Elevated suicidal thoughts and behaviors and nonsuicidal self-injury in autistic youth and adults: a multinational study

Added on 18/03/2025

Type de contenu

Journal article of the type Scientific research ( ; english)

Jessica Schwartzman, Carly McMorris, Claire Brown, Julian Trollor, Mirko Uljarević, Mark Stokes, Zack Williams*, Darren Hedley
Elevated suicidal thoughts and behaviors and nonsuicidal self-injury in autistic youth and adults: a multinational study published in the journal "Autism in adulthood" Preprint, 20 pages , doi: 10.1089/aut.2024.0225

*One co-author has publicly identified as autistic. [Learn more about this mention]

- 2% of authors cited in the bibliography of this resource have publicly identified as autistic (5 out of 232 authors).
- 10% of references cited in this resource contain at least one author who has publicly identified as autistic (8 out of 79 references).

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Summary/Presentation

Background: Autistic people are at significant risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) and nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI). We examined STB and NSSI in different age-groups, considering sex- and age-based effects, in a pooled multinational sample of English-speaking autistic children and adults.
Methods: We administered the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale to 245 autistic people without intellectual disability (139 youth and 106 adults; 46.1% female sex; Mage = 24.8, SDage = 16.3 years, range = 7–70) or their caregivers in Australia, Canada, and the United States. The study samples were enriched with autistic people experiencing depression and suicidality.
Results: Most participants (87.8%) reported suicidal ideation and NSSI (56.3%). Nearly one-third of autistic people (31.0%) reported a lifetime suicide attempt (M = 2.9 attempts; range = 1–26); overdosing was the most common method of suicide attempt. Sex was not a significant risk factor for suicidal ideation, behavior, or NSSI. Increases in lifetime suicidal ideation were observed across older age-groups, with those aged over 18 years reporting more severe and longer-lasting ideation than in children or adolescents. The youngest age of suicide attempt was 7 years in this sample, and the average ages of first/initial, most lethal, and most recent suicide attempts in youth (n = 24) and adults (n = 42) were 16.6, 19.2, and 20.8 years old, respectively.
Conclusion: Regardless of age-group, autistic people across the lifespan constitute a high-priority group for suicide prevention strategies, development of appropriate assessments, and evaluation of system-level programs that effectively address the problem of preventable death by suicide.

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