>>alexfo+(OP)
I've spoken to many people in the past 10 years or so who were in a crisis/burnout/depression or however they personally labelled their situation with varying degrees of bad mood, depressed affect, and reduced energy. Every single one of them had a mask they had been wearing for a very long time, and which was hugely mentally draining on them. Most of them wore the mask especially when interacting with themselves, interestingly.
Some of them self-identified as neuro-atypical (with or without professional diagnosis), others didn't. Some of them identified their situation as a co-morbidity of being atypical, others as a result of it, or as a pure coincidence. It's not clear to me whether the masks themselves and/or the current inability to wear them were a reason, a symptom, or just a coincidence of said situations and/or the subjective or objective atypicalliness. But whenever I hear that masking has such a huge drain on people with ADHD/autism I wonder about the questions of cause and effect, the question of correlation and causation, and the question of (self-)selection bias. It's really a mess and it's very difficult to make sense of any of that. But mostly, I feel that discussing ways how society could reduce the pressure to mask might be more beneficial to everyone than finding the perfect definitions for groups of people who have an accepted reason to be drained by their masking, while others must still endure because their masking is not socially or medically recognized as unnecessary suffering.
p.s.: hope you're doing better now.