I have a roommate I’m reasonably certain is autistic. He hates any kind of change (the migration to windows 11 is killing his soul since he can’t bring his ancient Dell along for the ride). He doesn’t remember what you talked to him about yesterday, instead remembering a completely different outcome to any conversation. He doesn’t clean up after himself, and cannot be convinced to do so.
The problem the brings me here is when he moved in I told him the common areas must be kept clean. You can make any mess you clean up after. If it has to stay a mess, do it in your room. As long as it doesn’t violate fire code or decay or cause lasting damage, I could give a damn.
So he makes his room a mess, then says he finds the mess depressing and overwhelming and migrates to a different room and makes a nest there. He forms little piles around the nest, always keeps things near him to instantly deal with. But it eventually becomes too much and he migrates elsewhere and starts again.
I cannot get him to clean up. When I talk to him about it, it doesn’t matter what tone or delivery I use. He gets anxious, has some sort of fear response, gets visibly agitated but in more of a scared way than an angry way, and will not talk. He can’t form sentences. Then it suddenly evaporates and he bluescreens. He reboots. He doesn’t recall the conversation. He doesn’t realize one was still taking place. He just walks off and does something else. Not like is an asshole dismissive way but in an incredibly frightening Alzheimer’s way.
When I do get him to talk, he says he doesn’t want to stayed coooped up in his room when working on anything because it’s messy and depressing. (Then fucking open your blinds to let in sun and clean damnit!) But it’s a change in his environment he cannot bring to action.
He also has issues with time management. Like he says he’ll do his dishes and he starts in playing Skinner box games on his phone or trying to pirate porn off YouTube (don’t ask. I’ve not been successful convincing him that is dumb) and he looses track of time. He intends to do the dishes but he ends up going down some rabbit hole and by the time he frees himself he is already late for something else and has to leave.
But he will go back to his parents and mow their lawn and at work he will skip lunches because “there are carts in the parking lot that nobody is putting away”. He can do things, even when they are someone else’s priorities or problems. But he absolutely cannot help himself. He’s just spinning his wheels.
I’m not effective here. I feel pressing any harder is just abusive. He’s clearly got some flavor of neurospicy going on but he’s an adult and aware of the issue. He needs to deal with that and he’s just not.
He is oblivious to social cues and even when I’m being verbose he doesn’t pay attention and do the fucking thing. I’m constantly moving his little hoarder piles back to his room to clean my home. He’s not improving and some of his issues, like the bluescreens, sound funny but are deeply disturbing to witness. He has other issues too, like his diet is nothing but ice cream, cookies, and fiber supplements. He’s in his 20s but turned my home into a Metamucil commercial. I’ve never seen him eat anything else. He can sit on the couch watching TV and then suddenly jolt and flail as if being electrocuted for a second then fall back into reality. “Sorry. That happens sometimes.”
Just, dude.
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I have a few stupid tricks that might help.
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add a “daily house cleaning time” to a schedule. Every day, same bat time. 30 minutes, phones off, music on. Both of you get up and “return the house to the default state.”
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clean the house once and take a picture of each room in the default state. Print the picture and put it on the door out of each room. Tell them that’s what you need the room to look like when you walk in. Phrase it as an accommodation for your mental health. Then they’re “helping a friend with a problem.”
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Hard tasks get rewards. It doesn’t have to be anything major. Stickers work for my wife. Sour patch kids work for me. “Hard tasks” are anything we hate doing. We reward ourselves or each other. “thanks for cleaning the shower, it looks great. You get a sticker” “I went and talked to the crazy neighbor, I get some sour patch kids.” Our stupid brains don’t give us dopamine for doing the thing, so we have to trick them.
Our brains don’t give us dopamine for doing the thing, so we have to trick them.
Every gawdamned day. 😅🖖🏼
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The bluescreens are called “autistic shutdown” if you’d like to google that. https://reframingautism.org.au/all-about-autistic-shutdown-guide-for-allies/
Autism symptoms have a fair bit of overlap with ADHD. “Executive functioning deficits” is the phrase to search for there. Basically it’s problems with planning and executing anything slightly boring. And people with autism only find a very small number of things non-boring, so…
It sounds like this person needs a lot of support to develop healthy routines and it’s not really your responsibility to be that person.
Maybe he is autistic, maybe he isn’t, but this sounds very much like ADHD to me.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I am severe ADD as well and I function between ok and great when I am needed by someone else but have a hard time making myself do anything like cleaning during unstructured time.
I need deadlines and start times, for instance my job. If one of my neighbors asks for my help I get right on it. I spent four hours building and installing a new exhaust setup for my neighbor’s truck last month, all the while unable to make myself do 15 minutes of vacuuming.
I’m medicated. It gets worse the more depressed I am, which is particularly bad right now because of romantic relationship ending, lack of consistent work, and I hate cold weather and winter darkness.
Didn’t mean to info dump but to get to the point, the roommate is in far worse shape than me. Maybe OP could set a schedule for them. Maybe even lean into the fear reaction by saying something like “I’m going to be very upset if all this isn’t cleaned up by 6:00pm tomorrow”. That sounds mean but people like me absolutely need the structure and deadline.
He’s on meds for that and depression and they do fuck all.
You have no idea how much worse it could be without the meds. Trust me.
I’ve seen him with and without. Some days he misses doses or takes them so late he stays up all night long. Aside from removing any semblance of a sleep schedule they don’t do anything for him.
We’ve talked about sleep hygiene. He dismisses it.
Please be mindful of dismissive judgements from your liminal perspective on their disability that may in fact stem from your lack of integral, clinical details. 🙇🏼♂️
Normally I would agree with you, but OP is living in the environment created by the roommate’s symptoms. This is obviously uncontrolled or, at best, extremely poorly managed mental illness and it is not reasonable to expect OP (who is this person’s roommate, not explicitly a friend, certainly not a family member, and definitely not a partner) to sacrifice their own wellbeing in deference to this person’s dysfunction.
OP obviously has empathy for this person, but is clearly at the end of their rope, and your pontificating and language policing from the outside doesn’t actually help OP or the roommate in any way. I work in medicine, I deal with a LOT of mental health patients, and your comment here doesn’t read as any kind of advocacy for people suffering from mental illnesses, it just reads as virtue signalling or sanctimonious tone policing.
I’m not sure it’s abusive of you to ask him to be an adult and take responsibility for himself. His mental health struggles are not his fault, but they are his responsibility.
You don’t deserve to have your life made difficult by an adult who chooses not to deal with their issues, at your expense!
Intentionally, knowingly and repeatedly pushing someone until they have an autistic shutdown is abusive (and ineffective).
OP didn’t know what it was so it wasn’t abusive then but now they know…
OP doesn’t know this person is autistic. At time of writing, there’s suspicion in the text but no mention of a confirmed autism diagnosis.
I think you may also be picturing a much more hostile confrontation than needs to happen. If OP, in a calm, polite, and non-hostile way explains that this situation is not acceptable, and that if things don’t change this person will have to leave, that’s absolutely not abusive.
It’s boundary setting, and it’s both a reasonable boundary and a reasonable thing to ask an adult who has been allowed out into the world without carers.
I don’t think this will be a conversation you will be able to have with him, but it’s probably something you need to have for yourself for your own sanity. There is the adage that “your mental health is not your fault, but it is your responsibility”, that I think is very applicable here. I know that the manifestations of his mental illness at this time are damaging your quality of life, but I think that you are suffering additional, semi-self-inflicted harm by internalizing any amount of responsibility for his behavior. It is a bit like intentional cognitive dissonance, but I think you would benefit from divorcing yourself of any sense of responsibility for fixing this situation.
There are some good suggestions in this thread about strategies for set cleaning times with reference images of what each room is supposed to look like, and to some extent, mild parenting techniques to get some sense of order in the house. If I were in your shoes, this is the list of things I would try to implement:
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Set deadlines for cleaning tasks
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Make a list or a calendar on a whiteboard in the kitchen
- (columns for days of the week with check boxes for needed tasks and written communications instead of verbal) -
Clear delineation of responsibilities
- ("you make the mess, you clean it up" or "wash/put dishes in the dishwasher immediately when done using them or before bed that night")
(The strategy for dishes can be variable, I just feel like dishes are a good example for figuring out household responsibilities.)
Also, make it clear that his actions are harming you. It may feel dramatic, but it’s true. And I think a way around the bluescreen issue is to write a letter explaining your needs and how his actions are affecting you. I would recommend hand-writing this because it will appear more personal, and be less easily dismissed. Putting it in writing makes it so that he has a physical object to refer to when his mind tries to edit out the uncomfortable thing. But still give him the letter in a conversation. I would start it with saying:
“Hey ____, I’ve tried to talk to you about this before, but I don’t think I’ve been communicating with you in a way that works. There’s some things going on in the house with your cleaning habits and behaviors that are really messing with me and it’s putting me in a bad place mentally to have the common areas this messy all the time. I know these conversations can be really overwhelming for you, so I wrote this letter for you to read when you’re ready. Please come talk to me after you’ve read it so we can work out some strategies to make living together more comfortable for everyone.”
This is my advice from having had difficult roommates and friends that don’t deal with their mental health, and from the perspective of a medical professional. I’m a medical student, but I’ve done a lot of work with mental health and substance use disorder patients and I always try to work with folks to find strategies that work for them to improve their quality of life. I see medications as an adjunct to building accommodations for oneself, but I always emphasize that the medications are exactly the same as medications for things like high blood pressure. For some folks, there’s a physiologic dysfunction that you can’t “life strategy” your way out of, and you just need to get the chemicals in your brain to behave properly so you can function.
(This ended up longer than intended, sorry for the essay)
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Talk to his parents about it if they can manage to, well, manage his behaviour.
He has brought up his parents before and there’s some overlap with his dad in symptoms and his mother has been enabling a lot of things that will not serve him well as an adult.
When he first moved in it was because he was frustrated his mother would not leave his room and stuff alone. He didn’t feel like he had his own space because she kept rearranging things in his room so he felt he has no privacy and no boundaries were being respected. As a result, he has literally never learned to manage his own space. Ever. So from what I’m seeing she did it because he wouldn’t. It frustrated him. And now we are here.
It certainly helps that having him here cuts finances in half, though he’s always late on things. But fuuuuuck is this problematic.
