Unmasked: Autism, Burnout, and the Daughter the System Failed
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Unmasked: Autism, Burnout, and the Daughter the System Failed
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Narrateur(s):
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Samia McCall came to advocacy the hard way. A former attorney and law professor, she spent thirty years cycling through mental health diagnoses, medications, and therapists, none of which helped, because none of them were looking for the right thing. She is autistic. So was her daughter Masa. Masa died by suicide in November 2023, six months after a suicide attempt that the system met with judgment, a prison-like inpatient stay, and Prozac, a medication with known suicide risk in young people.
This conversation does not stay at the level of grief, though grief is present throughout. Samia is precise and methodical about what went wrong and why. She walks through how autism presents differently in girls and women, how masking from an early age leads to autistic burnout that gets misread as depression, and why the treatments prescribed for depression can actively make autistic burnout worse. She explains the well-documented link between autism and suicide that her own therapist dismissed when Samia brought her the peer-reviewed research, suggesting instead that the researchers needed to do a better job of disseminating their findings.
The systemic failures she names are specific. Twice-exceptional children, gifted and disabled, fall through the gap between gifted programming and special education with neither side catching them. CBT does not work for autistic people and can cause harm. SSRIs are contraindicated for many autistic people, a fact handed out like routine information nowhere. Autistic burnout requires the removal of demands, deep rest, and sensory reduction, not more engagement, not more exposure, not a safety plan on a clipboard.
Masa was brilliant, empathetic, and deeply connected to the natural world. She was also an undiagnosed autistic girl in a system that never once looked for autism in her, and when Samia found the research herself and brought it forward, she was told she was wrong. By the time a diagnosis came, Masa had had years of masking, years of shame, and a nervous system that had been in chronic overload for most of her life. What the medical model offered her was inadequate, punishing, and in at least one case actively harmful.
Samia is clear that Masa did not make a choice. Her brain shut down from pain. This is a conversation about what that means, and about what needs to change so other children do not fall through the same gaps.
Samia McCall is a writer, advocate, and spiritual guide who lost her daughter Mesa to suicide after years of misdiagnosis and failed mental health interventions. A late-diagnosed autistic woman herself, she co-founded SEEN, a visibility movement of mothers whose children died by suicide while actively seeking help from the mental health system. She brings a former attorney's precision and a mother's grief to the fight for a world that accommodates autistic people rather than trying to fix them.
Music by Shari Ulrich
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