Dr. Rachel Moseley

Again, it's a little bit behind, but we recently had a version released which focused on autistic people, autistic children.

And suicide was the leading cause of death in autistic children.

So importantly to mention again, you're going to have a case where many deaths are not registered as suicide.

And we'll also have the case when

Not all autistic children are actually diagnosed as autistic, so the rates are probably a lot higher.

Well, in our most recent research, we really wanted to ask autistic people themselves, what are the factors driving these high suicide rates and also what needs to change in order to prevent suicides?

So our participants told us that to a large extent, suicides in autistic people are a societal problem.

They are related to stigma and

inequality, discrimination, bullying.

And in response, autistic people typically said, we want systemic societal changes throughout.

Rather than just giving us a crisis app, we want...

changes in the education system so that it's accessible.

We want help with employment.

We want greater financial security.

We want access to health care and so forth.

So they're telling us that really we need a whole society approach to tackling suicide in autistic people.

It's really difficult because I think we're beginning to see changes in the way children are taught about autism.

So we are beginning to see generational changes in the way people think about autism.

But it's super, super hard to get those messages through to the older generations because when they grew up, autism was handicapped.

The way we talked about autism was very different.