Published on 12, July, 2020
I can't stand it...I think it's such an invalidating term, and as a 21-year-old woman I hate it when it's applied to me and my behaviour because it sounds like people are referring to a toddler tantrum: 'meltdown' sounds too frivolous a term for what is such a distressing experience for many people. However, most autistic people I've spoken to don't seem to mind it and freely apply it to themselves, so I'd be really interested to hear what people on here think.
Anyway...I hope you've all had a lovely bank holiday and that you have a good week. :)
Call them overloads, either caused by emotions, information or senses, or a combination of the three. I don't mind what they are called just as long as I have them as little as possible!
Hope you had a good bank holiday too!
Yes, I like 'overload'. Meltdown always has the negative connotation of 'tantrum', because of the way it's applied to kids. It's very difficult to explain it to an NT. I had to speak to my manager yesterday about a few things at work that make me angry. Things came to a head on Friday evening, when I got close to red-lining. I'd already started raising my voice and swearing, which is the first danger sign. Fortunately, I left before it got bad - but I still couldn't drive home straight away because I would have been a danger on the road. It took me a couple of hours to calm down and stop pacing when I got home. Even then, it lived with me over the weekend, when I drank too much to try to numb the emotional fallout (another 'meltdown'-type term, I suppose!) I told her I came close to an 'incident' - but even that doesn't do it justice. She said she would have been angry, too. I tried to explain that it's more than just anger: it's essentially the head shutting down because it can't cope with the inputs.
It needs its own language, really. It's like with epilepsy. What used to be called 'fits' and are now 'seizures'. I said to one person I know with epilepsy that I imagine it's like a short-circuit - which didn't go down too well! In a way, I think of the 'meltdown' as something like a seizure, because it renders me incapable of doing anything for some time. 'Meltdown', I suppose, is a term that most people think they understand. But it'll always have that negative connotation.