#This might be a sign of mental illness

[orangjoe]

I am losing my mind

anyway, here’s some of the data for a phylogenetic tree of harley poe albums no one wanted/needed/asked for

[inkskinned]

they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?

they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.

you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.

you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.

mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.

you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.

[fandxmslxt69]

how is it that with every new release of an EPIC saga im like there's GOTTA be a flop this time like there's no way he's back with another banger saga its been 7 sagas now at least ONE song has to flop

and literally NO FAULT EVERY TIME it is a 10/10 saga no flops no skips only heartbreak grief and mental illness

[goofalicousgooberface]

help I started crying because I was drawing a Chainshipping piece and I felt like it was too private of a moment between the two of them and that I was a bad person for intruding 😭 LIKE GIRL. THEYRE ON A PIECE OF PAPER. YOU ARE LITERALLY DRAWING THEM INTO EXISTENCE. STOP HUMANIZING THE PENCIL LINES YOU DUMB BITCH!!!!

[whydousernamesevenexist]

Does anyone have the urge to overshare every time they're talking about themselves?

Like, I need to describe all my thoughts in detail, or I then feel like I lied to the person and manipulated them.

Even if it's something minor and pointless.

I just have to make sure I wasn't dishonest and I didn't manipulate the other person.

[peachyyjellie]

i feel sick

[edge-oftheworld]

one thing I love about following celebrities/artists who are honest and proactive about their mental health struggles etc is I can’t count the number of times someone I know is going through something and I’m like ‘I’ve got a song for u’ and how much of my life involves telling myself ‘if [redacted] can do something/get better/etc then so can i’ (and having actual real evidence of it in front of me) and I can’t understate how much I appreciate these things.

but at the same time it involves a whole lot of watching people I care about suffer and you learn to read the signs and infer between the lines in songs and interviews, and yes we can never fully know what they don’t share with us, but when they do share things it’s not a big stretch to be like ‘this seems like it’s what life is like for you and I have taken encouragement from it but you deserve so much better’. and it’s easy to find ways to get angry at a predatory industry and realise things that could be hurtful if you’re already fragile.

and we can advocate for some things and help ourselves and the people around us feel better but it’s hard to meaningfully reach your faves as an individual. and there are things we can’t say on the internet in too much detail, speculation becomes the harmful kind of gossip, and so sometimes it’s a whole lot of internally saying ‘you’re doing incredibly well to have gotten to where you are but I wish for your sake things would get better faster’

[elliscousland]

mmm. i've been thinking about ellis' ocd & how it's aggravated Pretty Hard by his schizophrenia. was thinking, also, about how his living space reflects that. things like how his desk is a total mess but there is scarcely a speck of dirt on the floor bcs he will scour it / pick any dirt from in between the floorboards. the way he pins his drawings to the wall is very neat & organized but he has to leave candlewax for a certain amount of time before he feels like he can scrape it up. but his fireplace is always well-kept & his clothes are always folded a particular sort of way ( the way nan used to )

thinking about his dry hands from how often he washes them, convinced that there is just a bit of something ( blood, dirt, charcoal ) under his fingernails & that something terrible will happen because of that. his blades are always sharp but if he doesn't cut up his fingers sharpening them did he even do it right? thinking about how ellis can lock his door several times before bed but still have to get up every few hours to make sure it's still locked or he's Sure something terrible will happen to him & his wife.

thinking about how when he's sure something terrible will happen if he doesn't partake in specific rituals & that stress can trigger other delusions in the mix. ( things like those he loves will die if he doesnt have an even number of logs on the fire, the grey wardens will collapse if he sleeps on the left side of the bed, he thinks he'll get ill if he's not using the right kind of ink ect, ect ) i want to break all of this down sometime but i think this mixes really dangerously with his delusions because believing these things will happen turns very quickly into believing these things are happening.

he puts a lot in his journals but there is also this intense belief that if he puts those thoughts ANYWHERE ELSE they will become real & happen. which in the case of some of his invasive thoughts / obsessions, that is very bad. he thinks of things happening to people but also him doing terrible things, though i don't want to get into that on the dash. there are a handful of people that he can talk with when the obsessive thoughts hit hard but those people are far & few between because of that Feeling that it Has To Be In The Journal

[a-small-writer-in-a-big-world]

Small COD confession of sorts. When I get super anxious about family dinners around the holidays, I tend to daydream about any of the guys (mainly Simon tbh) shutting down any teasing from my cousins and aunts about how I'm one of the very few adults in the family that's still single and childless. I know they mean nothing by it, but it's exhausting hearing it over and over again. So picturing Simon deflate their teasing or even saying something to flip it back on them so *they're* the one that is embarrassed is kinda satisfying to me

I often think about them doing something like this for me too. It’s a comfort thing maybe idk

[fishsinsareacknowledged]

Ohoho a sudden burst of adrenaline just shot what the fuck.

[lightbulb-warning]

local audhd having idiot has to do something not related to their hyperfixation and fuCKING EXPLODES!!1!!!!!! /j

[seldaryne]

somewhere in the back of my mind i'm piecing together conversational fragments that must have happened post-cazador fight & post-orin fight (+ all that came immediately after) respectively. i don't think it'd be untouched until post-game, but probably would take place closer to the final fight. something something the calm before the storm, insomnia-induced contemplation, etcetera.

i'm not 100% sure on the tone of everyone's emotions yet. what i do know for sure is that when astarion asks velrith if she would have fought him the same way she did cazador (he's seen what she can do & knows there would probably be a decent chance of her success, which is like. at the very least a mildly frightening thought lmao), she's going to answer him truthfully.

yes, she would have, no hesitation whatsoever. & he kind of figured that would be the case, but also wants to know why. it's in the past, he's definitely not going to go out of his way to set up a new version of the ritual for himself so it's all conjecture anyway, but there's enough curiosity to justify it.

& she was still pretty removed from everything at that point, so it wasn't completely impossible to imagine her stepping back to just allow it either. it's not exactly like there's a blueprint for what the average person would do in the same situation, especially when he wasn't objectively incorrect about that type of power providing safety.

there was a case either way, but even she was pretty sure it was logically wrong to let 7000 people die for that from a moral standpoint. alexithymia aside, that's pretty obvious. she's still not even sure that 7000 spawn would be as dangerous as an ascended vampire, & would probably point out that statistically speaking, a decent number of them will probably end up destroyed before they become a threat. letting anyone ascend just seemed like an objectively worse path across the board, and while she might have a memory of mostly holes & miss out on a number of social norms, she isn't stupid by any stretch.

there's also the issue of her oath. he gets it as far as knowing it's extremely important to her & she essentially wouldn't be who she is now, but he'll probably never get it past that. in the timeline where she was personally in favour of ascension but still valued her oath, she would have made herself follow it. one of them was not going to survive that encounter, simple as that. which isn't a pleasant truth to hear, but he knows that she's definitely not lying either.

she loves him in her own way, as intensely as she knows how (which is actually quite a lot, but is very much something that requires you to know what you're looking for to actually see it), but that promise she made to an ideal, that single idea that she was able to re-build an entire identity around was going to hold more weight in that situation. there would have been no justifying it if she let him go on, no way she could crawl her way out of oathbreaking a second time (to say nothing of how badly it broke her when she made the mistake that led to the first incident).

she didn't even remember her own name after orin tried to cave her skull in & left her for dead, but she sure remembered the oath she swore before bhaal upended her life. to her, that means something. fighting him would have been terrible, yes, but it would also have been a familiar flavour of tragedy & not the same hefty blow to her sense of being. she would unhappily survive after that, probably alone by choice, but alive. self-betrayal wouldn't see the same ending.

& i don't see him exactly feeling comforted by this, because it's a lot to unpack, but he also wouldn't have bothered to ask if he wasn't able to digest the truth either (she's also historically a really, really bad liar & there would be no question if she was actually lying. it's actually embarrassing to watch her try).

the dedication makes so much sense, though. after the night she'd completely lost control, the only thing that really gave her anything resembling solace was the promise that there would be someone to end her if there was no chance she'd return to her senses. not platitudes, not gentleness, but the knowledge that someone would be willing & able to destroy her before someone else got hurt. (admittedly, that interaction left him feeling a bit weird in an inarticulate sort of way.)

& another thing--if they're having this conversation, she's also managed to piece together the memory of when she decided to pursue her oath, & more importantly, why.

rejecting bhaal had given her a notable change in her overall demeanour & energy, but absolutely nothing drastic. it doesn't destroy the typical disconnection she has with the majority of the world or the feeling of viewing everything from the other side of a glass barrier. that otherness in knowing there was something missing by the standards of her peers led her to value her body as a tool early on. so what if you can't make conversation without seeing the other person struggle not to visibly recoil? so what if you can't feel happy in a way that doesn't feel false? devotion to an ideal meant she would still meet a standard of goodness, could still serve a function & if she did it well enough, other shortcomings could be overlooked entirely. certain things were beyond her reach, but being useful and functional wasn't.

(even that was ripped away, and she learned that no matter how badly she wanted to change herself, she'd only ever been intended as an instrument of death. she didn't enjoy a second of it, but she's always been a tool that needed a guiding hand of some sort. the reaction to that much death shouldn't have been apathy, but even that felt too difficult to muster up after a while. whatever hope she had at at least being able to serve the people around her in a way that made up for her deficits was gone.)

no real messy conclusion here. he sits with the knowledge that she would have killed him out of necessity, but those same reasons are also a big part of why she was unquestioningly ready to aid him in the first place. she tells him it genuinely wouldn't have mattered even if he despised her for some reason on a personal level; he brought to her attention a man responsible for the untold suffering of thousands of people, and that meant she had an obligation to become involved. not exactly the romantic ideal of a knight in shining armour, but the consistency is terrifying & splendid in its own way.

--

honestly, i don't even know if he would know how he felt until he has some time to think about it. the way she functions internally is just so insanely alien to him sometimes, despite her general willingness to plainly answer more or less any questions he might have. the explanations work for how, not always why. he gets the bodily disconnect, of course, and the idea that you're only as good as your last performance. & his experience with other paladins tells him that they're generally kind of odd, but not in the way she was.

he wants to know why, then, if she'd always seen herself as someone who had such a massive blindspot, did she dedicate herself to something inherently selfless? usually, that sort of decision came out of emotional connection (not to be insensitive, if there's even a way to dance around that type of insecurity delicately). & she just sort of shrugs, as if the conclusion was obvious. she could always sense that there was something incomplete & incorrect in her, and if she couldn't fix it, then she could at least make up for it in other ways.

(this is probably the most glaringly obvious example of how different their internal workings are. he cannot for the life of him imagine continually putting himself on the line for strangers like that voluntarily, knowing he'd be getting so little out of it beyond meeting some imaginary and/or arbitrary standard. she's never even considered it to be that, on the other hand, and knows that causing suffering takes approximately the same amount of effort. better to at least have someone benefitting from her existence, if she should exist at all. there's still a part of him that feels like he's owed something for all of his suffering--she's still not even certain that what she's experienced would even qualify as suffering. if it is, shouldn't she tolerate it willingly because of what she is & what her purpose was?)

he'd propositioned her at the tiefling party for a few reasons. one was, of course, the need to secure his safety via her enamoured trust. not a single one of those interactions followed his usual script. yes, she went along with them, but never in a way that he felt stemmed from unbearable lust or otherwise being completely enamoured. he'd picked up on the involuntary detachment too without realizing, but it made him nervous. the second reason was more immediate; the staring.

in hindsight, he is now aware that the people watching is a harmless (if disconcerting when you're the one her eyes are on) habit of hers, and it's not just him who ends up targeted either. she's fascinated by the mechanics of someone who's able to work a crowd, who can effortlessly draw strangers in & figure out where things go from there. body language, vocal tone, everything is observed. she's moved past envy at this point in her life, she tells him, but she suspects that probably wasn't so as a child. there's a very hazy recollection of trying to imitate the way some neighbouring girls spoke to each other when they played outside, ending in confused disappointment when her efforts were laughed at as they ran off without her.

he could talk to people, though. maybe not always as well as he did now (everyone had an awkward learning phase, he figures, even if he can't recall any similar memories of ostracization during his formative years), and that wasn't saying he enjoyed the vast majority of those interactions either, but he could do it & do it well. so well, in fact, that her observational fascination had been inevitable. what he thought was intense suspicion was actually just a curious audience, and her (correctly understood) bafflement when he'd propositioned her had also retroactively made a lot of sense. she'd seen no reason for someone like her to have a place in his performances, but was curious enough to go along with it to see how everything looked from this side.

(everything worked out anyway, but he still feels a little stupid for being that off-base when she'd never even thought of hiding her motivations.)

there's also so much to unpack about withers dragging her back from the dead. she didn't even question it being a 'no peace due to the weight of your sins' scenario (which... i'm not certain it was entirely?). the only alternative she might be convinced of is knowing the reality of her strength and how valuable it would be for the upcoming fight. stepping into the actual gameplay for a second but she had orin down single-handedly in 1.5 turns. just over a minute of combat. that's not nothing, and would almost definitely be horrifying to watch happen in real-time. yes, that's your friend, yes, that's your lover, but it's a good thing she's not your enemy or else you might also be reduced to a pile of viscera.

i'd say this is probably the point where the lack of value she has for herself is crystal clear. not purposefully, but he's had some pretty pressing matters on the brain & didn't catch on while his focus was elsewhere (like not dying or being recaptured, for example). & she's also actually sort of... passive in a lot of ways? she's got a code she adheres to and acts accordingly in situations where it applies, and naturally there were some pretty strong reactions about bhaal's connection with her. but beyond that she tends to accept things as they come to her, operating without solid intentions or a notion of preference until after the fact.

this gets me to another thing i'll probably have more thoughts on later (or more in-depth anyway). him understanding & functioning for the majority of his existence with his worth measuring up to what he could do for cazador specifically. how good he is at reading people, using that to mold himself into someone that they'd be head-over-heels for in one evening and how easily those habits still show themselves presently & he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to unlearn that instinctive reaction, compared to her complete inability to hide anything. she will never be charming, or smooth, or even be able to do the briefest impression of 'normal.' people don't like her, even without bhaal's influence on her actions; there's still something that always flags as subconsciously wrong to them. and she'll accept the treatment anyway because it seems to be the best she can achieve. he knows how to have people falling at his feet with minimal effort; she's consistently surprised when anyone likes her at all.

(there's a parallel/connection here that i'm grasping towards but haven't quite defined yet & it has something to do with physical autonomy/reclamation of the self and how that can manifest.)

she also wasn't surprised when he confessed to having less than honourable intentions about their initial hookup. she didn't know the exact reasons behind it, of course, but she assumed it might just have been his own curiosity or even boredom that drove him. lightly insulting but another thing that explains her behaviour at the time. it was still something she wanted to engage in, but there was never any assumption that it was something more than skin-deep & honestly i think he might have been a bit miffed to learn that? in a way that isn't even entirely logical, since it also means someone didn't just fall for the ruse (& wanted to be around him anyway). but also: someone didn't fall for it, meaning there was some sort of hole in the armour, some type of vulnerability that gave it away. knowing now that he wouldn't have been persecuted doesn't mean this is any less of an anxious thought.

she's not aloof & never actually has been. she doesn't think she has that desire to connect because it's never been reciprocated, but it's there & it's strong. she'll take whatever she can to try and figure out what's missing in her, and this desire has been exploited before without her knowing. if bhaal's control made all her efforts pointless, able to control her body & override her own thoughts for the sake of murder, then there wasn't anything left to fight for. having her memories taken was inherently violating, but also probably the only way she was ever going to gain a desire to live for herself in any capacity. there's something just a bit extra tragic about someone who's never been offered anything remotely self-worth building to the degree they think 'hollow' is a positive state.

anyway, this definitely isn't a happy conversation for them, but it's important & revealing. it's also her first time really vocalizing what she thinks of herself, so that's pretty big too even if it's indirect. i also get the sense he might be even somewhat paradoxically angry. not at her, but more just the whole situation & the fact that these are the lengths she feels she has to go to for... what, exactly? the off chance that someone might speak to you like a person instead of an anomaly to avoid? it's gone on so long now, he knows she's never even considered that there should be an alternative. he's having to build himself back up again & it's been varying levels of struggling to do so, but he's never actually considered what starting from total 0 would look like. evidently, it looks like not even understanding what the issue is in the first place, or that it exists at all. he doesn't know if one is worse, or if they're just two types of the same hell.

mix this in with some guilt-tinged relief, though; if she's just piecing together herself now, then she's also not judging any of his own missteps. her tendency towards acceptance could probably use some more discretion on who receives it, but it's that same quality that allows her to gracefully deal with whatever he throws at her. if she doesn't know how, she will learn, not just for him but so she has the skill in the future. stubbornness can be a problem, but tempered with humility & patience? a lot of good can be done. he's done/said very little that she hasn't been able to take in stride and add to a growing list of experiences. it's also not like he's never crossed a line before, and it was made very explicit when it happened. his attempt to make light of the oathbreaking situation had backfired terribly, and that was apparent the very millisecond it happened.

but every time he asks something of her, or reveals a little more of himself, or dares to express discomfort, there's never been a need to push for it. how fear-filled had he been, wanting to crawl out of his own skin, when he'd choked over wanting to step back from sex? he'd expected something. disappointment, most likely. perhaps anger. a demand to be the exception. definitely not a thoughtful look while the request was digested before agreeing to it shortly after, only asking a question to clarify if he meant a break from physical contact entirely, or just certain kinds? & he just blinked back for a solid few seconds, processing how easy that was, how it didn't need all of the build-up or trepidation. ask & receive. that's it. & he asks why, because it's all he can actually think to say in the moment instead of an answer to her question, which produces an equally baffled because you... asked? what other response would there be?

as if no other option existed. as if what he said was completely reasonable and not something the majority of people he'd interacted with would have taken as a personal slight. the only concession she'd needed was clarification. and because he couldn't leave well enough alone, he did eventually manage to wheedle out that yes, should he have been turned off entirely from any sort of physicality whatsoever, she would have been somewhat disappointed (expected, honestly, especially since her recent discovery of general touch being something she craved after years of denial), but still wouldn't have pressed.

while grateful at the time (still grateful now, actually), he can't pinpoint if this was purely for his benefit, or just another side of how quickly she could deny herself anything that brought her the slightest amount of pleasure. it's not innocence, because it doesn't make sense in any world to apply that word to bhaal's former favourite, and she's aware of things even if she fails in their application. perhaps it's just the natural result of conditioning & neglect, a lack of recognition pushing her to accept scraps in place of something more thoughtful.

& sitting here now with her, learning that the one thing she had when everything else was stripped away was actually something she took up out of a desperate need to make up for the fact that she was simply born as herself is...

well. it's something, that's for sure.

because it's still important to her & likely will be until she's dead. it brings comfort and direction, providing a framework that she can use to navigate other people on occasion. he's not even going to broach the topic in a potential shift in interests. it wouldn't go anywhere or do anything beyond making her pull away. he'd been made to feel all sorts of shamefully inadequate over the last two hundred years, but he could at least sit with the knowledge that he had a few decades before all of that. it wasn't much comfort, especially with the understanding that he would be dealing with the ripple effects for an undetermined amount of time, patching the damage he could & learning to accept what he couldn't. but he knew enough to be able to mourn what had been lost.

so perhaps the solution here isn't to remove it, but to just... introduce more things into her life for variety. he's not sure yet, nor does he think he's really the best candidate to help either. (ironic, since she feels like she's the least qualified person in camp to help anyone with anything, but here we are.) & that's if a solution is even necessary here. perhaps it really is just a matter of time before there's a shift. she's been free of bhaal's influence now for... what, a week? possibly less? which leaves years to sort things out after, assuming they survive this anyway. a lot could change in that time.

another item on the post-tadpole to-do list, another bridge to cross when they arrive.

[cherryview]

!!!!

[roseofcards90]

If I had the chance to redo this semester I would take it so badly 😭 like this was not it at all

[theenemyod]

Thisthisthisthisthis

“i don’t respect therians/otherkin/etc because they’re mentally ill!” oh so. so you believe mentally ill people aren’t worthy of your respect. no that’s fine. that doesn’t speak volumes about you as a person don’t worry about it

[drdemonprince]

The data does not support the assumption that all burned out people can “recover.” And when we fully appreciate what burnout signals in the body, and where it comes from on a social, economic, and psychological level, it should become clear to us that there’s nothing beneficial in returning to an unsustainable status quo. 

The term “burned out” is sometimes used to simply mean “stressed” or “tired,” and many organizations benefit from framing the condition in such light terms. Short-term, casual burnout (like you might get after one particularly stressful work deadline, or following final exams) has a positive prognosis: within three months of enjoying a reduced workload and increased time for rest and leisure, 80% of mildly burned-out workers are able to make a full return to their jobs. 

But there’s a lot of unanswered questions lurking behind this happy statistic. For instance, how many workers in this economy actually have the ability to take three months off work to focus on burnout recovery? What happens if a mildly burnt-out person does not get that rest, and has to keep toiling away as more deadlines pile up? And what is the point of returning to work if the job is going to remain as grueling and uncontrollable as it was when it first burned the worker out? 

Burnout that is not treated swiftly can become far more severe. Clinical psychologist and burnout expert Arno van Dam writes that when left unattended (or forcibly pushed through), mild burnout can metastasize into clinical burnout, which the International Classification of Diseases defines as feelings of energy depletion, increased mental distance, and a reduced sense of personal agency. Clinically burned-out people are not only tired, they also feel detached from other people and no longer in control of their lives, in other words.

Unfortunately, clinical burnout has quite a dismal trajectory. Multiple studies by van Dam and others have found that clinical burnout sufferers may require a year or more of rest following treatment before they can feel better, and that some of burnout’s lingering effects don’t go away easily, if at all. 

In one study conducted by Anita Eskildsen, for example, burnout sufferers continued to show memory and processing speed declines one year after burnout. Their cognitive processing skills improved slightly since seeking treatment, but the experience of having been burnt out had still left them operating significantly below their non-burned-out peers or their prior self, with no signs of bouncing back. 

It took two years for subjects in one of van Dam’s studies to return to “normal” levels of involvement and competence at work. following an incident of clinical burnout. However, even after a multi-year recovery period they still performed worse than the non-burned-out control group on a cognitive task designed to test their planning and preparation abilities. Though they no longer qualified as clinically burned out, former burnout sufferers still reported greater exhaustion, fatigue, depression, and distress than controls.

In his review of the scientific literature, van Dam reports that anywhere from 25% to 50% of clinical burnout sufferers do not make a full recovery even four years after their illness. Studies generally find that burnout sufferers make most of their mental and physical health gains in the first year after treatment, but continue to underperform on neuropsychological tests for many years afterward, compared to control subjects who were never burned out. 

People who have experienced burnout report worse memories, slower reaction times, less attentiveness, lower motivation, greater exhaustion, reduced work capability, and more negative health symptoms, long after their period of overwork has stopped. It’s as if burnout sufferers have fallen off their previous life trajectory, and cannot ever climb fully back up. 

And that’s just among the people who receive some kind of treatment for their burnout and have the opportunity to rest. I found one study that followed burned-out teachers for seven years and reported over 14% of them remained highly burnt-out the entire time. These teachers continued feeling depersonalized, emotionally drained, ineffective, dizzy, sick to their stomachs, and desperate to leave their jobs for the better part of a decade. But they kept working in spite of it (or more likely, from a lack of other options), lowering their odds of ever healing all the while. 

Van Dam observes that clinical burnout patients tend to suffer from an excess of perseverance, rather than the opposite: “Patients with clinical burnout…report that they ignored stress symptoms for several years,” he writes. “Living a stressful life was a normal condition for them. Some were not even aware of the stressfulness of their lives, until they collapsed.”

Instead of seeking help for workplace problems or reducing their workload, as most people do, clinical burnout sufferers typically push themselves through unpleasant circumstances and avoid asking for help. They’re also less likely to give up when placed under frustrating circumstances, instead throttling the gas in hopes that their problems can be fixed with extra effort. They become hyperactive, unable to rest or enjoy holidays, their bodies wired to treat work as the solution to every problem. It is only after living at this unrelenting pace for years that they tumble into severe burnout. 

Among both masked Autistics and overworked employees, the people most likely to reach catastrophic, body-breaking levels of burnout are the people most primed to ignore their own physical boundaries for as long as possible. Clinical burnout sufferers work far past the point that virtually anyone else would ask for help, take a break, or stop caring about their work.

And when viewed from this perspective, we can see burnout as the saving grace of the compulsive workaholic — and the path to liberation for the masked disabled person who has nearly killed themselves trying to pass as a diligent worker bee. 

I wrote about the latest data on burnout "recovery," and the similarities and differences between Autistic burnout and conventional clinical burnout. The full piece is free to read or have narrated to you in the Substack app at drdevonprice.substack.com