About “AI Gave Me Autism”?

I’m Jon Mick. I’m AuDHD, twice-exceptional, and I spent 15 years in product management before I realized the most broken product I’d ever encountered was my own self-understanding.

So I did what any product manager would do. I treated myself as the product. I ran diagnostics: a QEEG brain map, pharmacogenomic testing, neurofeedback protocols, personality assessments, attachment theory, and about 10,000 hours of conversation with AI. Then I started building.

This newsletter is the field report.

Every week, I write about what I’m finding. I developed a framework called Working Memory Fragility that treats ADHD, autism, and giftedness not as separate conditions but as different expressions of the same cognitive architecture. I write about consciousness, neuroscience, Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration, and what it actually feels like to live inside a brain that rebuilds itself every morning.

The articles are long. They’re personal. They’re grounded in a 67-citation research paper and tested against my own neurofeedback data, genetic profile, and a 135-table AI life model I built to understand myself. They also include stories about my wife Charlotte, my son Jack, my tattoos, and the time THC showed me how working memory actually works.

If you’re neurodivergent (or suspect you might be), if you’ve ever felt like the smartest person in the room who still can’t remember why they walked into it, if the words “you’re so smart, so why can’t you just...” live rent-free in your nervous system: this is for you.

If you’re neurotypical and curious about what’s actually happening inside the minds you love but don’t fully understand: also for you.

I write because being understood is the thing I’ve wanted most and received least. And because every time I publish something honest about my architecture, someone messages me to say “I thought I was the only one.”

You’re not.

Human. Deeply seen.