Timothy Speed (2026)
In current psychiatric and diagnostic practice, masking in autistic persons is predominantly interpreted as an exhausting act of adaptation, whose pathological relevance is assumed to manifest above all in visible failure, breakdown, or burnout. This reading has become established not only in everyday clinical contexts, but also in parts of neurodiversity-oriented research. The present paper argues that this interpretation rests on an implicit, normative ontology that treats neurotypical forms of existence as an unquestioned reference and renders autistic existence legible only in relation to deviation, deficit, or exhaustion.
Starting from an ontological perspective on masking, the paper shows that masking is not primarily to be understood as self-denial or an attempt at adaptation, but as a situational act of translation, protection, and interface-work within structurally asymmetrical world architectures. The clinical reduction of masking to an indicator of exhaustion leads to a diagnostic short circuit: autistic competence, stability, and functional simulation are systematically interpreted as deception or compensatory over-adaptation, while autism is acknowledged as “authentic” only at the moment of decompensation.
The paper analyses the resulting dynamic as an iatrogenic structure: diagnostic recognition is bound to visible failure, thereby generating an implicit pressure toward decompensation. In this framework, autistic burnout appears not merely as an individual consequence of masking, but as a structurally produced harm of a system that can read autistic existence only in the mode of dysfunction. The focus thus shifts from individual vulnerability to institutional responsibility.
In conclusion, the paper argues for a fundamental revision of diagnostic concepts of masking. Masking must be understood as an ambivalent, context-dependent competence, not as a pathological condition. Without such a revision, psychiatry reproduces precisely those dynamics of exhaustion and breakdown that it claims to recognise and treat. Autistic burnout thus becomes visible less as a symptom of autistic existence than as a marker of an ontologically inadequate diagnostic practice.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18199424
Keywords: autistic burnout, masking, unmasking, psychiatric diagnostics, neurotypical normativity, diagnostic ontology, representational violence, iatrogenic harm, diagnostic recognition, neurodivergence, epistemic injustice
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