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Can you become more autistic? That’s a pretty provocative thing to ask, but interestingly, people who are diagnosed as autistic later in life often talk about feeling like they have become more autistic after diagnosis. This sensation is more common than you might think. Sometimes, people refer to the phenomenon as autistic regression. But like most things related to autism, it’s more complicated than it first appears. The term autistic regression is used to describe at least two quite different phenomena.
My Story
Before I knew I was autistic, I underwent a long, drawn-out, somewhat spiky descent into what I now know is autistic burnout. Not long after I turned 50 years old, back in 2015, I started to struggle to function in many areas of my life. By early 2016, it had become serious. By 2018, I was a shell of my former self. From this point, all through my period on the waiting list for an assessment to see if I was autistic, and past my eventual diagnosis, I became a person almost unrecognisable to those around me.
My self-confidence was shot to pieces. I was in a pit of depression. But there was something else. Something really strange. I found there were certain things I used to be able to do that I could no longer do. This manifested in several ways:
- Increased sensory sensitivity. Especially my tolerance for environments in which there were mixed sounds competing for my attention.
- Increased anxiety in social situations, which I would try to mask with varying levels of success, leaving me feeling genuinely unwell.
- Increased reluctance to leave the home.
- Increased anxiety at any change to routines or plans.
- Higher levels of anxiety, sometimes panic, at having to go anywhere busy, such as a crowded restaurant or pub.
These types of things had troubled me all my life, but now were so intense, they were unbearable. There was more…
Worryingly, I was suddenly unable to write fiction. Having branded myself for many years as a writer of fiction, I went into a spiral of despair when I realised I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I publicly announced I was quitting writing, because I now felt like a faker. I think this led to a lot of my readers, who had been happy to start following me from my earliest days and were expecting to support my trajectory, feeling let down, and I lost their support.
Eventually (the above didn’t all happen in one go), I felt like I had somehow become more autistic than I had been when I received my diagnosis. I want to be very clear here: I did not really become more autistic. I simply experienced a feeling that I had become more autistic.
It turned out I was far from the first autistic person to experience this sensation, and some people were calling it autistic regression.
Note: Some of the issues I experienced at that time have improved. I temporarily regained the ability to write fiction, which allowed me to finish my third full-length novel, Aberrations, but then lost it again. I can write non-fiction now, no problem, but for the time being, it’s like the fiction-writing skill has been frozen. I hope it thaws again. In general, however, many of the effects of my autistic burnout linger, and it has fundamentally changed me as a human being.
Conceptualising Skill Loss
An interesting point that has been raised in some discussions about loss of skills in autistic adults is this: Has the skill really been erased, or has access to that skill been blocked? This is important to me personally. I still know everything I learned about the craft of writing, but at present I am simply unable to deploy that skill.
In terms of the impact on my life, the effect is the same regardless of whether the skill is lost or access to it is lost. And that effect has been profound in the context of my writing career. For the purposes of this discussion, I will continue to refer to it as skill loss.
What is Meant by Autistic Regression?
At its simplest, regression means losing an ability or level of functioning that was previously established. It is not about slow development, and neither is it about failing to acquire a new skill, or having a bad day, week, or month. And it doesn’t mean finding out some activity is more difficult than you thought or remembered.
Technically, autistic regression usually refers to two rather different things.
Developmental regression in autistic children
This is a phenomenon that has been widely researched. It usually involves a loss of previously acquired language and/or social skills in the first few years of life.
Regression in autistic adolescents and adults
This doesn’t appear to have had the same degree of focus in research, but is a common subject of debate in autistic circles, and is usually discussed in relation to autistic burnout.
Autistic Regression in Childhood
The term childhood autistic regression describes a genuine phenomenon, involving loss of previously acquired skills, particularly language and social communication. The mechanism by which this happens is not understood. However, it shouldn’t be equated with autism being a progressive neurological deterioration; that is not the case. Autism is not a disease.
In 2021, a paper was published updating findings from an earlier meta-analysis from 2013. The lay summary explained:
“About a third of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder experience loss of skills, which is also known as autistic regression. […] Unfortunately, studies are not sufficiently similar, making it difficult to provide clear answers on the exact timing or type of regression seen in different children.”
So, while childhood autistic regression is a recognised phenomenon, there is considerable uncertainty around it. This is partly because its cause has not been identified, and partly because different ways of describing the phenomenon are used in different research.
Interestingly, childhood autistic regression is not always permanent. A 2024 study of 675 preschool autistic children found that 26% had experienced social and/or language regression. Of those children, 76% had regained the lost skills by the time of assessment. The study stated:
“To conclude, these findings suggest that slightly more than a quarter of preschool children with ASD lose skills in the first few years of life and, although most regain lost skills by age 5, those with a history of regression have poorer outcomes than those without a history of regression in the preschool years.”
In one longitudinal study, children with language regression initially had poorer language, but by about 5½ years the earlier differences were no longer apparent.
Yet another longitudinal study found that children with regression eventually acquired speech at roughly the same age as those without regression, with only a small delay in language development. There has been much more research in a similar vein, showing similar conclusions.
So, it seems childhood regression can be followed by some recovery of lost skills and substantial developmental catch-up. Developmental trajectories in autism often change throughout childhood. However, this does not mean that children who recover skills and developmental progress have recovered from autism. Being autistic is lifelong.
Autistic Regression in Adults
The subject of autistic regression is actually quite controversial, even within the autistic community. While some autistic people describe loss of skills and call it regression, others simply recognise this phenomenon as part of autistic burnout.
Certainly, in my story as related above, the skill loss and reduced social functioning (masking) I experienced came as a result of a long and severe period of autistic burnout.
The actual lived experience of functioning differently, and feeling like there has been an impairment in certain skills, is a real thing. The number of autistic people talking about this online in social media posts and blogs is huge. So much of what I see in the posts, and in face-to-face conversations I have had with other autistic people, aligns very closely with my own experience. But the existence of the phenomenon isn’t the only question at stake when we talk about adult autistic regression.
Regular readers of my blog will be aware of a point I keep coming back to in autism: If we’re going to communicate clearly about autism, minimising misunderstanding, exploding myths, and correcting misinformation, we have to be precise in the language we use. Without being pedantic, this does mean being clear about the definitions of the terms we use.
Some autistic people openly use the term regression to describe part of their autistic experience; others reject it as an inaccurate and misleading label.
Autistic blogger Autistic Science Person makes an interesting point in their article, Autistic Burnout, “Regression,” and Identity Crisis – #TaketheMaskOff Week 4. They are not the only person making this kind of point; what follows is simply an illustrative example:
“It is not regression – it’s the fact that I can’t keep up this act for more than 25% of my lifespan […] The person in there doesn’t change! The person is the same person. The way people react to that person is different.“
~Autistic Science Person
They then go on to draw an analogy with neurotypical people going through a period of exhaustion, making a point that autistic people don’t become more autistic any more than an exhausted neurotypical person becomes “more neurotypical.” This is a fairly common type of response to the regression label in autistic adults. However, there are certain assumptions baked into the statement:
One of those assumptions is that neurotypical exhaustion is analogous to autistic burnout. However, neuroscience has demonstrated differences between autistic and neurotypical brains. It does not necessarily follow that autistic burnout has the same effects as ordinary exhaustion in neurotypical people. In fact, whether it does is precisely one of the questions at stake here.
The opinion that “the person doesn’t change” might not be true. My experience is that I am a fundamentally different person than the one I was pre-burnout. The body is the same, but I think differently, communicate differently, have seen a reduction in certain skills, and even my senses seem to work differently. I take longer to process face-to-face verbal communication. This is eight years after the lowest point of my autistic burnout.
Imagine an autistic adult spends decades of their life masking, forcing themselves to process ill-fitting social information, suppress sensory differences, maintain eye contact, match their behaviour with neurotypical expectations, and so on.
Then the inevitable autistic burnout occurs, and the person dramatically reduces those behaviours because they can no longer sustain them.
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We know that adult brains remain neuroplastic, and that learning, repeated behaviour and changing environmental demands can produce changes in neural activity, connectivity and, in some circumstances, brain structure. It is therefore biologically plausible that decades of masking and adaptation are accompanied by neural changes, and that a prolonged change in behaviour and environmental demands could produce further changes.
There has been some research that has conceptualised autistic burnout as involving changes in functioning, increased disability, sensory and/or social overwhelm, and exhaustion. A 2025 systematic review synthesised 48 studies involving roughly 4,000 autistic people and found increased disability and functional difficulties to be central features of burnout.
The question is whether regression is a suitable term for this process. And the same question could be asked of regression in autistic children, of course.
In autistic children, regression has become a technical term, and when professionals in the field use it, despite some differences in interpretation, generally they know what overarching subject they are referring to. Regardless of whether I or any other autistic person thinks the term is appropriate, this is the term in use, and its technical application has been arrived at as a result of much research.
However, when we talk about adult autistic regression, the same volume of research is not there, and so the same technical usage is not in place. This is where confusion can emerge if people are using regression in the sense of a technical term for autistic adults.
For autistic adults, what we have is a situation where the phenomenon is real, but the research is scant. Thus, how we describe the implied neuroplastic changes is disputed.
Is This Regression in autistic adults?
I think an interesting point here is that, for adults, there appears to be a distinction between the actual loss of skills and functioning resulting from autistic burnout, and the subjective experience of “feeling more autistic.” It is in the subjective experience that the term regression (or a less controversial/misleading term) sits.
That’s all for this time. Take care.
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