This post talks about suicide and a suicide attempt, without any details of method. If you're in a bad place right now, skip straight to the end, or go to the Get help now page.
I'm going to say something I couldn't have said ten years ago. I think I broke because I spent about fifty years pretending to be someone else, and nobody, including me, knew I was doing it.
Can masking cause burnout and mental illness? The research says it's a real part of the picture. Studies link long-term camouflaging in autistic adults to exhaustion, autistic burnout, depression, anxiety and a higher risk of suicidal thoughts. It's rarely the only cause. But hiding who you are all day, every day, burns through you, and it keeps the people around you from ever seeing that something's wrong.
What does the research say about masking and mental health?
When autistic adults in the 2017 "Putting on my best normal" study described their camouflaging, the long-term consequences they named included exhaustion and a shaken sense of who they really were.
A year later, a team from Nottingham, Coventry and Cambridge published research in Molecular Autism looking at why autistic people are at higher risk of suicide. Two factors stood out as specific to autism: camouflaging, and unmet support needs. One participant put it in a way I haven't been able to shake. All his life, he said, to survive he'd had to "be someone I'm not," and the effort takes a toll.
The research charity Autistica keeps a plain-language page on suicide and autism. Autistic people themselves named late diagnosis and barriers to support as part of the problem.
And the National Autistic Society lists masking among the causes of autistic burnout, alongside expectations that don't fit and a lack of support.
The cost is real, and it adds up over years.
What it looked like from inside
From the outside, I was a guy who had it handled. I co-founded a web agency, ran it, stood in front of rooms and made them laugh. Later I built a dive operation in Indonesia. People saw energy and ideas.
What they didn't see was the drive home. Or the days after a big week when I couldn't do much of anything. Or how often I blew up at people when something went wrong, the thing a friend named a "robplosion," and how much shame came after.
Nobody around me day to day was close enough to notice, either. That's the trap. When you mask with everyone, nobody gets near enough to the real you to see it cracking. I could run a room, and the people who really knew me were far away.
Depression has been part of my life for a long time. So has substance use. I haven't touched cocaine or heroin in sixteen years, and I'm not going to pretend I know exactly why I started. But looking back with the diagnosis in hand, I wonder how much of it was me trying to turn down the volume on a life that was too loud and too much work. That's my own reading of my own life, not a clinical claim.
1998
In 1998, I tried to take my own life.
I'm not going to describe it, and that's on purpose. What I'll say is that I didn't know I had ASD then. I didn't know there was a word for the act I was putting on, or that the exhaustion had a cause. I just thought I was broken in some way nobody else was.
I'm still here. I'm grateful I am. I've had good years since, including ones I couldn't have imagined back then. Right after the attempt, I checked myself into a psychiatric ward voluntarily to get better. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made, and I wrote about it in I checked myself into psychiatry. There's more about the years after in life after my suicide attempt.
When the mask finally stopped working
During the COVID years, the mask just quit on me. A breakdown. Everything that used to run on autopilot stopped running. That's when I finally got assessed, and at 50, found out I have ASD. I've written about the burnout itself in how long autistic burnout lasts.
The diagnosis didn't fix anything by itself. What it did was give the last five decades a shape. The tics, the obsessions, the crashes, the blow-ups, the way I'd run from people before they could leave me. It stopped looking like a pile of personal failures and started looking like a guy running a really expensive program in the background his whole life.
If you see yourself in this
If you mask, or think you might, here's what I'd want someone to tell me:
The exhaustion has a cause. You're probably not lazy, and you're not broken. You may be carrying a load nobody can see, you included.
Tell one person what it really costs. A doctor, a therapist, a partner, a friend, a crisis line. Out loud. Masking works by keeping that hidden. Saying it breaks the pattern a little. In Québec you can start with your CLSC or Info-Social 811.
If you're having thoughts of suicide, reach out today. Not when it gets worse. In Canada and the US, call or text 988. In Québec, call 1 866 APPELLE (1-866-277-3553), text 535353, or chat at suicide.ca. If you're in immediate danger, call 911. Other countries are on the Get help now page.
People get through this. I'm one of them. It took me a long time and a lot of help, and the help is what made the difference.