Lessons from ACE26: The neuroscience of belonging and how that translates to AuDHD masking

At the AuSAE ACE26 conference in Brisbane last week, neuroscientist and criminologist Milo Wilkinson opened with a distinction most of the room heard as a leadership lesson. For people with AuDHD, it is closer to a clinical description.

Fitting in is not belonging.

Wilkinson’s keynote was on the topic of what the brain needs, what it protects itself from, and what it costs when the need goes unmet. She quoted Brené Brown's distinction: fitting in means reading a situation and becoming whoever you need to be in order to be accepted. Whereas belonging doesn't ask you to change.

She also noted that social rejection recruits the same neural circuitry as physical pain.

Put those together and you have a reasonable description of an ordinary working week for an Australian with AuDHD, masking as protection, to feel as if you belong.

Consensus definition of autistic burnout

The Australian evidence on the cost of masking is good. Autism CRC's autistic burnout research, led by Julianne Higgins, identified masking as a primary driver. One participant described it as

the exhaustion of putting on my best normal.

The consensus definition the researchers arrived at is not tiredness: it is severe exhaustion, withdrawal, loss of functioning, executive function collapse, and a reduced capacity to keep masking at all.

AuDHD interaction within Australian data

The Australian ASD and ADHD study of 5,651 Australian adults, published by Giblett, Lind and Medland, found that ADHD symptoms and experienced stigma each independently predicted camouflaging. That is the AuDHD interaction effect showing up in data rather than anecdote.

And here is where it lands.

ABS figures for 2022 put labour force participation for autistic Australians at 50.2%, against 84.9% for people without disability. Unemployment sits at 18.2% — almost six times the rate for people without disability.

A workforce does not lose half its autistic population because those people cannot work. It loses them because the price of admission is a performance that eventually cannot be sustained and leads to burnout.

Wilkinson offered one practical idea worth taking on board. Before choosing and launching change, have what she calls a ‘reconciliation of loss conversation’ which allows you to consider what it is you are about to lose due to the change, rather than an explanation of why the change is good. This is a great way of uncovering and understanding your reactions to change when you don’t know why you feel the way you do.

The AuDHD Council of Australia exists to turn exactly this understanding into workplace and policy reform.

If your organisation is asking people with AuDHD to fit in, you are asking them to spend energy they will eventually run out of."

Catherine Squire, CEO