Employers avoid naming autistic burnout because naming it creates liability

Shamus Hart’s explanation for why autistic burnout is missing from workplace policy was a legal one. At Think Autism Melbourne, on a panel that treated burnout as a policy failure, Hart said businesses are hesitant to name it, and that the hesitation is deliberate. Hart told the panel that “as soon as you name it, you’re putting liability around it”, and that accountability and responsibility come with it.

Hart, who said they had just been getting over burnout and who, the facilitator Anita Aherne of Living on the Spectrum noted, had done a lot of work in large corporate organisations, walked through the logic as an HR team or a business would see it. Once autistic burnout is named, an employee can ask for accommodations and for systems that would stop it, and the organisation is then dealing with the liability that follows. Many businesses are very risk avoidant, Hart said. They do not want to admit that their environments, workplace systems and policies were not built for neurodivergent minds, so they do the opposite and leave the problem unnamed. It gets pushed down the organisational structure, and the structure itself was designed without any account of burnout. Hart called it a circular problem.