Self-Caregiving Under Structural Erasure: Role Collapse and Structural Isolation in Autistic Adults

Some adults permanently occupy two roles that caregiving research treats as belonging to separate people: providing care and receiving it, in the absence of a stable support network able to detect deterioration and coordinate a response. This conceptual analysis proposes self-caregiving under structural erasure (SCSE) to name that general configuration, defined by two constitutive criteria: role collapse and non-transient structural isolation. SCSE does not name ordinary self-care or the routine self-management of a chronic condition; Section 3.1 draws that boundary explicitly. The article develops SCSE within the population of autistic adults, the context in which the phenomenon prompted this analysis and in which the surrounding literature shows the clearest gaps. Within this context, the article proposes a hypothesis, not a third criterion: that residual masking, an audience-directed strategy that may persist after its original audience disappears, could moderate the gap between independently assessed support need and self-perceived need. The article synthesizes caregiver burnout, autistic burnout, and masking research, positions SCSE against its closest conceptual precedents in both the clinical literature (compound caregiving, elder orphans, general autistic burnout) and the disability studies tradition, and outlines implications for measurement, clinical and personal-assistance practice, and a falsifiable research agenda. SCSE is proposed as a general conceptual construct, applicable in principle beyond the population studied here rather than tied by definition to autism, and distinct from a diagnostic category.