Meltdowns aren‘t always or only emotional.

Many things can contribute to overload that triggers meltdowns:

- intense emotions
- lack of sleep, food, and water
- illness, pain etc.
- sensory input
- cognitive processing

ALL processing overload can lead to a #meltdown.

#autism

Declaring meltdowns as one thing only, same for everyone, means countless autistic people who get meltdowns for other reasons go without proper understanding and support.

It leads to wrong approaches being used to alleviate the mis-identified problem, and unnecessary suffering.

An autistic person who gets meltdowns as a reaction to panic attacks needs different supports and accommodations than an autistic person who gets meltdowns as a reaction to the loud barking of a dog.

Figure out the triggers, then figure out the necessary supports.

Seeing meltdowns only as emotional misses, ignores, or outright erases so many aspects of this neurological phenomenon.

Even IF emotions are the trigger, don’t mislabel autistics „too emotional“, „angry“, „hysterical“ etc.

It‘s still an involuntary, uncontrollable brain event.

Sincerely,

an autistic person who has suffered, and sadly often still suffers, unmeasurably on top of the suffering caused by meltdowns, due to other people mis-identifying and mis-treating their meltdowns as anger.