Dr. Megan Anna Neff
speaker
1,098 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2023
last heard Jun 2025
Dr. Megan Anna Neff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So things that perhaps used to be tolerable that can create a sensory meltdown or shutdown.
And then the third piece is loss of skills.
And so that can look like executive functioning going way down.
There's a term in kind of the medical space, instrumental activities of daily living.
So activities of daily living would be things like bathing, clothing, basic things a person needs to move through the day and be able to function.
And then instrumental is a little bit more of those softer things like making appointments, doing your billing, managing your medications, things like that.
And for adults, we would see lots of declines in that area as well as for children.
And this can be the part that I think is most confusing for folks because it can be like, well, last week or last month, you were able to do this really complex thing.
So for children, it's like you were able to do this really complex research project and now you're struggling to go to school.
So the ebb and flow of functioning can be really disorienting both for the person, but also the people around that person.
Yeah, it absolutely will look a lot like depression and then can easily lead to depression.
So it'll look like depression in the sense that when we're depressed, it's like our system is shutting down.
We tend to be very lethargic when we're depressed.
And so yeah, that wall of fatigue, the difficulty with executive functioning, emotional sensitivity, all of that is going to look like depression.
Some of the things that distinguish it from depression, so there's this clinical term, anhedonia, it means loss of pleasure.
And this is a core piece of depression, and this would be one of the things that differentiates it from burnout, is things that used to give a person pleasure no longer do.
The person can't access it.
Now in burnout, it might be hard to access things that often bring autistic joy.
Like if the person has special interests because of fatigue.
So one of the questions becomes, well, can you still access that special interest?
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