Burnout and Catatonia

Recognizing the overlaps between autistic burnout and autistic catatonia may help us to "pool" our knowledge about these disorder(s), in order to better understand how to prevent their onset. While clinicians writing about catatonia generally claim little knowledge of how and why catatonia might emerge, autistic people often have a very well articulated sense about what things might bring on autistic burnout. If in fact burnout and catatonia overlap, then it falls to reason that the autistic community has a well developed collaborative understanding of the natural causes and precursors of mild catatonia. These causes include major life changes, illness, and other well recognized stressors, just as clinicians have speculated, but they also include features that clinicians might be less prone to spot themselves. Autistic people, for example, are much more likely to focus on the demands of masking as a major source of autistic burnout. They are likewise much more likely to focus...

 In what follows I will begin the work of drawing a comparison between "autistic burnout" and "autistic catatonia," to show their quite suggestive similarities. My point here is not to make a conclusive case--I am not a medical researcher, or a public health researcher, and in any case I only thought of all these things this past weekend. It is only to provide food for thought, and perhaps some casual "aha!" moments, for other people, and maybe to provide a basis for my own and others' further reading and writing.  There are a number of suggestive connections between mild/moderate catatonic deterioration and what autistic people frequently call "autistic burnout." Both autistic people writing about burnout and clinicians writing about catatonia frequently discuss loss of speech, either partial or total: at times this might take the form of difficulty finding the right word (anomia), of slowed speech or of partial speech; at other times, the a...

Research into autistic catatonia is well-established; early work in the field had been published by the year 2000, and study of the topic has continued since. As recently as 2022, a major overview of the topic was published in the journal Nature--which, as many know, is one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, with a readership of three million unique readers per month. (The article is titled "Catatonia in autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities: a state-of-the-art review.") As a result, it is easy to find descriptions of autistic catatonia online.  Here are a few basic facts about autistic catatonia. (I should note that the following list is in a draft form and requires better attribution, which I will add soon): * Somewhere between 5% and 20% of autistic people are said to present with catatonic features at any given time. * Autistic catatonia may apparently be triggered by stress or trauma, but its onset does not always have an obvious cause. ...

My interest in the topic of Raymaker's research is profoundly personal. From 2018 to 2023, I experienced a series of episodes that I came to understand as autistic burnout, of varying degrees of intensity and persistence. Until 2022, I was self-diagnosed with autism but had not received a professional diagnosis, and neither I nor anyone else connected my symptoms of autistic burnout with autism. After a year of profound exhaustion, I began to undergo episodes of "brain fog" or semi-consciousness, which I eventually came to call dissociation, as a kind of personal shorthand. A friend of mine eventually called 911 for me (with my permission) and I was admitted to the hospital for a week, where they ruled out absent seizures, and then a wide range of mental health conditions, before sending me home without an answer. It was clear to the hospital's psychiatrists that I had PTSD, but for what reason no one could say. During the course of these five years, I strove to keep ...