I'm in the middle of an autistic shutdown. or am I?

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Hello (rather halp!!1)

I feel like I have some sort of catatonia and severe dissociation.

needed to call and go to many many people of different offices to get on disability again, which didn't work. They are sending me around from office to office and everyone says someone else is responsible, while they say the former is actually responsible. Who cares. I don't right now. Also went to my GP for some stuff and that gave me the complete spaarrtaaaa kick.

Right now I feel like I'm curling up into fetal position, everything seems unreal and broken, and I literally feel that I've arrived somewhere (home?) after years of travel and everything is so unfamiliar and generally everything inside and outside me 1. doesn't make sense or 2. is total s**t.

I'm almost sure this is a shutdown because my routine was broken since 2 days and I had to talk to too many seriously obnoxious people who obviously don't even try to act like they want to help.

I was just wondering whether shutdowns only happen in HFA and Asperger's folk, or do they also happen in other stuff like depression or bipolar or Schizophrenia or whatever? I mean schizophrenics get catatonic I know but afaik they just go into catatonia and never come out and need to get hospitalized and it looks pretty different than what I'm experiencing (I actually mean the visual presentation of a catatonic schizophrenic, have seen some people with it). Maybe I should ask on schizophrenia.com too. no not really. It was hard enough to type this s**t here.

Cheerz
omid

Hi, Omid. Your situation sounds like how my daughter gets when she encounters a snag in her government benefits. Those agencies CAN be extremely complicated to navigate, and being told contradictory things can be mind-blowing to an aspie. Our need for order and rules gets thwarted when hearing contradictory things.

What helps my daughter is if I or her social worker go step by step through the necessary paperwork and procedures until the needed result is obtained.

It might be a special, extreme case of being flooded with helplessness feelings, shutting down any motivational and executive function circuits in the brain.

Try self-soothing techniques (soft music, warm bath, dim lights, napping, whatever works for you) and also get help from someone not so easily overwhelmed - family, friend, or social worker at one of these agencies. I hope you feel better soon!

Hi Omid,
I would also find it hard or nearly impossible to keep things together in such circumstances.
I can't add much to the wise words of BeaArthur.
Having a figurative backstop in your life (friend, family, even a very good GP) is of great necessity in such a situation. Try recovering or at least regain some energy by sleeping, or whatever activities that calm you down and when you're ready, take up the fight again! You must have fought more battles successfully in the past, so I wish you all the best.

I'm not good at comforting people, just hope your situation improves soon. Don't give up!

I can't comment on the other medical conditions (I have Aspergers), but what you describe sounds very much like the same shutting down experience that I have when I am totally overwhelmed. I will become very detached from the world around me (derealisation) and extremely fatigued; my sensory sensitivities become much greater; my executive functioning gets much worse; and I often lose access to knowledge and skills which normally come easily (e.g. speech, literacy, numeracy etc.) This is sometimes called a "partial shutdown", in contrast to a "total shutdown", which is much more like complete catatonia (which sometimes happens to me instead of, or after, a meltdown.)

Bea's advice is good, and I would add just one thing to it. Once in that shut-down state, I really can't function normally at all until I have had plenty of rest with the minimum of communication and sensory stimulation. I don't know of any other way to recover or to speed the recovery, because that rest is the precise thing that my brain needs. So, I think this is definitely a case of prevention being better than cure. Wherever I can, I try to anticipate situations that might overload me so that I can seek help before trying to tackle them, as once a shut-down has started, there's little I can do but to ride it out until it passes - I couldn't ask for help even if I wanted to at that stage.

I hope you recover soon, and that your battle with welfare turns out well in the end.

I get like this a lot more often than I used to. I am fortunate that my wife seems to understand everything but the fatigue. She just can not wrap her head around how much energy is expended keeping it together at work. She will patiently wait for me to get my words out right, redirect the kids to not make demands of me or loud noises, then give me attitude about falling asleep. Sometimes I can recover by tinkering in the garage. This sometimes backfires if things do not go just right. The only sure fire way to recover for me is to sleep. Our social services agency has staff to assist people with language difficulties. Perhaps you could ask if the same is available where you are.

That's the problem that's led to the end of every job I ever had. It's rare that I've struggled with the actual vocational tasks given to me, but my stamina for coping with the socialising and sensory over-stimulation has always worn down until I've found myself shutting down nearly every day and barely recovering at weekends. Eventually I just go into a continuous, less severe, shut down state where attending work, or even looking after myself properly, become impossible. It was these periods (or rather the depression that they led to) which led to my autism eventually being diagnosed, which seems to be quite a common story for late-diagnosed people.

On the subject of shut-downs generally, I found this article <clicky> a very good summary of the different effects and kinds of shutdowns. I'm pretty sure someone here linked me to it, so thanks to whoever that was!

Sounds like a really hard situation you're in. I hope it gets better.

Meltdowns can happen to anyone, even NTs, and I'm pretty sure shutdowns are the same.

Meltdowns and shutdowns are about being trapped in a situation that the brain can't cope with and unable to escape. Because those with ASD tend to encounter more of those situations than NTs due to sensory issues and the like, meltdowns and shutdowns are way more common among those with ASD than among NTs.

My guess is that any neurological condition that adds conditions that the brain can't cope with would probably also increase the likelihood of a meltdown or shutdown.

Here's a good article about meltdowns. I'm no psychologist, but I think that most of what it says probably applies to shutdowns too.
http://snagglebox.com/article/what-are-meltdowns/