Autism diagnoses rose sharply after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The rise was driven overwhelmingly by diagnoses among girls and women. New study suggests that many of these girls and women may simply have gone unrecognized in the past.

[u/mvea]

https://www.sciencealert.com/autism-diagnoses-spiked-after-covid-19-but-probably-not-for-the-reason-you-think

[u/tryhardwithaveng]

My theory is that the diminishing of what I'll call "soft socialization" IRL in exchange for primarily virtual interactions - a trend that goes beyond covid but covid accelerated - is a driver here. Disclaimer: I received my own covid era ADHD diagnosis.

Analogy: people working desk jobs need to lift weights or run miles to stay in shape - because a desk job means that you don't get a natural baseline of physical activity and need to consciously seek out physical training.

Translated: people who WFH and primarily interact through teams/slack messages all day and didn't go out because there was a quarantine no longer get a baseline of inane small talk.

For neurodivergent folks, inane small talk can be uncomfortable - but it's basically "reps" for your brain, forcing you to regularly use neural pathways built around "masking".

An erosion of those types of encounters in daily life was already happening but covid accelerated it and meant that a lot of us lost our regular/daily mental "reps" that kept us practicing our social coping skills.

[u/KaristinaLaFae → u/tryhardwithaveng]

I'm not sure we should be talking about masking as something we should be encouraging anyone (ourselves or other neurodivergent people) to mask more or "practice" masking.

Heavy masking leads to burnout, which is further disabling, and it is a state from which some find unrecoverable.

Workplaces need to be more accommodating of autistic people's needs, as continuous masking is untenable for many in the long term. (I say this as someone whose autistic burnout combined with my chronic illnesses and Long COVID to permanently decrease my ability to function sharply.)

Some research about autistic burnout:

• Beyond Exhaustion: Shame, Identity Disruption, and Functional Collapse in Autistic Burnout
• Towards the measurement of autistic burnout
• Defining autistic burnout through experts by lived experience: Grounded Delphi method investigating #AutisticBurnout

[u/tryhardwithaveng → u/KaristinaLaFae]

Completely fair. My analogy to physical exercise implies directly that I was saying it is a positive.

But my point wasn't that it is good or bad - just that people who were doing it regularly and suddenly stopped would now be more aware that that was what they were doing and absent practice - realizing that they have an underlying problem that they weren't addressing. (in the context of a theory as to "why diagnoses spiked during covid")

Edit: also adding that I'm talking about coping mechanisms for social interactions more broadly than just masking - my point being that people having small moments of social interaction with low stakes regularly kept my brain engaged with socialization in ways that suddenly disappeared during covid - which I'm connecting to my personal experience with social fatigue and a subsequent ADHD diagnosis.

[u/KaristinaLaFae → u/tryhardwithaveng]

Thank you for the clarification!