Elevated Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors and Nonsuicidal Self-Injury in Autistic Youth and Adults: A Multinational Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".