Proudly Autistic
Director of Customer Experience at Sydney Theatre Co.
Sydney based actor - TV Film and Theatre.
Long time Sci-Fi & RPG geek
My views are (of course) my own
I’ve been getting into using AI in my day-to-day a lot over the past 6 months. Deciphering cantankerous customers’ meanings. Writing the start of a long letter not knowing where to start. And sometimes creating a logo… well, I gave it a try with a clear set of prompts “logo for a book club, an illustration of an open book, simple line art” and this is what I received.
Well I don’t know where they learn those kind of words but it certainly isn’t from me. I daresay that it’s learning those things from those Unstable Diffusion crowd. Frankly I’m not even mad, I’m disappointed.
Similarly, there are days when writing prompts seems like the AI is just being willful. “What do you mean you don’t know what an infinity symbol is? You drew the Kardashians coming out of a clown car a minute ago just fine!” I really have to resist the temptation not to push my prompt, weighting the up up until all hell breaks loose and tortured content starts flying about the screen as we wrestle with concepts that really are beyond both of us.
So yeah I really need to take better care of my AI. We’re better working from the same playbook.
What my AI thinks it looks like when we are fighting
I have been meaning to follow up with some more resources regarding Burnout in the Neurodivergent Community. It makes sense that the challenges of working in a high pressure environment, especially one that is nonoptimal for your skills, will add stress. Of course that means that burnout can and does occur in all neurotypes.
A Succeed-with-Dyslexia (SWD) blog post[1] from last year is a great read about burnout for everyone. It summarises the very important point
What matters is recognising [burnout], and reaching out, even if it feels trivial or embarrassing at first – it isn’t, but sometimes that hurdle is one of the largest for people.
Hayley M Butcher, in her blog “Discussing the Dyslexic Brain” [2] lays out the reasons for fatigue being so common in the dyslexic community. Her summary in typically clear, dyslexic style:
A collage of factors, including tackling difficult and complex tasks, spending time checking and re-checking for errors, battling visual stressors and coping with associated stress can be a real recipe for fatigue amongst the dyslexic community.
It is also a fantastic literature review of contemporary research and support, with great references and advice:
Setting achievable goals, breaking tasks into manageable chunks, taking regular breaks, accessing reasonable adjustments and seeking the expertise of educational professionals when needed can all be great ways to assist the dyslexic population. In addition, remaining supportive and encouraging, yet also understanding of your dyslexic child, student or significant other (or even towards yourself) is absolutely crucial.
(This piece of writing was created by my incredible friend Shelly and myself for our Neurodiversity and Wellness, Arts and Culture community that we chair)
You might hear the term “Burnout” talked about a lot and maybe you’ve felt that way yourself.
But what is burnout?
How does burnout differ between different communities?
And what can you do about it for your co-workers, friends and yourself?
Defining Burnout
The World Health Organisation (WHO) points out that whilst burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon, it is not classified as a medical condition.[1]
Burn-out is defined in ICD-11 as:
“a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterised by three dimensions:
• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; • increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and • reduced professional efficacy.”
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (MAY, 2019)
However, as the boundaries between work and home have blurred throughout the covid years, the occupational distinction has also become less fitting. Evidence shows that burnout makes no distinction between paid or unpaid work and people undertaking unpaid home or care duties can also be impacted[2].
The Black Dog Institute and the UNSW School of Psychiatry[2a] have carried out studies into factors that commonly concur with burnout, including:
Anxiety/stress
Depression and low mood
Irritability and anger
Sleep disturbances
Lack of motivation or passion
Lack of concentration, memory loss or brain fog
Withdrawal from others
Physical symptoms such as aches, headaches, nausea and low libido
Emotional fragility
It raises the chicken v egg question on whether these factors are a cause of or caused by burnout, or whether they are all a symptom of an underlying issue. The same researchers are also undertaking a followup study to further investigate the features of burnout and its relationship with depression.
Neurodivergent Burnout
In the neurodivergent communities, conversations about burnout are quite common. In fact many neurodivergent people come to uncover their uniqueness due to the burnout of trying to fly under the radar. The challenges of living and working in a society not designed for us can mean frequent overload that can push us into meltdown, shutdown, and burnout. Also life-changes can exacerbate challenges, for example transitioning from school to work, experiencing a mental health crisis, or the death of someone close[13]. Stigma can make prevention and recovery even harder.
So how does neurodivergent burnout differ from the WHO defined burnout?
A notable difference is in the causes of burnout [6]. Some of factors that lead to burnout for ND folk are:
Repeated sensory overload
Long term masking
Having social/sensory needs minimised by others due to appearing “fine” (i.e. “successful” masking)
Not having access to the appropriate level of supports & accommodations
Difficult or unreachable expectations from family, school, work, or society
Executive Functioning fatigue following a number of stressors or transitions
When the overall load exceeds abilities + supports = burnout
But impacts of burnout can also present differently, including [7]:
Loss of skills
Loss of interest in dedicated interest areas
Emotional regulation issues
Added anxiety and depression
A study by Dr Dora Rainmaker at Portland State University[11], involved interviews with autistic adults. Whilst her studies have been in the autistic population, the sentiment aligns with other neurodivergent communities. Findings included:
“… struggling with independent living, loss of self-belief, and being frightened that the loss of skills from the autistic burnout might be permanent.”
Dr. Dora Rainmaker
The results also pointed to a “lack of empathy from neurotypical people, who had difficulty understanding or relating to the autistic person’s experiences.”
What can we do about it?
Policy
On a policy level, it may be good to know that groups such as the Black Dog Institute are campaigning for workplace reform through methods such as their White Paper[9]. Actions your organisation can take include:
Evidence-based training for managers regarding the resources available and actions they can take to recognise and respond to mental health risk factors in the workplace.
Building mentally healthy workplaces.
Taking immediate action on bullying, sexual harassment and assault.
Self-care
The most important way to recover is prioritising self-care as a protective measure against burnout and other mental health issues. However self-care is often the first thing that gets sacrificed to work demands and stress.
So what is self care?
“Self-care refers to the activities and practices that we deliberately choose to engage in on a regular basis to maintain and enhance our health and wellbeing. Regular practices may include exercise, reading, meditation, disconnecting from technology, or talking with a friend or family member.”[10]
“When you take time for yourself to rest, reset, and rejuvenate you will actually have more energy to meet the demands of daily life as well as reduce or avoid the symptoms of mental ill-health.”
Dr Jan Orman
But what does Neurodivergent self-care look like?
For Neurodivergent folk there are a few ways to recover in addition (or instead of) neurotypical burnout recovery. In fact it’s worth noting that many neurotypical recovery techniques and interventions can be ineffective or even more overwhelming. Social support can add to overload, and even mindfulness may need a special touch as described by Sue Hutton[14].
Neurodivergent affirming recovery methods can include [8, 11, 12]:
Deliberate reining back of tasks and responsibilities
Prioritising rest, recognising the necessity of healing, and equitable productivity
Careful unmasking where appropriate
Slow refocus on areas of interest and energy giving environments like nature
Outsource executive functioning tasks
Attending to sensory needs
Self-care Strategy
Prevention of burnout comes with increased awareness of needs and accommodation for those by workplaces, family and community. Clear boundaries and formal supports are also key to keeping the overload at bay.
The Black Dog institute has a comprehensive self care template designed so that you can craft a personal self-care strategy that works for you. It will guide you through the 4 steps of self-care planning:
If you are feeling burnout, run down or depression it’s worth talking to a mental health professional starting with your doctor. But if you are feeling that that’s a big first step try reaching out to the people around you and in your communities. Talking can help and it can make that journey more manageable by taking it one step at a time.
Go well!
PS– what to learn more? Check out this upcoming workshop on Autistic Burnout:
There are a bunch of fun and interesting tests that do the rounds of the neurodivergent and autistic communities every now and again. Some draw from rich experience and colour of the community, whilst others are built from the doctrine of Asperger* & Lovaas* treating us as if “they are not people in the psychological sense”. Yes ND and autistic people are horrendously marginalised still, so when doing any of these tests it’s important to remember that it’s not a Cosmo quiz and experiences may vary.
(Before I get too soap-boxy) the folks over at Embrace Autism have collected a bunch of them and give each a description, a discussion on merits and the evolution of the test, notes on scoring and provide a comments page – always interesting. I’m looking for some fun ones for a meetup and this is a great place to go. I did however get sucked into the tractor beam of the RMET and I unpack my opinion below.
Reading the Mind in the Eyes test
Yep 10 in 16 minutes. RMET is so arbitrary and forced. There are recent studies of peoples thoughts of what they looked like when frightened compared to what they actually looked like and they are nothing alike.
Like the TASIT, RMET is a performative model of what neurotypical society agree are the proxies for emotion in the same way that sitcoms and soap opera’s use codified behaviour to indicate emotion. They are not testing reactive emotion displays but artistic expression of emotion. I was an actor and director for 25 years and am an executive on Australia’s largest theatre company. I know some of the actors in the TASIT test and that is acting – not real life. Say what you will about “method” acting or portraiture, they are devices to tell clear narrative. Life is not. I spent decades learning to act professionally neurotypical because (as Damian Milton proposes) NTs were equally bad at recognising my emotions. With context and knowledge I’m quite good at determining a persons mood and situation. But more to the point of empathy I act on it.
What is actually interesting is that the times I’ve met up with new autistic friends they are much more attuned to my emotional state with a much more limited exposure. This has always felt like we are naturally attuned to one another. That’s a metaphor rather than a factual statement but still often it’s with other ND and autistic folk that I get close to a feeling of home.
TASIT and RMET basically boil down to a culturally specific ink blot test, or a test to see if you have the cultural secret to enter a club.
* the former a Nazi scientist who experimented on children and the latter one of the creators of gay conversion therapy and the founder of Applied Behavioural Analysis – still the western standard therapy for autistic children. Summarised here
This week I went to a wonderful accessible arts panel discussion on accessible tech in the arts. There are a lot of everyday uses of technology to use technology to increase the accessibility of arts and culture and our exceptional panel of Sophie Penkethman-Young (Australia Council), Marcus Wright (MCA), and Simon Buchanan (Sydney Opera House) unpacked a wide field of these. Technologies such as digital performance, alt text and captioning, digitally delivered workshops, Virtual narrators, Augmented Reality deepened experiences, and AI created audio description … yes Artificial Intelligence made it’s face known.
Lately, in so much of the conversation, Chat GTP, and the AI successors, has dominated the subject of technology and art. Whether it’s artists having their work used as a platform for training AI without their consent, to using AI to develop writing art and critique of writing and art.
But it’s in the most banal ways that AI could be an accommodative tool for those of us with disability. We may argue the merits and value of a novel or poem written by AI. But what about AI writing your grant proposal. On that artists seem to agree. Maybe not the whole thing, but for those of us struggling regularly with executive functioning dilemmas. Contrary to the narrative of procrastination and avoidance that saviours like to peddle, or the adjectives that beaten down neurodivergents find the selves reciting, some executive functioning issues come from the difficulty in engaging with an unmotivated task or from a difficulty in cracking the introductory social format that is often where we find our lives. Having and AI write a rough and inaccurate opening that you could take on for a spring board into self expression is a wonderful idea.
There are many technologies that we use and will arise to help us meet the goals of an inclusive society. But they really need to start with the opening up of society to be more inclusive. Having no meeting agenda or notetaking could be taken away by speech to text capture or AI inferred agenda in retrospect. But the thing that will get us to a harmonious society is not technology filling the gaps – it for there to be no gaps from the designing of the way we want our future society developing.
I came across Katherine May’s new blog post at 2 am on a Sunday trying to finish up work. As my life is more irony than substance these days I think it’s worth putting up.
It’s an important call to action. How do we make our work more sustainable? There are a couple of points in there for me
How do I automate manual tasks
How do I delegate with the goal of improving the work outcomes and career growth of others
How do I set up cross collaborations to distribute the load and remove bottle necks
How do we upskill for self-service and empowerment
Sustainability of work is easier to handle (and harder to refute) if it becomes about raising others up. Whilst I might be “essential” if I’m the sole knowledge holder I am also limiting my ability to take leave, adding risk to the risk matrix, and stopping others from understanding my needs. And sharing information can lead to great collaborations.
So perhaps there is something in that. Collaboration and advocacy can be used to create a healthy work structure.
One last thing though is the Black Dog Institutes self-care template. It’s a guide more than a prescribed set of marketing fluff, so common with these themes. You set the tasks that work for you at a rate you can take on. Well worth a look.
We’ve had a few nests of paper wasps at our house over the past 5+ years. Over the years they’ve started a few nests, small ones off a few cells that they’d sometimes abandon for unknown reasons and sometimes they come back to them. They are small clustered tubes of grey, looking like loose bunches of Sunday newspapers bought from some tiny delivery kid on their weekend paper route around the garden, and turned into a paper mache bouquet.
They meant even more to my partner, spending days in the garden they’d often watch her work as much as she watched them. Once a spider built an elaborate web overnight surrounding their nest, and they watched with patient faces as she deconstructed the web and moved the spider on.
Over seasons their family grew with the size of the nest. Some summers, tubes were capped with wax as little wasplings grew inside to emerge weeks later. Of a night they sometimes shelter on the flat top of the nest, or crawl in a tube for shelter from wind.
Recently we had huge storms across the coast. Rain and flooding were intense and the winds were worse. Coming home one morning we noticed that their nest had blown down onto the path in front of our door. A few wasps were at the roof where the best used to be, and a couple more were at the grounded nest. It was easy to read the tragedy with human experience, in their frantic but futile action. We hit a small still from the house and some super glue and easy enough put it back in the position that it fell from. The wasps watched us from the roof or hovered about, but never tried to sing us even as we handled their home for over a minute, with them clinging onto it. It stayed attached and they immediately got back to work replacing wax and trending to anything in the sealed tubes; making repairs to their long-lived home and staring at us, as they sometimes do, while we work near them.
Then on Friday, in a brief moment, we were out, that all changed
Human neighbours must have had some internal pest control done, and one of them crept over our fence and sprayed the nest with some poison. Then they took off. Years and generations of our considerate neighbours were destroyed by human xenophobia and an inbuilt need for destruction.
It’s difficult not to think that humanity is the earth’s story case scenario. Too short-sighted and greedy to do anything more than squeeze the last drop of personal gain off their environment in their short lives and too arrogant to stop graffitiing the landscape with boasting of their own greatness.
Sometimes I get weary of hoping that humanity will change. They perform horrors on one another without learning from the past, led by greedy men, or unable to challenge their own ego and empathise with another, praising the genius of the wealthy as if there was a linear relationship between abundant wealth and the ethics of accumulating and hoarding it.
There will never be a day when we are free from the tyranny of ourselves; but I do hope that a collective consciousness, an ethical understanding, is reached whereby we can continue as something greater than ourselves. Less destructive and more considerate of our place in time.
There are people that I’d want that for. There are still people that connect me to the species of my birth.
In the past I have been an irregular participant of running and hiking, but presently swimming is my go-to exercise. For me exercise is less about physical fitness and more for quietude; for self reflection and regaining control. When I’m swimming I can’t get overly ambitious. If I swim more vigorously I’ll start gasping for air and my performance drops as my anxiety rises. Swimming laps is both rhythmically monotonous and also holistically stimulating. For a neurodivergent brain such as mine that is a sweet combo. Being regular and repeated there is nothing to distract me. The only thing my brain can do is go along for the ride, which is a great meditation. We’ve covered our breathing Mental Health Monday.
So what’s with all the swimming? Well at the moment I’m recovering from burnout. A new job coupled with some personal troubles has led to overload on top of overload until I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. The first step is realising you have a problem. The next is dealing with it, and swimming has been one of the ways of combating the anxiety and depression that can come with burnout*.
So what is the broader word on exercise being good for mental health?
In addition to making me hungry, the Mayo Clinic[1] has some comprehensive advice about exercise balancing out depression and anxiety. I know that when I’m depressed, drumming up motivation for exercise can feel impossible. Joining a dance class with instructors shouting “Woo!” is not my thing. I learnt early in life that I’m not much of a “woo” person – even at my emotional peak. But exercise doesn’t mean olympic level training, or filming a TikTok of you over exerting in lycra. It can be as simple as walking. Research from Stanford found walking can increase your creative output by 60%[2].
Any physical activity can be beneficial, including gardening, washing your car, and the covid staple – walking around the block.
Doing 30 minutes or more of exercise a day for three to five days a week may significantly improve depression or anxiety symptoms. But smaller amounts of physical activity — as little as 10 to 15 minutes at a time — may make a difference[1]
Probably one of the most promising findings is that regular exercise of any intensity has a protective effect against future depression and is recommended to prevent recurrence of depression[3]. The Black Dog Institutes info sheet on Exercise & Depression has a lot more information[4].
For a lot of us putting our personal needs first is difficult. Advocating for others is a great way for me to trick myself into doing work for my own good. For example, finding time to swim everyday is hard. But when I saw the Laps for Life charity to raise money for youth mental health it was a great way to align a cause that I support with my own needs. So far this month I’ve swum over 10km in 12 days.
So in case you find yourself struggling, changing your scene with some light exercise might help you get back on track. As always though, reach out if you are doing it hard. A health professional like your local Dr is a good first port of call, as are friends, family and your support network.
Let me know what your experience is with exercise and mental wellness.
* never fear we are not going to gloss over the thorny topic of burnout, and the 41 flavours that it takes throughout the neuro-diversi-sphere. It is a solid topic that deserves its own conversation(s). Just preferably when I’ve had a bit of a repair.
[5] Schuch, F. B., Vancampfort, D., Richards, J., Rosenbaum, S., Ward, P. B., & Stubbs, B. (2016). Exercise as a treatment for depression: A meta-analysis adjusting for publication bias. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 77, 42–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2016.02.023
The holidays are rough for a lot of us. A lot of expectations and traditions that are counterproductive in a neurodivergent context.
If I may, I think there are three things going on for me during holidays. Being transparent of these differences can be helpful in coming to a mutual understanding.
1) I understand the premise of reconnecting and bonding time and the rituals that feature in the neurotypical way of doing things. And whilst connecting is important to neurodivergent folk as well, without accommodation, it can cause the disconnection and friction instead. For example; planning a group outing without including the needs of the other ends up feeling … like you are not being included. Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance; (Belonging is having a place on the planning committee).
2) Forced interaction, without built-in recharge time, is damaging for us hugely. Often it leads to meltdowns, arguments and an erosion of trust. You wouldn’t continue to go on a kite flying activity if thunderstorms rolled in – so why would you insist on Disney World during the holidays season for autistic folks without sensory breaks built in. For friday night drinks in a noisy bar just because “that’s the way everyone else does it”?
3) Parallel play is intimate play. I’m understanding more and more that this is not only an autistic child development thing. Perhaps it’s due to heightened awareness of the other person and thanks for the deceased social load; perhaps it’s just that we don’t have to be made of social hierarchies and continual reinforcement; nevertheless doing things together but separate is legitimate.
Speaking of inclusion in holidays Ludmila Praslova PhD wrote a great piece on LinkedIn about sharing the holiday period inclusively. It’s a very broad in it’s thoughts of being inclusive, something I’m working on being in myself (you can read the full article here).
Heath Wilder 