New Study Highlights the Need to Assess Mental Health in Autistic Youth

New research from Sweden shows that autistic young people are more likely to experience mental health difficulties than people of the same age who don’t have an autism diagnosis.  

The study, which assessed 20,841 autistic people ages 16 to 25, also found that autistic females had higher risk than autistic males. The risk among girls and women was especially high for anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbances. By 25 years of age, slightly more than 22% of autistic females and nearly 11% of autistic males had symptoms significant enough that they sought treatment in a hospital, researchers said (Martini et al., 2022).

What Causes the Higher Risk? 

Evidence from some earlier studies has shown that several factors could have contributed to higher risk among those assigned female at birth: 

• Autism can look and feel different for people assigned female at birth, which often leads to delayed identification and intervention. 

• Some girls and women may be more likely to hide, camouflage, or compensate for autistic characteristics, especially those related to social communication (Corbett et al., 2021).  

• Some clinicians mistake autism characteristics for the symptoms of other conditions, which can also result in later diagnoses (Estrin et al., 2020).  

Learn more: Why Are So Many Autistic Girls & Women Still Missing Out on Early Identification?

The lack of access to regular mental health care could also explain why hospitalization rates were higher for some people. For example, in community settings, more White students receive evidence-based interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy than Black or Latinx students do. And services for autistic children can be easier to find than services for autistic adolescents and young adults. 

A recent study described several other barriers that can make it harder for autistic individuals and their families to access quality health care:  

• living in a rural community, or where there is a shortage of services 
• having a health care provider without training in how to support autistic individuals 
• lacking health insurance or the means to cover treatment costs 
• feeling a sense of stigma around mental health care (Malik-Soni et al., 2022) 

Sometimes the barriers are systemic or external. Sometimes they’re personal or internal. In a small study published in 2020, autistic young adults expressed some beliefs about mental health care that may have prevented them from seeking help.   

For example, some said therapy would work only if they saw a therapist who specialized in working with autistic individuals. Others believed anxiety was just part of autism. Most of the study participants said they preferred to self-manage and did not seek help until their symptoms became severe (Coleman-Fountain et al., 2020).