He might be 'burning out,' from compensating too hard too continuously. That doesn't necessarily mean he's going to end up permanently severely 'regressed,' though. He might just need to learn to better manage his resouces; such as setting aside some time for absolute solitude and etc, instead of trying to act 100% normal every second (if he does).
I.e. I remember reading a married AS guy once saying his routine was to come home from work, not say much to his family, go in the bedroom and close the door, and space out on the ceiling for an hour, to 'decompress'. Then he'd get up an interact with his family.
The below is an excerpt of a really good article he & you might want to read. It's by Amanda Baggs (aka Anbuend on WP):
"Help! I Seem to be Getting More Autistic!"(link)
Quote:
Burnout
Burnout, long-term shutdown, or whatever you want to call it, happens generally when you have been doing much more than you should be doing. Most people have a level to which they are capable of functioning without burnout, a level to which they are capable of functioning for emergency purposes only, and a level to which they simply cannot function. In autistic people in current societies, that first level is much narrower. Simply functioning at a minimally acceptable level to non-autistic people or for survival, can push us into the zone that in a non-autistic person would be reserved for emergencies. Prolonged functioning in emergency mode can result in loss of skills and burnout.
With some diseases with long-term effects (and I am not suggesting that autism is a disease), it is the people who tried to ignore the long-term effects and "act normal" who often burn out, probably because they are drawing on emergency reserves to do so. There is a high chance that autistic people who attempt to ignore the fact that they are autistic and act like non-autistic people are subject to the same kind of burnout, or even autistic people who push themselves too hard in general without trying to look normal.
The danger here may be obvious: It may be the people most capable of passing for normal, the most obvious "success stories" in the eyes of non-autistic people (some of whom became so adept at passing that they were never considered autistic in the first place), who are the most likely to burn out the hardest and suddenly need to either act in very conspicuously autistic ways or die.
To the outside world, this can look as if a forty-year-old perfectly normal person suddenly starts acting like a very stereotypically autistic person, and they can believe that this is a sudden change rather than a cumulative burnout eventually resulting in a complete inability to function in any way that looks remotely normal. The outside world is not used to things like this, and the autistic person might not be either. They might look for the sudden onset of a neurological disorder, or for psychological causes, and receive inappropriate "treatments" for both of these, when really all that has happened is massive and total burnout.
This can also look much less spectacular, or be much more gradual, and it can happen in any autistic person. Sometimes, with more supports or a change in pace or environment, the skills lost come back partially or totally. Sometimes the loss in skills appears to be permanent — but even that can be somewhat deceptive, because sometimes it is simply that the person can no longer push themselves far beyond what their original capacity was in the first place.
Sometimes this kind of burnout is what leads adults to seek diagnosis and services. Unfortunately, many service systems that would otherwise support people in their own homes, cater only to people who were diagnosed in childhood, and will look at someone with a very good neurotypical-looking track record of jobs, marriages, and children with suspicion. They need to be made more aware of this possibility, because there's a high chance that an adult in this situation could end up jobless, homeless, institutionalized, misdiagnosed, given inappropriate medical treatment, or dead.
People training autistic children to look more normal or refusing to tell their children they are autistic also need to be aware of this possibility, because this is the potential end result ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years down the road. This is one of the biggest reasons for teaching us to learn and grow as ourselves, accounting for our strengths and weaknesses rather than as counterfeit neurotypicals.
CLICK HERE FOR WHOLE ARTICLE
30 Mar 2009, 6:49 pm
