Finally Seen: Exploring the Invisible Load

Finally Seen: From Diagnosis to Daily Life panel discussion at CAMH.

Last week at CAMH we attended the Finally Seen event, where a panel moderated by Autistic, author and speaker, Paige Layle, alongside Dr. Yani Hamdani, Dr. Laura St John, PhD, and Dr. Louisa Man, had an important conversation about something that often goes unnoticed in women with autism and ADHD. The panel eloquently discussed the cognitive load which many women like herself experience. Not just the visible responsibilities of parenting or family life, but the invisible management of everything underneath it.

Things like tracking appointments, anticipating needs, monitoring emotions in the household, managing routines, transitions, social dynamics, schedules, meals, school communication, and planning ahead constantly, while trying to appear calm and capable.

For many women, this level of mental organization is socially expected and rarely acknowledged. For autistic and ADHD women, it can become completely overwhelming and consuming. What makes this especially complicated is that many women have spent years masking. They learn early how to adapt, people-please, and perform competence in ways that hide how much effort everyday functioning actually requires.

From the outside, they may appear organized, high-achieving, and emotionally aware, but what often gets missed is the personal cost.
The feeling that daily life requires an unsustainable amount of effort just to keep everything from falling apart.

Too often, clinicians only see the bigger symptoms like anxiety, depression, irritability, shutdown, or burnout, without stepping back to examine the broader context of a woman’s life. This is something we talk about early with our students at Counselling & Behaviour: A Mental Health & Psychotherapy Clinic in Toronto. We pay attention to the systems around the person, and what functioning costs somebody. Someone appearing “high functioning” doesn’t mean they aren’t struggling. Sometimes it means they’ve become exceptionally good at hiding it.

If we only assess what’s visible on the surface, we miss the bigger picture, and when we miss the bigger picture, women continue to go unsupported.
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