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Is it Autistic Burnout OR Depression? | Autistic Advice #11 (Patreon)

Published:
2025-03-19 15:00:12
Imported:
2026-06
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Sara N.

Thank you Meg!

Kayla

Great video! I’ve looked back at my teenage “depression” and wondered how much of it was burnout/overstimulation etc. it’s so hard when others around me are doing all the things, and I just can’t… I’m just glad that I know my limits now, and can take better care of myself going forward.

Katzenbekloppt

Am very interested, but as I know I will cry watching it and need to do some stuff it has to wait for a while. But thanks for doing it, Meg, I DO apreciate!

ROMVLVS

When I was studying business in a vocational school five years ago, I got a burnout that my teachers and even some doctors undermined. This happened during Covid and it worsened. I got a burnout that lasted for 2-3 months. On many occasions I considered dropping out as it caused me great difficulty to continue studying and it made my days very exhausting. When I finally got into touch with a therapist they wrote a note so I could actually get a month off from school which was thankfully enough for me to recover. I graduated 2 years ago and now I'm studying website coding in a college.

Nicole Purple

TRIGGER WARNING . . . Here is a note also to add to the conversation regarding thoughts of SI, I am in OT and we are covering emotion regulation. My occupational therapist has taught/informed me that there are many phases that we go through on a day to day bases. They are all compared to weather phases. There is sunny, windy, stormy, foggy, cloudy, easy breezy. We haven't really gone over sunny, or easy breezy so I don't know much about them but, if you spend too much time in windy, if you get triggered you go to stormy and then into foggy. Or you can just go from windy to foggy. Windy is like go, go, go, staying focused on things, doing schoolwork, keeping up with chores. Stormy is usually exhibited by or associated with anger. Sometimes includes yelling bursts. This very quickly leads into foggy. Foggy is like being dissociated from life. You have less ability to function normally.(I often just have to sit sometimes in the middle of getting my kids ready for bed.) But the other part of foggy, this is when SI can happen. It is even more common to happen after a stormy episode. (For me it is almost garenteed[sp. autocorrect wants to change this to parented...] to happen after a story episode.) All this information leads me to believe that burnout is also related to this cycle especially the foggy phase. So when it says that depression is associated with SI, I feel like this can also be associated with burnout because of the foggy phase. Just my thoughts. Also, I didn't watch this past 5 min before having this thought and wanting to share it.

Gwynne R

This video has been so helpful! Thank you! I had extreme burnout after I graduated from uni, and I didn't understand why I was so tired all the time. Through talking with doctors, they realized it was extreme burnout. I had burned the candle from both ends, and there was nothing to do except rest. The ADHD goblin in me did not like that. Lol!

grae salisbury

Afab AuDHDer here who has struggled with depression and burn outs my whole life! I am now doing much better because I understand autism better! Yey! :3 So nice to hear about these and the distinctions! <3 Another crossover I wanted to bring up is Long Covid and ME/CFS. My partner is also autistic, and has lived with burnout on and off her whole life but not depression. However, after she got Covid in 2020 she never recovered, and it was tricky to distinguish if she was dealing with new depression, old burnout, or new long Covid (or all three) as all of these involve incapacitating fatigue. She has been diagnosed with Long Covid, ME/CFS, POTS, and MCAS and is on helpful medication now, but I wanted to add to the discussion as Long Covid is becoming more and more common and there's a lot of evidence that folks with hyper-mobility and EDS are much higher risk. And because there is quite the overlap with EDS, hyper-mobility, and Autism and ADHD I felt it was relevant! I have attached some recent papers in case anyone reads this and is curious and wants to check them out! <3 Paper 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03173-6 Paper 2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36639608/ General Long Covid Info: https://thesicktimes.org/2024/12/19/long-covid-essentials-new-resources-published/ Paper 3: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38116712/

⋆｡ ݁𖥔. froggo .𖥔 ݁｡⋆

I wonder if there is a difference between the burnout that allistic people experience compared to autistic burnout? Is it that the burnout itself is the same but the triggers and reasons for getting into it and recovery process is different? Or is it that autistic burnout is an entirely different thing altogether?

Sammie

I think with burnout. I notice that, I feel like my autism is too much for myself or other people and worry that how I see the world or my reactions to people is not valid. This is a symptom of burnout that is not discussed but does happen when you have a mental breakdown due to thinking about the autism too much, or not having the right support, including people not understand you. It can make me feel like I’m just precise or not flexible

Sammie
>>170614759

You made me realise that people have different burnout or/and depression symptoms. So it feels like a spectrum like autism is. Since everyone might have different struggles. As you said depending on what happened or if expectations can push burnout out faster because we still want to do interests. And for me I will be sad that I got to burnout in the first place and I would grieve the hobbies I missed because of lack of energy

HardyRose
>>173238979

I'm still recovering from my recent Autistic burnout and I find I really struggle to mask during this period. But, it wasn't till a few weeks ago when I watched the video on burnout on YouTube that I even realised that's what it was and could start mentally helping myself out of it as I could explain what I was experiencing to others and they were able to then help as well. It's a strange experience, though, when I can't mask as well and how much I apologise to people around me, or shut myself off from them, due to feeling like I need to act more "normal". (Sorry if that was a long tangent, I hope I got across what I was trying to say).

J4

In my mid-30's (long before being diagnosed with autism) I developed what was diagnosed as "treatment resistant depression". I had all of the classic symptoms of depression, except that I could still enjoy things and I was functional enough to still pay bills and such. In hindsight, I suspect that I had both burnout and depression. The burnout was keeping the treatments for the depression from working as they should have. I ended up having a series of electroshock treatments. My psychiatrist said that all they did for me was to cause me to forget what I was so angry about. 🤔🤷‍♀️ Some of the meds I take help reduce the symptoms of anxiety, but I very rarely tolerate "therapeutic dosages" before the side effects outweigh the benefits of the meds. It is just how my body works. I didn't know that this may be an autistic trait too. I have to work very hard to avoid burnout. I feel like I am walking on the edge of it most of the time. But thanks to videos like yours I now know what it is and can start to adjust my life to reduce what triggers it before it becomes completely incapacitating.