What mental illness is avoiding eye contact?

Avoiding eye contact is especially common in people on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Researchers at Harvard Medical School discovered neurological reasons why eye contact is stressful for people with autism. Eye contact over stimulates the subcortical system, an area in the brain responsible for reading emotions in other people’s faces. People with autism aren’t the only ones who struggle with neurological imbalances. People who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD (CPTSD) have also been shown to become agitated by eye contact. A 2019 study of women with PTSD from childhood abuse found that their brains associated eye contact with threat. Avoiding eye contact is also common in people with social anxiety as it raises their anxiety levels.

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently avoid making eye contact, and now scientists think they know why. An area of the brain known as the dorsal parietal cortex shows less activity when someone who has ASD makes eye-to-eye contact compared to someone who does not, say scientists from the Yale University School of Medicine. The experiment found that the dorsal parietal cortex was less active when a person with autism tried to maintain eye contact with their partner. The more severe the ASD diagnosis, the less their brain lit up. Social features of ASD, as measured by ADOS scores, were also associated with activity in the same area of the brain. Neural activity in this region was synchronous between “neurotypical” participants during real eye-to-eye contact but not during gaze at a video face. This expected increase in neural coupling was not observed in those with ASD, and is consistent with the differences in social interactions, the researchers said. Our brains are hungry for information about other people, and we need to understand how these social mechanisms operate in the context of a real and interactive world in both typically developed individuals as well as individuals with ASD.