Congratulations @agnewblais.bsky.social 🎉 Very well deserved, and much needed research!

The resource explains similarities, differences, changes to look out for, & where to find support.

The webpage and PDF versions link to a range of different information pages, making it a helpful signposting hub.

We're also working on other versions, including one for professionals.

If you need help or support, please reach out to the Samaritans: www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-h...

There is a lot of excellent research going on related to suicidality and autism, and I am glad our ageing focused work adds to this and highlights the need for better mental health support for older autistic adults.

#AutRes

Older autistic adults (aged 65+) were more likely than middle aged autistic adults (age 40 to 64) to report lifetime and recent self harm or suicidal self harm. This is similar to the general population literature where older age is a risk factor for suicidal behaviours.

#AutRes

Within the autistic group, women and people assigned female at birth reported significantly higher rates of suicidal ideation and suicidal self harm than men and people assigned male at birth.

#AutRes

Here are some key findings:

Autistic adults aged 40 to 93 reported far higher rates of suicidal ideation, self harming thoughts, deliberate self harm, and suicidal self harm than a matched non autistic group.

#AutRes

So I make the recommendation we label our samples accordingly! Midlife and old age. By doing so, we’ll improve the accuracy of our sample descriptions and help generate more information about these different life stages.

The open access version is here: kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/pu...

#AutRes

Autism & ageing research has advanced a lot over the past several years, and I’m very proud to be part of that movement forward. But, inadvertently, we have often described people over 50 as being ‘older adults’, which isn’t very accurate. It also doesn’t align with the labels used in other fields.

Video can be accessed here: youtu.be/mfRWoIQTc-M?...

It has now been added to the playlist :)

I think the team are still cleaning the video up before they upload it, but it'll end up here soon: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

The talks are added to a YouTube playlist. If you go to the Eventbrite page linked above, there is a link to this playlist with all of the previous ARCH talks :)