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Category: Mental Health

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Post-COVID Transition Anxiety and Autistic Burnout

Post-COVID Transition Anxiety and Autistic Burnout

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For more than a year now, we’ve been dealing with the challenges of the global COVID-19 pandemic.  This has had a devastating impact, both in general and in particular on many disabled people. Most obviously, COVID-19 has killed millions of people worldwide, and neurodivergent communities have been disproportionately impacted.  The death toll among people with intellectual disabilities in residential group homes and institutional settings has been catastrophically high.  Unfortunately, discrimination against neurodivergent people – again, particularly people with intellectual disabilities…

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Supports, Burdensomeness, and Dependence

Supports, Burdensomeness, and Dependence

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Research suggests that volunteering and helping others can be beneficial for the mental health of the helper.  This effect is believed to stand above and beyond any tendency for those with better mental health to be more likely to volunteer for things in the first place. Conversely, dependence on others and being a recipient of help can be bad for mental health.  Indeed, a major component of the dominant interpersonal theory of suicide suggests that those who perceive themselves as…

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Self-Determination, Control, and Mental Health

Self-Determination, Control, and Mental Health

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I seem to have a bit of a self-determination theme running through this blog now.  I’ve written about self-determination a fair bit, and most particularly in the context of childhood, because I feel like children in general have relatively little freedom to exercise control over their lives and those with disabilities even less. Today, I thought I might take our discussion of the importance of self-determination in another direction – mental health (which I suppose is another thing I do…

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Burnout and Expectations

Burnout and Expectations

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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…

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Pathology and Motivation to Access Supports

Pathology and Motivation to Access Supports

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In previous posts, I’ve criticized the “pathology paradigm” of autism.  I believe that there are a number of problems with this paradigm, but I always find myself returning to one that I find especially glaring: when we describe autism as pathology, when we use the language of deficit and disorder, we’re very openly suggesting to autistic people – a marginalized population with high vulnerability to mental health challenges – that there is something fundamentally wrong with them.  Autistic people are…

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Mental Health and Adult Outcomes

Mental Health and Adult Outcomes

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Today, the community of autistic adults is in a state of crisis.  Many of us are unemployed.  Moreover, those of us who do have jobs tend to have marginal, precarious experiences of employment: we are often hired in under-paying jobs for which we are probably over-qualified, and many of us go from one such job to another in a continuous, revolving door.  Many of us are only able to secure part-time work. Nor are our challenges limited to the domain…

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How Not to Treat Sensory Anxiety

How Not to Treat Sensory Anxiety

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Autistic sensory sensitivities are closely related to anxiety.  I hope this isn’t a terribly controversial point.  There are now several studies showing the existence of an association between sensory symptoms and anxiety (e.g., Mazurek et al., 2013; Uljarević et al., 2016).  Furthermore, it just makes sense that sensory sensitivities would be associated with anxiety.  When my sensory sensitivities were really bad, they caused genuine distress.  Naturally, I didn’t enjoy being overwhelmed by my environment and experiencing sensory distress.  Therefore, I…

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Rational Paranoia

Rational Paranoia

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Dealing with autistic adults and adolescents can sometimes be difficult.  I know many of us can be quick to take offense, even where none was intended – which is rather curious when you think about it, because autistic children tend to start out being socially naïve.  At some point, these naïve children can become nervous, reactive adults.  Why is that?  It seems kind of like a transformation from one extreme to the opposite extreme. Well, the problem with naïveté is…

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Theatre and Autism

Theatre and Autism

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For a long time, I was part of a theatre group for autistic people.  I joined when I was 13 and I remained part of the group in some capacity or other for a total of ten years (although for the final year I was only irregularly attending meetings as a substitute instructor).  I suppose it’s fairly obvious I wouldn’t have stayed for such a long period – indeed, from the beginning of my teenage years until I was finishing…

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Mental Health in the Mainstream Schools

Mental Health in the Mainstream Schools

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Today, I’ll be continuing my assault on the idea that everybody should be forced to attend all-inclusive mainstream schools with a sixth post on the subject.  We’ve already heard how autistic students in the mainstream can be bullied and isolated.  Furthermore, I’ve argued that the mainstream does little to help us learn social skills and instead probably delays social learning.  We’ve also discussed how educational placement decisions are made and we’ve discussed why all of this is so critically important….

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