Shutdowns annoy me

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3-5 times a week, every week. My brain gets super cluttered by sensory stuff, grinds to a halt, blue screens and I get stuck for an hour or so. Afterward, I'm so exhausted I tend to sleep for another 2-3 hours after that no matter how much sleep I've had. Today I manage to skip the nap and I lose speech (this tends to happen 2-3 times a month anyway, I think, lasts for a few hours to a day and a half or so).

During the shutdown, it's basically random images and colors with no concepts associated with most of them and no short term memory at all, punctuated by brief periods of having some concepts available and then back into the chaos.

I just want to take this opportunity to say "First!" Also, I would like to inquire more on the nature of these episodes: are they followed or preceded by a depression? Are they accompanied by voices? Do you enter a catatonic state when these episodes arise? How long have these been going on? Have you suffered a traumatic or emotionally tolling event in your life? Is there any correlation between these episodes and the weather? Is there anything else that I have not asked that you would like to share about these episodes? If any of these questions are answered with a "yes," (with the obvious exception of the last one) you should seriously consider psychiatric evaluation.

http://everything2.com/user/Zifendorf/writeups/shutdown

http://www.shutdownsandstressinautism.c ... utism.html

These should clarify things a bit.

In order:

They have nothing to do with depression.
I don't hear and have never heard voices.
Please describe a "catatonic state", but also:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookde ... escription

These episodes have been going on for decades, with varying degrees of frequency.
Recently? No. Not for many many years.
Shutdowns happen in the middle of winter with snow on the ground and the middle of summer on 90+ degree days.

I've had three psychiatric evaluations in the past year. I will have a fourth in October (to continue receiving disability benefits). I don't appear to be schizophrenic, and my symptoms have been relatively stable since childhood. I say relatively, because sustained overload and stress can make everything worse, which has happened to me more than once over the past ten years alone.

Anyway, what happens, basically, is overload. Sensory overload - too much noise, too much visual action, even being in the rain and feeling the rain hit my body, can cause overload, and enough overload basically pushes my brain into this state where I can't do anything and just shut down. I don't do anything, but my brain is doing something, I would say processing the overloading stimuli. The whole process is exhausting and leaves me cognitively "off". I usually sleep it off, but sometimes I don't or can't, and other things sometimes happen.

I have had shutdowns caused by emotional overload as well, but this doesn't happen very often.

Oh I have stress induced shutdowns too... during which my mind goes numb and I feel nothing or even process anything. They last four hours[not for hours] when I am stressed usually. When I am excessively stressed I sleep it off. I've trouble pronouncing words when I am stressed or even making sentences when I'm stressed. It affects other languages I speak too. I have stammering problems when I'm super stressed.

I've had numb periods, when I am overloaded and about to shut down. I associate them less as shutdowns than as a precursor to the shutdowns I described, but they probably qualify. It's really really hard to do much at all in that state, and it does affect my speech to some degree, but so does a million other things and I never know if I'll be able to assemble a complete sentence or not (often I can, but still).

Shutdowns are not pleasant. I don’t think my shutdown’s are as bad as Verdandi describes, I just switch myself off and withdraw into myself to block out the rest of the world, normally because I can’t cope with sensory overload.

Until I found out about AS, I didn’t even notice that I used to do this. I recently tried to force myself not to withdraw in an overload situation (a crowded restaurant). I felt the overload coming on but tried to stay with it. My brain still did its best to shut down and while I may have appeared to be with my companions, I was there in body only, I could not process any of the conversation. I could hear the words spoken but they made no sense to me and my hearing focussed in on a guy speaking Cantonese on the next table (I don’t speak Cantonese). I had a very strong urge just to escape the place. I did not enjoy the experience at all.

When the restaurant quietened down, everything slowly went back to normal.

Just wanted to say I really like these links.

My shutdowns aren't near as bad as yours, I think, but these links really helped me understand more about my own shutdowns. Especially the smaller stuff like when I have something to say and the moment I go to say it the words are just gone. It's the most frustrating thing in the world. I can speak in front of people easily. I don't have that kind of social phobia. I don't mind getting up and speaking my mind. But sometimes the words are just gone, even if I'd carefully planned them out the moment before I opened my mouth.



Same thing happened to me last time I was out at a restaurant with friends. I kept unconsciously rocking side to side in my chair, and kept forcing myself to stop because I didn't want to look like an idiot. There were conversations going on on either side of me, but I could only catch pieces along with pieces of what people at other tables were saying.

The irony was, I'd been to the same restaurant the week before with my family and it was fine.

I won't shutdown because of purely sensory issues. I suspect mine aren't bad enough to shut me down. For me, it takes a combination of sensory issues plus other kinds of stress. For instance, with the instance at the restaurant I was already stressed because the people I went with forgot to tell me the time changed, so I was there and hour early.

I hate shutdowns too, but I hate meltdowns more. I started trying to reduce my shutdowns and only got more and more meltdowns .

Those links have good descriptions though. I have at times sensory shutdowns, receptive language shutdowns, speech shutdowns, motor shutdowns, and full shutdowns.

Most commonly are a combination of partial sensory shutdown (drastically reduced parsing of inputs, but partial) and motor shutdown.

I've never had a speech shutdown without it also being a motor shutdown - those tend to be the ones I react to worst, because my thoughts are racing, and I can neither move nor speak - I tend to end up regaining movement of my fingers and start typing to get thoughts out of my head before I can do anything else. That's definitely helped, especially with the communication.

I wonder, is there a word for a shutdown that also includes the inability to stop talking or to filter? I've felt like I've shutdown and done that before - overloaded, stopped processing things, if I processed somthing someone said I'd react verbally without any thought or control, but as a whole it felt strongly like a shutdown.

Overloads are so hard to avoid and so hard to explain to NTs .

I went the other way. I tried to stop my meltdowns and now they turn into shutdowns.

I have more kinds of shutdowns than I listed - but I have enough full shutdowns that it's carving large chunks out of several days a week.

I've had this happen, although I didn't think of anything that was happening with me as shutdowns. During one of these in the '90s was probably the first time I clearly wondered if I was autistic, but this was also because I was experiencing a lot of palilalia as well.