Hi everybody, I am gathering some information and maybe making an information video about shutdowns. My main goal is to help explain shutdowns to NT people.
My way of making videos is to do lots and lots of research. I do it this way because I am hyperlexic and research is a special interest of mine (I am a professor), so I think that doing good research is the best way that I can be helpful to the community. In all the research I am doing, though, I keep finding some information that I think is a little bit incomplete.
When medical/psychological research talks about shutdowns, they often describe it something like this: "Shutdown can affect the autistic individual in different ways. They may withdraw totally from the external environment, may be unable to communicate or respond, curl up in a ball, or engage only in self-initiated repetitive actions (Shah, Catatonia, p. 24)." Now, I agree that shutdowns can have all of these effects. I have had all of these experiences. But VERY often, the first thing that happens to me when I shut down is that I simply freeze in place in a very neutral-seeming way. To an NT person, I look exactly the same as I did a second or two earlier. My posture is the same; my breathing is the same; everything is the same. The only difference is that, if you try to get me to respond, I can't.
It's not that I think the Shah book is deceptive or anything. Shah DOES say that a person in shutdown may be unable to communicate or respond. But I wish that her description emphasized, or made clearer, that sometimes being unable to speak or respond is the ONLY sign of shutdown that an external observer would be able to recognize. I feel almost as if an NT person reading the whole description might get the impression that an autistic person in shutdown will always *look* shutdown somehow. Sometimes I do; sometimes I don't.
My shutdowns go kind of like this. Often, at first, I am simply unable to speak, but I otherwise seem "normal." Sometimes this unspeaking phase lasts a long time but otherwise I appear just as I otherwise would. My face becomes completely placid, as if I was totally unbothered, even when I am extremely distressed inside. I used to joke to a friend that it's as if the internet has gone out on my face. (It's not uncommon that I start crying almost hysterically when I come out of shutdown, but it's actually because I am becoming less upset, not more upset: it's actually a good sign when I start to cry, because it means that my face has come back online again, so to speak.) Sometimes, especially if I am harassed or pressured to respond while I am nonspeaking, I become more and more visibly dissociated. I slump over or slide down in my chair, and sometimes I end up sliding all the way to the floor, or dropping to the ground if I am standing. I sometimes end up in a ball on the floor, but for me that's usually because a shutdown has been progressing for a while and because I have been unable to escape the triggers of the shutdown. But that doesn't always happen.
Also, I almost never "withdraw from the environment" in a literal sense when I am shut down because I can't walk. I think maybe Dr. Shah means that, when we are shutdown, we withdraw mentally and cognitively from the environment and stop responding to the stimuli around us. I think that description is quite accurate. But I wouldn't want an NT person to read the phrase "withdraw from the environment" and think, "oh, autistic people in shutdown usually walk away," because I often can't walk away or necessarily even move at all.
I just wondered what other people's experiences of shutdowns are like. Are they like mine or different? Do you think that you look visibly "shut down" when you are in a shutdown, or are your shutdowns sometimes almost invisible to the people around you? Thank you for sharing your experiences.
