Untended wounds: Non-suicidal self-injury in adults with autism spectrum disorder

In the citing paper

“Crucially, it highlighted the increased prevalence of NSSI in autistic as compared with typically developing populations, with 50% of the autistic sample (n = 42) having engaged in at least one act of NSSI—an inflated prevalence that motivates further study of NSSI in a larger sample of these individuals within the autism spectrum.”

In the citing paper

“These authors also compared autistic self-harmers to autistic people who did not engage in NSSI: they found no significant differences in age, depression or emotion dysregulation, but a higher proportion of autistic women than autistic men engaged in NSSI.”

In the citing paper

“They found no significant differences between groups and so suggest that these factors are not associated with increased risk of self-injury.”

In the citing paper

“Maddox et al. [15] were recently the first to delineate a different type of NSSI, one resembling that seen in neurotypical populations, in autistic people without intellectual disability (all of whom had completed high school, the majority of whom had college qualifications).”

In the citing paper

“They found more similarities than differences between their small groups of autistic and non-autistic (typically developing) self-harmers; both began self-injuring in early adolescence and did not differ in the specific NSSI they engaged in.”

In the citing paper

“The only suggested differences were that autistic participants were more likely than non-autistic self-harmers to engage in NSSI for the purpose of shocking or hurting others, in imitation of peers, or for the purpose of avoiding a suicide attempt.”

In the citing paper

“(We included measures of anxiety and depression in this analysis to specifically test the assertion that autistic self-harmers and non-self-harmers do not differ significantly in depression [15], but results must be interpreted with caution as these measures reflect current psychological health within the last fortnight and month respectively.”

In the citing paper

“However, to our knowledge, only one study has ever explored NSSI in a small sample of autistic adults using a validated instrument but did not explore associations with suicidality [10].”

In the citing paper

“The rate of NSSI in ASC was elevated (50%) compared to college students (17%) and adult community samples (23%), but the phenomenology of NSSI was broadly similar between those with and without ASC [10].”

In the citing paper

“Importantly, this suggests that NSSI could be more prevalent in ASC than that in the general population, and could potentially be a previously unexplored common risk factor for suicidality in ASC and the general population.”

In the citing paper

“This study is the first to use measures of suicidality (SBQ-R) and NSSI (NSSI-AT) that have good evidence of validity, albeit not yet in autistic adults [7, 10].”

In the citing paper

“The rate of NSSI in the ASC group (63.6%) was significantly higher than the general population group (29.8%), and similar to the rate reported in previous research [10] (50%), which also utilised the NSSI-AT in autistic adults.”