Commentary: Suicide risk is high, but often overlooked, in autistic spectrum disorder populations

Abstract

Self-Harm Significantly Higher in Populations with ADHD, Anxiety, ASD, Depression, and Eating Disorders. I appreciated your recent paper on the large and well-matched studies on nonfatal self-harm and suicide among adolescents in the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink (Cybulski et al. 2021). This large study involved 56,008 self-harm cases and 1,399,356 controls aged 10–19 years and reported that many diagnoses were associated with significantly higher rates of self-harm. Compared to controls, the risk of self-harm was significantly higher in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (OR 3.3, 95% CI 3.1–3.4), anxiety disorder (OR 3.8, 95% CI 3.7–3.9), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (OR 2.4, 95% CI 2.3–2.6), depression (OR 7.9, 95% CI 7.8–8.2), and eating disorders (OR 3.1, 95% CI 3.0–3.2) (Cybulski et al. 2021).