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Community voice, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Lost skills or known limits, a participant asked about life after diagnosis
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne, a participant said the office had become excruciating since their diagnosis. Panellists, including a provisional psychologist, gave different answers.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
A participant at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne put a question to the panel on autism and disability about a change they had noticed since their diagnosis. They said they had stopped trying as hard in certain situations, and had stopped masking as much. Part of that, they worried, was a potentially limiting belief that they could no longer do things they once could. Part of it was that those things were legitimately hard. They had heard people talk about skill regression. There were things they used to be able to do, never easily, but they could do them. “Go to the office every day for example and now I find it excruciating.” They asked whether the panel had any thoughts.
The question followed directly from the panel’s discussion of masking in business and of the idea, raised a few minutes earlier, that carrying a label could become a reason not to try. Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, had just asked whether the discussion was prompting questions.
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Sources the story draws on
- Is social camouflaging associated with anxiety and depression in autistic adults? (opens in a new tab), Molecular Autism, vol. 12 (Hull, Levy, Lai, Petrides, Baron-Cohen, Allison, Smith and Mandy); Directory of Open Access Journals record
- "Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew": Defining Autistic Burnout (opens in a new tab), Autism in Adulthood, vol. 2(2) (Raymaker, Teo, Steckler, Lentz, Scharer, Delos Santos, Kapp, Hunter, Joyce and Nicolaidis); PDXScholar record, Portland State University
- Defining autistic burnout through experts by lived experience: Grounded Delphi method investigating #AutisticBurnout (opens in a new tab), Autism (J. M. Higgins, S. R. C. Arnold, J. Weise, E. Pellicano and J. N. Trollor); Autism CRC record
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