Autistic people at higher risk of self-harm, psychiatric illness: study

The researchers used Ontario health administration databases to follow both children and adults who had been diagnosed with autism between April 1, 1988 and March 31, 2018.

Researchers are calling for improved diagnosis, prevention and treatment of psychiatric illness among autistic people after finding they are at a higher risk of self-harm and suicide than non-autistic people.

“We think psychiatric diagnosis plays a very important role in explaining these increased risks,” said lead author Dr. Meng-Chuan Lai, a staff psychiatrist and senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

The new study, conducted by CAMH and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), found that autistic females had an 83 per cent increased risk of self-harm than non-autistic females.

Autistic males had a 47 per cent higher risk of self-harm than non-autistic males.

The researchers also found that deaths by suicide were “rare,” but autistic people were still at higher risk and that psychiatric disorders were a factor.

The findings, which were published in the journal JAMA Network Open earlier this week, support previous research showing that autistic people “tend to be more vulnerable to almost all kinds of psychiatric disorders that we know,” said Lai.

Those include anxiety, depression, ADHD, substance use and some psychotic disorders, Lai said.

But psychiatric disorders often go undiagnosed among autistic people, partly because clinicians may assume that self-harm symptoms are part of the autism — a phenomenon known as “diagnostic overshadowing,” said study co-author Dr. Yona Lunsky, an adjunct scientist at ICES and director of the Azrieli Adult Neurodevelopmental Centre at CAMH.