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Chapter 1: What is neurodivergent burnout and how does it affect young people?
I started to get a lot of depression and a lot of anxiety. I was putting on a bit of a show to try and measure up to everyone's expectations of me. I thought ADHD was something wrong with me. I usually just sit and stare at my wall thinking about what I could have done better in that day. Like, oh, I shouldn't have done that, or I shouldn't have said that, or why did I do this?
Because I didn't know I had dyslexia, so I just thought I was dumb. It's like, why can't I pull myself together?
These are the voices of some of the young people who have featured in previous episodes of this series. They are thoughtful, intelligent, kind and courageous. So why are they finding life so hard? Anxiety, depression, chronic stress and low self-esteem. For the neurodivergent community, these co-occurring conditions are the rule rather than the exception.
But is this because they are autistic or dyslexic or ADHD? Or do we need to separate the two? Neurodivergence itself is not a mental health condition. But if there's a misalignment with the environment, with how society works, it can cause extreme distress.
So right now, it's important we make sure that our young people don't move into adulthood carrying unresolved mental health issues and trauma. So this episode takes a look at some of the medications, therapies and non-drug treatments that can help make these lives better. What works and why? And how accurate is the information young people get from social media? And we also examine anxiety.
It's common in neurodivergent young people. But is it always an anxiety disorder that we're seeing? Or something disguised as one? Something that's not recognised in the DSM-5? Neurodivergent burnout. The big takeaway here is that these rangatahi are not broken. They're just waiting patiently for society to recognise their awesomeness. Neurodiversity. It's no longer a fringe conversation.
For decades, neurodifferences have been framed as deficits. But now we're questioning that narrative. What if variation is part of the design? In Season 3, I look at the science, the systems, and the stories shaping what happens next and the tools that can really make a difference. Kia ora, I'm Sonia Gray, and this is No Such Thing as Normal, Season 3.
We know the rates of mental health distress are very high for neurodivergent young people, but the issue is broader. Across the board, young people seem to be struggling with anxiety. The rates of anxiety for 15 to 24 year olds have more than doubled in the past 10 years in Aotearoa. So are kids really more anxious now? Or is it just awareness of anxiety that has grown?
I don't think it's just more anxiety. I think young people are finding it harder to regulate.
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Chapter 2: How are anxiety and dysregulation linked to school refusal?
And this is how we make it better. We take all the distress away. We try and help you to feel better about yourself. And we prop up all the dysregulation, all the sensory overload, all the things. And we try to put those accommodations in place. And then we see an individual actually thriving. And we are treating it. And we've had some very good successes.
It's amazing, Daryl, about just that burnout. People need to know about parents. That's a thing. I mean, I've just realised, as you were saying it, I had burnout as a 20-year-old. I mean, I'm ADHD. But you had an ADHD burnout. It was burnout. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't go to university. And we just called it depression then.
But it's not. It's not. Yes. Well, what is it? The system's overloaded. We need to unload the system. Yeah.
And even just recognizing that, eh, which helps so much, saying you have too much and we're taking some of this weight off you. You don't have to keep doing.
You don't have to. And I think it's also about recognizing how hard people who don't fit in ā
who try to normalize what they do and it's at their peril because when you're trying to be like everybody else and your whole system doesn't work like that it's going to hurt and you know what i think too we don't see it much because because those people are really really good at masking yeah so we just get a surprise when they fall over because we're like they were fine yeah
oh God, what's happened? Yeah. Let's go to the psychiatrist, you know, and you think, you know, they've got all sorts of GI problems. And then they go to a gastroenterologist and they do all 101. And oh, now you've got functional gastric pain. And you're like, no, see, it's not that.
The vagus system has gone to hell in a handbasket and we don't need all these fancy meds and we don't need any of that stuff. What we need is to just take the pressure off. Give them time. It can take up to two years to recover from this if it's that bad. So we should recognize it before it comes, and then we should actually accommodate for that. And that's what I think is not happening.
So that's a whole other ballgame. Oh, no, but that's so important. That is so important. To be fair, it's not surprising this has been missed so often. Burnout is not generally associated with kids. It's described as an occupational phenomenon. Excessive demands at work that become overwhelming. But what Daryl Lee and her colleagues are seeing is not all about external demands.
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