My name is Mohamad Sakkal. I'm 31, a foreigner, and I live in Vienna. Since I was a child I have had difficulties. Misunderstandings. Problems with concentration. At school, with people, even with friends. Making friends or building any connection was always hard for me.
No social connections. No professional chance, no job. Almost nothing.
For most of these eleven years, nobody had a name for my difficulties. People saw the foreign name first and explained everything through it. The diagnosis came only in 2025, when I was 30. Until then I was simply someone who seemed difficult. And the rule was the same everywhere: deliver the best version of yourself, despite the ASD, despite the depression. Whatever I could not deliver was read as my choice.
I keep trying anyway, because no other way exists. But by now I can predict how each attempt ends before I start it.
And this is the part that is hardest to say, because it sounds like a contradiction. I know I can do a lot. I have ideas. I have projects in my head that I want to build.
ASD is complicated, and that gets used against me. Offices want a simple case: degree finished or not, able to work or not, resident or not. I am always somewhere in between, and for in between there is no box. The law even has exemptions for situations like mine. In my case they were never applied.
What fills the days instead is isolation, frustration, rejection. That is not a bad month I am describing. It is the standing state of eleven years.
At some point I stopped telling people, because said out loud it sounds like exaggeration. That is one reason this site exists: the documents can say it without me having to.
After enough years I also stopped thinking something is wrong with the situation. It just feels like I am on the wrong planet.
The documented part: five years of a technical degree, stopped without any adjustment. 542 job applications in eight years. Residency refused for having no income. Disability refused three times, once after a 25-minute examination that overruled ten years of hospital records. Every organization I contacted said the case fell outside its mandate. In 2026 two institutional acknowledgments arrived: a university research group named it as something no Austrian organization works on, and a human rights research institute acknowledged the assessment practice as arbitrary. Neither changed any decision. On the social side: years of events and more than eighty matches across five apps, and not one connection that lasted.
The loop. Eleven years.
Starting condition
Autism · ADHD
- Alone: No family in country, no support network
- Untreated: Late diagnosis, only as an adult
- Read as foreign first: a foreign name, before anything else
Standard paths fail
- Education: Studies impossible without adjustment
- Employment: 542+ job rejections
- Inclusion bodies: Refused the case
No way to break out
- Therapy: Beyond insurance unaffordable; condition stays untreated
- Legal: No representation; decisions stand
- Relationships: Eleven years of deepening isolation
- Movement: Cannot afford to leave
Subscribe. I write about this every two weeks, with the documents: Die unsichtbare Barriere. New pieces arrive by email.
If you have read this far, there are three things you could do, and each takes a few minutes.
Send it to one person. Not to everyone. To one person you can think of who works on this: a researcher, a journalist, someone in disability or migration law, someone at an organisation. Getting it in front of the right person is the one part I cannot do myself.
Write to me. If you have lived something similar, or you are in Vienna and would meet, or you simply want to say something: [email protected]. I read everything and I answer.
Offer something concrete. A contact, an opening, a place, an introduction, or another kind of support. If you have it, say so plainly and I will take it seriously.