I have autism and suspect I might have synesthesia. Does anybody else with autism suffer from catatonia. Like you become so aware of your own mind that nothing makes sense and you can’t move your own body?
Bruh, I swear the Earth is just a simulation. I kid you guys not, I was literally
just finishing a late paper for school where I mentioned something very similar to this and announced that my follow-up paper to this one was going to be about autism and its correlations with other diagnoses. I'm pretty sure I had gotten the paper turned in just a few hours before you sent this message.
What I've found is that disorders of any kind that exist on a spectrum of their own can achieve what's called "comorbidity", which simply refers to when a person shows the symptoms of multiple possible diagnoses at or within the same time frame. I had written my paper on schizophrenia, but upon learning that a disorder like that also has its own spectrum, I started to think about this more as possible inspiration for the follow-up assignment (we'll be doing that one in November). If you don't mind, here are some definitions that might help you before I go into further detail on my... well, I guess you wouldn't call this an "answer", but you get my point hopefully.
Synesthesia: the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.
Catatonia (in psychiatry): abnormality of movement and behavior arising from a disturbed mental state (typically schizophrenia). It may involve repetitive or purposeless overactivity, or catalepsy, resistance to passive movement, and negativism.
I can't entirely speak on behalf of a large portion of our community since the issues we all face are unique enough, but what I can say is that based on the transference of information between different parts of the human brain via neuron-based electrical pulses, it is definitely possible that people with more severe diagnostic levels of autism spectrum disorder may find their sense of free will "overloaded" in a sense by an imbalanced production of neurons- hence catatonic behaviors providing a case for a possible synesthesia diagnosis. I'm sorry that this was such a long answer, but I hope I was able to help clear things up for you :)
Also, does anyone get sensory overload from thinking? Like I see all my thoughts projected in my mind’s eye in front of me but they easily overwhelm me.
Thankfully, I can answer this part of your post
much more easily. Feel free to tell me if this is relatable or not, but what I often find happening with my own mind is that I can at least attempt to visualize what I'm thinking incredibly well, whether that be on paper, on a screen, et cetera. The challenge for me, as someone who wants to one day speak in public for the neurodiverse population, is trying to convert my thoughts into words that both neurodiverse and neurotypical people can easily understand. Like most of us, I do hyper-fixate on things from time to time, and when this happens, the rapid influx of thoughts going through my head ends up getting my speech a bit jumbled up, complete with the occasional stutter. Additionally, I've also learned that sensory overload on one or more senses can multiply the adversity of the impact from that of other senses. In simple words, here's an example of what I mean by that. Since I don't like crowds very much (another challenge for a wanna-be motivational speaker), the sight and hearing of the aversive stimulus, that being the crowd of people, overwhelms my senses of sight and hearing at the same time. When it comes time for me to talk with that crowd, then, only three of my five primary senses are currently stable, and that could be made evident in things such as my posture on-stage or my tone of voice, to name a few.