Neal Tricarico

I wasn't bullied, but one of the things that hurts my heart and my wife's heart is that no one ever shared with us this possibility of suicide in this group.

Yeah, I mean, so when Anthony went to the Autism Center for Services, he would go four days a week, and then once or twice a month, they would meet with my wife and me and talk about how he was progressing and things to anticipate, but they never mentioned this statistic.

Yeah, we only learned about it after.

And so what was hard was in reaching back out to these centers is it is the...

elephant in the room if you will autism service providers are aware just how at risk these kids are but they don't have any training to help them on the mental health side so they send us over to the mental health side when you come over to the mental health side

those providers share hey you know because we would share with them hey anthony's on the spectrum and this was a two-year journey for us anthony was wildly aware of this as a real possibility for him but each time we would mention autism or high functioning autism they were like oh well we don't have any special protocols and in fact many of the things that happened for him in that space

actually contributed to his isolation to his helplessness we've only come to learn about after because they were probably putting him on medication right yeah and he was um super resistant to that we supported him in it in his case when he was on that medication it actually increased his ideation wow yeah was it antidepressants

i think so i mean it was only a few days we were he was actually so uncomfortable in the um institution or facility if you will yeah that um beforehand while he was begging us to have him go because he needed that kind of help then he was begging us to to take him out he didn't like the rooms with no windows all the the light the medication also in the support groups other kids were giving him ideas so

Peace.

We're not here to really blame or point fingers, but to point out two important gaps as it relates to autism.

There is this huge gap.

The statistics are undeniable.

They're doing great things in Europe about it.

And in addition to the 30% more likelihood, this group is the highest percentage of completion, meaning they're not doing it for attention.

They're doing it with their black and white thinking to complete.

Yeah.

That's a 12 to 18 group.

Males, statistically, are higher.

What's scary is if you take teenage males, ASD diagnosis, and COVID, Anthony was more than 60% likely to do this.

Holy crap.