Mental Health
15 terms
Autistic Burnout
Complete physical, mental, and sensory collapse from the cumulative cost of existing in a neurotypical world. Skills disappear, speech vanishes, and previously automatic tasks become impossible—not tiredness but neurological system failure.
Autistic Meltdown
An involuntary neurological response to overwhelming stress where an autistic person temporarily loses emotional and behavioral control. Not a tantrum or manipulation, but the nervous system's emergency release valve when overload becomes unbearable.
Autistic Shutdown
A temporary loss of skills and abilities when an autistic person's nervous system becomes overwhelmed. During shutdown, speaking, moving, or responding becomes extremely difficult or impossible, even though the person remains aware.
Camouflaging
The conscious or unconscious suppression of neurodivergent traits to appear more neurotypical. Often used interchangeably with "masking," camouflaging involves hiding, compensating for, or overperforming to meet social expectations.
Co-regulation
When one nervous system helps stabilize another through presence and connection. Not talking someone through their emotions—literally sharing your calm until their system remembers how to regulate. Like emotional jumper cables: you can't charge a dead battery by yelling at it, but you can share power from a working one.
Decision Fatigue
Your brain running out of decision-making juice—every choice from breakfast cereal to career moves drains the same finite cognitive battery until you're standing in the grocery store unable to choose between two identical yogurts. Not laziness; executive function running on fumes.
Emotional Dysregulation
Neurological differences in how emotions are experienced, processed, and expressed. Characterized by intense feelings that may seem disproportionate to triggers and difficulty returning to emotional baseline—not a character flaw, but brain-based variation.
Energy Budgeting
Planning activities around available energy using a structured, proactive plan.
Masking
Hiding or suppressing neurodivergent traits to appear more neurotypical. A survival strategy that involves mimicking social behaviors, suppressing stims, and performing neurotypicality at significant personal cost.
Neuroaffirming
Creating spaces, practices, and attitudes that accept and support neurodivergent people as they are, rather than trying to change, fix, or hide their differences.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
A neurodivergent condition characterized by intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors or mental acts (compulsions) that significantly impact daily functioning.
Overfunctioning / Underfunctioning
Two common responses to stress: doing "too much" (taking on everything, over‑controlling) or "shutting down" (reduced capacity, withdrawal).
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
Extreme emotional pain triggered by perceived or actual rejection, criticism, or failure. A neurological response common in ADHD where minor criticism feels like physical injury and imagined rejection becomes unbearable agony.
Resilience
The capacity to adapt, persist, and thrive despite facing challenges, adversity, or systemic barriers, often developed through navigating neurodivergent experiences in a neurotypical world.
Spoon Theory
A metaphor where daily energy is represented as a limited number of spoons. Each activity costs spoons, and when they're gone, you're done—no amount of willpower creates more. Created by Christine Miserandino to explain living with lupus, now universal disability language.