❤️‍🩹autism & menopause

[Music] so let's talk about autism and menopause first of all this is a very understudied topic and it turns out that there are four main themes I want to share with you from this research article called a perfect storm autistic experiences of menopause and and midlife I'm a licensed clinical psychologist I have been through so much this last year with menopause um surgeries and cancer risks and all kinds of things hormones it has been so difficult but I want to just say this that when I started menopause around 50 I felt like and I've been saying it like someone turned the lights out on my energetic Focus to sort of like be here to care about things and then I had autoimmune disease blah blah blah and so it has been really impactful and I have to go off all HRT now because of what's been going on and I've been on it for about 6 years so if I look a little more tired and uh stressed out lately because I'm not sleeping but uh it's better than having uh uh bad outcomes okay so the point is that this research article looked at and this actually was done in um 2024 all the research I'm sharing in the next several videos are going to be mostly in the last few years if not this last year it says that some autistic people find menopause surprisingly not surprisingly right to be tumultuous and even catastrophic and that what happens for us is that as we go through menopause and that that depletion of hormones and the issues that we can struggle with heightened sensory sensitivities difficulty coping reduced social contact risk for self harm and challenges with adaptive functioning and cognitive changes so things around brain fog and concentration and memory not just that energetic thing I was talking about and and some research also talked about for many autistic women how the menopausal phase can look and feel a lot like when they had their periods you know going back to adolescence and all of the Dynamics associated with that and then if you add on the health issues as an aside like endometriosis PCOS and an increase certainly we'll talk about CSS Central Sensitivity Syndrome which is related to how our body responds to pain and hormones and all kinds of things it can really intensify all of these Dynamics so not only is there a lack of awareness of menopause in general certainly for autistic women but the the dynamic is that there's an increase in all of these things that can make our experiences really difficult and so the research looked at several different you know uh studies and and comparisons that they could find and did some interviews but there were four main themes that they concluded with the First theme number one was complexity multiplicity and intensity of symptoms and it says this a major theme throughout uh focus groups and interviews was the interaction of menopausal symptoms with autistic characteristics and co-existing conditions like ADHD which we know is very common that those two tend to go together as well as difficulty with distinguishing those too for some struggles with mental health emotions and self harm heighten the challenges their negative intense emotions led to a spiral of distress and difficulty emotional volatility and heightened sensory sensitivities as a result some identified a feeling of autistic overwhelm or autistic stress all of those increasing now it also turns out that many of those in the survey were late diagnosed um so they were discovering that they were artistic and also going through menopause and that really at the core it could lead to things like burnout and affect job ability to manage your job and I was thinking about how the coinciding of the um 2020 situation with my menopause symptoms and me deciding to stay home I hadn't really thought about me you know deciding to continue to work from home but there's probably a connection there for many of this and where it just gets harder to do certain things certainly if you're not sleeping having hot flashes and don't feel well it's going to affect anybody right let alone where we are in a certain stage of life okay theme number two is life experience and adversity converging at midlife social isolation and past trauma and so it says prior social experiences and traumas had a profound effect on the behaviors and expectations of the participants these experiences led to increased self-consciousness self-criticism self censorship like more and more in different social contexts for many of them they had episodes of feeling misunderstood and burnt out of socializing themsel uh socially isolating themselves you know obviously a history in some cases of being bullied and victimized and that they had kind of like all that could like culminate in menopause and it creates so much stress that they were no longer able to cope and so many of them had described their lifelong efforts to camouflage were basically become more difficult in menopause so all of those compensation strategies things we we've learned to do that we were kind of like maybe white knuckling when menopause hits can make it that much more difficult for us to manage and to be supportive and understood talks about history of traumas history history of trauma and how all of that can kind of like really get compromised when you're struggling to deal with your you know daily well-being um the next issue was theme number three the importance of knowledge and connection and just basically talks about how Society you know doesn't talk about menopause it certainly hasn't talked about autistic women in menopause and that there's a lack of resources and connection and so how that's important to be more prepared in terms of the future and the last theme theme four is barriers to support and care and it talks about that these were done in the UK I guess there'll be different there would be different social dynamics in terms of medicine that many people had already had a lot of negative experiences with the health care System no surprise whether it was through trauma their health issues not being understood certainly often times and all these articles are talking about how many caregivers and clinicians from doctors and therapists and just medical professionals in general only have the white male boy lens of autism in mind and don't even begin to see it so certainly a massive amount of misdiagnoses I've been talking a lot about borderline as one of them and the wrong medications things like that and so it talks about this idea that there's all these barriers even when you are going through menopause I think most women would say who are not autistic it's like even in your own doctor's offices I went through three separate surgeries last year with three different doctors all with kind of different outcomes to deal with the same problem and um many of them like don't understand HRT they don't understand the risks they don't know what to do when there's a something that you go through I even had you know uh reached out to some big creators on here and they didn't really have answers for me who were like menopause experts um not that they owe me any answers because like you know whatever but it was like hey this thing is going on I don't know what to do it seems to I can't find any research on it you know blah blah blah um and so anyway the point is that there are all these barriers to entry to getting support even things like making phone calls that talked about for autistic people in C places where that's an overwhelming thing to do to get on the phone and so how do you make appointments how do you create situations to get support so the bottom line is this this is really also for clinicians and those of us who interact with people who might be I had a lot of patients come in and they like late 40s and they were like I'm losing my mind I'm going crazy and I'd be like no you're you're probably in menopause and many of them were a key takeaway is the importance of person centered autism informed Healthcare that considers intersectionality and accessibility needs we encourage healthc Care Professionals to recognize autistic communication Styles and the various symptoms of menopause including those that are less widely discussed and may need to be receptive to the fact that menopause may start earlier that is commonly expected the reported range in this study the onset was between 38 and 51 and the last thing I'll say is for many of you I know if you follow me and you're younger like this is such an important topic to start to understand now even though it feels like like who cares that's so far away because it creeps up on you and it's this Insidious slow thing and one day you wake up and you might be like Oh I'm not having my period anymore but like I don't feel like myself anymore and the answers and solutions are not easy if you do follow any of the menopause experts just the history of HRT and where we are now and where to go um it's overwhelming so anyway um that's it and hope this was helpful uh I'll see you soon bye