News
Critical paper and policy brief: Suicide and Autistic people
Content warning: The following blog post contains content about suicide.
Autistic people face a heightened risk of suicidal ideation, suicidal behaviour, and premature mortality by suicide Autistic people face when compared to the general population.
We recently published a critical paper on suicide mortality rates in Autistic people and a corresponding policy brief to inform public health policy in the future.
Peer-reviewed paper
Published in Psychiatry Research August 2024, Santomauro, Hedley, Sahin, Brugha, Naghavi, Vos, Whiteford, Ferrari, & Stokes’s paper, the global burden of suicide mortality among people on the autism spectrum: A systematic review, meta-analysis and extension of estimates from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021, quantifies the risk, mortality, and burden of suicide among Autistic persons.
Highlights:1
- “Autistic persons were almost three times more likely to die by suicide than non-Autistic persons.
- Autistic persons without intellectual disability were more than five times more likely to die by suicide compared to non-Autistic persons.
- The risk of death by suicide for Autistic females relative to non-Autistic females was significantly larger than the risk for Autistic males relative to non-autistic males.
- Almost 2% of all suicide deaths globally in 2021 could be avoided if the risk for death by suicide was not elevated for Autistic persons.”
- Globally in 2021, there was more fatal health burden due to suicide mortality among Autistic persons than for cocaine use disorders, rabies, or testicular cancer among the total population.”
This paper is co-authored by OTARC’s Associate Professor Darren Hedley and Ensu Sahin.
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Policy advocacy
The statistics from the paper summarised above were used to convey urgency in our recently published Suicide in autism: Research Evidence and policy brief we published in August 2024, calling on the Australian Government and peak suicide prevention bodies to acknowledge the increased risk of suicide experienced by Autistic Australians. It comprises three sections:
- A heightened risk of suicide – the evidence
- Factors increasing the risk of suicide
- Barriers to accessing suicide prevention supports
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Footnotes
By art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, and JakobVoss – Own work using: http://www.plos.org/, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5069489