Brain health · Sanctum

Reading the room by translation

Social situations are a language you learned by study rather than feel. You watch, you copy, you rehearse, you work out the rules consciously while everyone else seems to just know them, and it leaves you wrung out for days.

For some brains the social signals that come automatically to others, the tone, the subtext, the unwritten rules, do not arrive on their own. So you decode them in real time, deliberately and effortfully. You can be good at it, even seem confident, and still be translating the whole way through.

Because the performance looks fluent, no one sees the work behind it, and the exhaustion gets read as being shy, antisocial or oversensitive. The effort of constant translation is invisible to everyone but you.

We look at the effort behind your social fluency, not just whether you can manage socially, because that effort is the point. None of this is a diagnosis. It is what we explore with you.

Written by Dr Asad RaffiConsultant Psychiatrist · Founder & Medical Director