šØ New year, new paper!
Short Report: "Type, content, and triggers for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors in autistic youth and their disclosure to caregivers"
Link to article below, and a brief summary!
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13623613241308327
Short Report: "Type, content, and triggers for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors in autistic youth and their disclosure to caregivers"
Link to article below, and a brief summary!
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13623613241308327
Comments
Autistic people are more likely to experience suicidal thoughts & behaviors (STB) than the general population.
For autistic youth, most research on STB uses parent report or single items on psychopathology measures.
So, what can we learn from youth perspectives?
In a clinical sample of 103 autistic youth, we examined the type, content, and triggers for STB and disclosure (or not) to caregivers using a semi-structured interview.
(Disclosure is the process of sharing crisis experiences with others, often to seek support)
1) Most autistic youth (83.5%) in this clinical sample reported lifetime suicidal thoughts, even as young as 10 years old.
2) Suicide thought content most commonly included abstract thoughts of dying/suicide (23.3%) and death by cutting (15.1%).
4) Nearly 1 in 4 youth attempted suicide (24.3%), and some youth (15.5%) sought help from caregivers to prevent an attempt.
6) Among youth with nonsuicidal self-injury (nā=ā52; 50.5%), head hitting (nā=ā28; 45.2%) and cutting (nā=ā20; 32.3%) were the most reported types.
Findings show the importance of targeted prevention and intervention to address STB in autistic youth!
And the urgency of continued research to understand barriers & modifiable factors to facilitate disclosure and help-seeking behaviors for autistic youth in crisis.