Alia Breon, MD

Hey docs, here’s an idea… what if we stopped prescribing meds to treat autism or adhd and instead used them to support the needs of neurodivergent people?

I became a low demand parent only when nothing else worked. Now, I understand the biology of why it did: body budgets, inflammation, and why autistic and ADHD kids in burnout need fewer demands to heal. #LowDemandParenting #AutisticBurnout #Autism #PDA aliabreonmd.substack.com/p/a-biomedic...

Woke up feeling angry at big pharma. No need to defend them- I know they also make much needed and life saving drugs. I can hold 2 contradictory ideas at once. But today I'm angry at them for convincing me that my autistic son needed zoloft when what he really needed was a different environment.

Ive been writing on the science of autistic burnout and monotropism. This one goes deep. Krebs cycle, electron transport chain, how we make ATP. And why the panic of running out of air and the panic of overwhelm are the same alarm. aliabreonmd.substack.com/p/the-bioche...

What does ATP—our cellular energy made in the mitochondria—have to do with autism? Maybe everything. How we spend that currency is where autistic lived experience (the Theory of Monotropism) and the emerging neuroscience of predictive processing converge. substack.com/home/post/p-...

What do ADHD and autism actually have to do with attention? The question won't make sense until we stop defining attention as the conscious focus of our mind, and consider it instead as how the whole mindbody notices and responds to the world. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/s...

#autres At just 6 weeks old, babies with an autistic older sibling already showed differences on fMRI in the salience network (the brain network that helps direct attention) Could attention be distributed differently from the very start? www.nature.com/articles/s42...

SSRIs can flatten emotion. Burnout recovery may depend on feeling things again. Has anyone tapered off an SSRI (gently, carefully, with support) during autistic burnout? How did it change your recovery? What did you notice?

aliabreonmd.substack.com/p/are-monotr...

Like many physicians, I thought of mast cells only as "allergy cells." I had no idea they live in the brain, driving neuroinflammation from stress. Witnessing my autistic son's burnout forced me to look deeper—and it changed everything. aliabreonmd.substack.com/p/meet-the-m...

Your nervous system runs on a budget. Overwhelm is what happens when the withdrawals have been outpacing the deposits — and the body finally calls it in. aliabreonmd.substack.com/p/the-neuros...

As my 13-year-old PDAer recovers from burnout, I thought the timing was right to write on the neuroscience of overwhelm. open.substack.com/pub/aliabreo...

A great paper on double empathy theory: autistic social challenges aren’t deficits, but a mismatch between autistic and non-autistic communication and experience. The DSM’s deficit-based framing of autism obscures that reality.

Ezra Klein recently wrote: "Attention is sometimes an act. But first it is an instinct." We think we choose what we notice. But the initial decision was made before conscious awareness arrived. Pulling attention from its natural direction? That takes effort.

We tell autistic kids to stop spinning, stop flapping—stop expressing joy so visibly. When did you last let happiness move through your whole body? Laugh without checking yourself, or swing just for the rush? My autistic son is teaching me to remember.

Autism studies say the autistic brain is over-connected. Others say under-connected. Others: both. Monotropism makes sense of it. Is the Salience Network the neurobiology beneath it? I explore that idea here ⬇️

open.substack.com/pub/aliabreo...

I’ve been holding these reflections quietly for a long time. I’m finally ready to begin writing about autism, monotropism, attention, and what I’ve learned along the way. Excited to share my first post! aliabreonmd.substack.com/p/why-im-wri...