sensory sensitivities can become more severe.  Tasks that would once have become easy become difficult.³

I have some personal experience with autistic burnout.  Years ago, back when I was in middle school, the social and sensory demands of my environment were beyond my own ability to cope.  Over the course of the school year, my grades would drop, I would become increasingly stressed, and I would start to experience psychosomatic illnesses as my body desperately tried to get some respite from the demands of the school environment.

When I started homeschooling, these problems immediately disappeared, because while the middle school was an environment that fit me poorly, the homeschooling context was an environment that fit me very well indeed.

This is why autistic people often say that autistic burnout is a reaction to excessive demands or expectations in the environment.  However, there’s a very important clarification that needs to be made here.

As I’ve written before, it’s all too common these days for people to have very low expectations of autistic people in some ways.  People don’t always expect us to be able to make important choices for ourselves, so they make the choices for us.  People don’t always expect us to be able to complete tasks ourselves, so they do things for us.  People don’t always expect us to be able to thrive, to participate in society – to reach our potential, whatever that might be.  When we feel that others around us don’t expect us to succeed, we can internalize this and come to believe in our own helplessness.  And if we don’t expect to succeed, why would we try?  These low expectations are a self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecy leading to low achievement and failure.

Now, what on Earth do I mean when I say on the one hand that we expect too much of autistic people, and then a second later, I turn around and say the exact opposite?

I promise I’m not just being contradictory for the fun of it!  These are actually two very different kinds of expectations.  Expecting autistic people to appear and behave exactly like neurotypicals – to look neurotypical, to fit in, to shrug off sensory overloads like they were nothing, and so forth – is what leads to burnout.  It’s impossible; it’s unrealistic; worst of all, it’s completely unnecessary.

We should instead set high expectations for autistic and neurodivergent people to reach their own personal potential in areas like academic achievement, employment, and autonomy and independence.  Within the “zone of proximal development,” the area of development just beyond a person’s current ability, the area that challenges us to learn but doesn’t overwhelm us, we need to allow autistic people opportunities to learn new skills and to make our own choices.⁴ Wherever that area might be.

Autistic people don’t deserve to be surrounded by people who blithely assume that we can do things exactly like a neurotypical person, and when we fail, then assume that we can’t succeed at all.  We deserve to be surrounded by people who understand our differences and allow us to follow our own paths, but who will still believe that we can succeed and thrive.

1. This is most true of of “surface camouflaging,” which relies heavily on conscious effort and sheer willpower.  “Deep camouflaging,” which is based on practicing social skills until they become automatic, may not be quite so exhausting as surface camouflaging, but even a deep camouflager will probably find social interaction more tiring and stressful than most neurotypicals.
2. In fact, it’s entirely possible that autistic burnout is itself a mental health condition.  There’s actually an old psychological diagnosis (still used in some parts of East Asia) that is based on physical symptoms, such as fatigue: the diagnosis of neurasthenia.  It’s possible that neurasthenia is more or less the same thing as major depression, but that it manifests in a social context where mental health itself is more stigmatized, so that mental health problems present as physical health problems.  Autistic people can often have some degree of alexithymia, meaning that we aren’t always in touch with our feelings.  Could autistic burnout be a type of depression akin to neurasthenia, where the presentation is more physical than mental, brought on by the hopelessness of constantly struggling to exist in a hostile world, with no end in sight?  Or is autistic burnout an entirely unique challenge, a direct consequence of excessive fatigue alone?  Could it be a mixture of both?  Unfortunately, we don’t know the answers to these important questions, because researchers – with the notable exception of AASPIRE – haven’t studied autistic burnout.
3. This loss of skill and ability is so severe that some people refer to “autistic burnout” as “autistic regression.”  Unfortunately, this offers yet another illustration of the gulf between researchers and autistic adults, because researchers use the term “regression” to refer to a loss of abilities (especially language) in very young children (like, toddlers).  This kind of regression is probably an entirely different phenomenon – probably much more biological and much less related to mental health.  The fact identical terms are sometimes used for these two distinct phenomena reflects the size of the gulf between researchers and autistic adults.
4. And sometimes people will make the wrong choices or struggle to learn, but that’s no different from what happens to neurotypicals, and our response to such a failure should be no different than if it was made by a neurotypical.