My name’s Katie, and I am in autistic burnout. I’ve been a lecturer at UoM since 2017. I’m surrounded by wonderful colleagues, enthusiastic and talented students and have extremely supportive (and frequently delightfully weird) family and friends. I have a hen’s tooth of a job – I’m permanent! So why do I feel so awful? 

I received my autism diagnosis in 2019 at the age of 38. Late diagnosis of autistic women without intellectual disability is a whole different soapbox I frequently stand on, but suffice it to say we are very frequently diagnosed after periods of chronic or acute poor mental health. This was the case for me. 

Post-diagnosis I did a fair amount of prancing around saying, “Hello birds, hello trees, I am an amazing autistic person and look at my strengths!” (You may have seen me do one of several talks about this – if you attended, thank you!) Then covid began, we all had to stay at home, and everything, despite the awfulness of the situation and the skyrocketing of academic workloads, was peaceful. I could control my sensory environment, actually speak in meetings, plan my time carefully, and work uninterrupted. My anxiety and panic disorder improved, and I felt, if not normal, then normal for me, which is a happy way of being (hello birds, hello trees).  

Then the “return to normal” began, and I crashed, hard. The pressures of returning to campus, trying to avoid catching covid, being in unbearably bright and noisy environments, in rooms where everyone speaks simultaneously (conferences, oh my DAYS), and the smells, oh the smells, gradually chipped away at my ability to cope. Coupled with rapid institutional change (Student Experience Programme and the cyber incident) and the hugely increased demands of student support, which is absolutely necessary but extremely draining for someone with mental health diagnoses themselves, burnout tapped me on the shoulder for a while. I ignored it, and so it pushed me ignominiously off a cliff. 

Daily panic attacks and various other delightful symptoms prompted me to access medication and therapy. Currently, I am signed off by Occupational Health as needing to work from home to reduce sensory overwhelm as I slowly recover. Equally, having a panic attack on the 8.30 Lancaster to Manchester Transpennine Express is not conducive to effective pedagogy. I have extremely supportive colleagues, but I don’t think neurotypical people understand autistic burnout, because why would they? Hence, this blog. 

Arnold, Higgins & Troller (2023) surveyed and interviewed 141 autistic adults about their experience of burnout. Saliently, the majority had a diagnosis of anxiety disorder, and only around half were employed. The most common features of burnout were mental and physical exhaustion, social withdrawal, difficulty working, and environmental overwhelm. This tallies with my experience. In burnout, your senses are turned up to 11. I had to refrain from snapping at my partner for being selfishly loud putting a bag for life in the cupboard the other day. He is very patient. Difficulties communicating were also common, to which my colleagues who’ve witnessed me glitch my way through meetings will testify. Participants reported physical symptoms such as dizziness and hot flashes, which are also symptoms of panic disorder. Worryingly, some participants reported misdiagnosis of psychiatric disorders and inappropriate medication. 

I’ve outlined the causes for me above. However, as all good scientists know, anecdotal evidence is not the same as data. Participants in Arnold et al. (2023) noted the following: build-up of life stressors (not going into personal detail here but HELLO), sensory and social overload (HELLO also the campus environment), being overloaded with multiple different tasks, mismatch between expectations from others and the situational capability of the autistic person, and lack of autonomy in daily (and presumably working) life. 

Critically, these participants expressed that burnout can be both acute and chronic. For some, recovery takes years, and requires autonomy in reducing sensory and social demands, finding time to engage with restorative special interests, receiving genuine support and understanding from peers and colleagues, and therapy. During recovery, people experienced self-doubt, fatigue, lack of confidence, lack of self-esteem, worsening physical health and worsening financial situation. All these are true of me, including the latter – I dropped my hours to 0.8FTE so I could spend a day a week recovering, and I am now forking out £70 a week for a most excellent, neuro-affirming therapist. I love her so much. 

So, what can we do as an organisation? I know I’m not the only one in this situation, but importantly, the autistic experience is different for every autistic person. Equally, I have been very lucky in terms of the support offered to me by my line manager, and things are slowly looking up, but it’s not the same for us all. Line managers and those responsible for determining workloads can listen – really listen. When DASS say we need to work from home, that’s because in order to recover (and not to relapse), we need to have control over our sensory environments. We could understand that if you allow an autistic person to work in areas that interest them, they will work astonishingly quickly and productively. In contrast, forcing autistic people into situations that overwhelm them (and this can be workload-related as well as physical situations), leads to burnout, which from an organisational perspective means a precipitous drop in productivity, staff sick leave, and increased workloads for the colleagues of the burned-out person. Burnout begets burnout. 

Ultimately, to make it feasible for us to work at Manchester… no, let me rephrase. For the UoM community to benefit from the insight, creativity, trustworthiness and extreme empathy of autistic people, we need to be heard and, crucially, supported. The EDI Directorate do great things, and the Neurodivergent Staff Network and Disabled Staff Network are wonderful, safe, supportive spaces. DASS are heroic under extremely challenging circumstances.  But until immediate colleagues understand that just because we may look OK, it doesn’t mean we are, the university will continue to lose some of its best staff. 

Right, I’m off to look at pictures of fractals. 

Reference 

• Arnold, S. R., Higgins, J. M., Weise, J., Desai, A., Pellicano, E., & Trollor, J. N. (2023). Confirming the nature of autistic burnout. Autism, 27(7), 1906–1918. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221147410 

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