Suicide rate for people with Asperger's or HFA?

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Anyone know what it is, either in general terms ("high"), or percentage, or relative to the general population (10 times more likely to commit suicide"), etc.?

From a recent paper I read 1/3 attempt suicide, 2/3 consider it. I'll try and find a link.

EDIT: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanps ... 2/abstract

I tried when I was about 21. I only just failed as I was sectioned for 6 months. I had a bottle of analgesics. The only thing I didn't take was alcohol or it would have guaranteed going home.
I left the NPC with a good view about life. I have had a fantastic time since then. I am glad that I failed.

It would be incredibly difficult to obtain valid and reliable data in terms of scientific soundness. So percentages that are quoted are very likely to be just guesses.

I think though we can reasonably make a few assumptions, that it is likely to be higher than the NT rate, and that the age spread may be different for structurally disadvantaged minorities from NTs. (I take the view that these exist, though I know not everyone on the spectrum shares my view of that).

What I am less clear about is whether the reasons 'we' attempt suicide would be the same reasons in the same
order that drive NTs to attempt suicide. My random guess is that the answer is "no, they are not the same".

Also, to me (people will disagree I am sure), it is a glib cop-out to attribute all suicide to depression, as routinely happens, as if depression alone explained why that person made that choice. There are megamillions of depressed people who don't make that choice. I think that society on the whole is not yet mature enough to face these underlying complexities; it is in a more simplistic stage where blaming the victim is always the easy default position, no further inquiry nor consideration necessary.. it also lets the abusers (where these exist in the background) nicely off the hook..

Instead of the focus being on how many kill themselves, I would really prefer to shift the focus to surviving well - how not to kill yourself and how to maximise our group survival... however that's another topic, isn't it.

One major problem with the Lancet sample is how it was drawn - it is unlikely to be representative of the whole population and "newly diagnosed" is another source of potential bias, because there seems to be a huge adjustment process people go through and we see things very differently at different stages of the long and multi-staged self-discovery process of being on the spectrum.

This link discusses some of the possibly different variables: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/as ... nd-suicide

One thing that jumped out to me was the potential connection of the much higher rate of being bullied, and the terribly young age for being at risk. Bullying is one elephant in the room which studies like one the Lancet published ignore or minimise. It's too easy to attribute the cause of suicidal thinking to the person who experiences it, ignoring social, historical, cultural, political and structural impacts (but psychology does that, as a discipline, all the time).

I get what you're saying B19. Have me thinking actually that the same groupings that economists use for unemployment could potentially be used for depression, so studies could provide more information about causation. As with any data sample though, it's strength lies in how representative it can claim to be of the population, meaning often the more people the better. And there are possibly more Autistic's in the world than people living in the UK (70 million vs 60 million by a very arbitrary estimate), making a population sample quite hard (and expensive) to acquire.

So, back on to methodology. Here's my suggested groupings for depression based on the groupings used for unemployment (rather rudimentary for now):

Reactive - as a sub-category under the category of "structural" causes (broadly speaking).

the only aspie that I know of who did themselves in, was Nikki Bacharach [daughter of Burt and Angie Dickensen]. her story broke my heart. I tried to find out more about what her life was like but there wasn't much other than this- [mixed with showbiz stuff]

(clicky)Burt Bacharach and Angie Dickensen tell about their daughter Nikki
some excerpts-
Burt and Angie's daughter Lea Nikki Bacharach was born July 12, 1966, years before they knew anything about Asperger's Syndrome.

Nikki Bacharach in childhood

Nikki Bacharach in adulthood

Burt Bacharach: "Angie had a difficult pregnancy, and on July 12, 1966, our daughter was born, three months and 20 days prematurely. She weighed one pound, ten ounces and the doctors didn’t think she would live through the night.
Day after day, I would stand in front of the premature baby ward, looking at my tiny little doll of a daughter in her incubator. Even though I knew she couldn’t hear me, I would start singing to her. You might think it would have been something I had written, but the song that got stuck in my head was Hang On Sloopy by the McCoys. One day, about eight weeks after our daughter was born, I was standing there singing it to her when two women who had been visiting someone in the maternity ward walked up. They began looking at all the preemies (premature babies) and one said to the other, ‘God, if I had one like that, I’d just throw it away.’ Completely losing it, I started to scream at them. Then I chased them all the way to the elevator."

"When Nikki was a young child, I couldn't really tell if there was something wrong with her, even though I definitely felt something about her was off. I really loved the nurses in the preemie ward, and since they had been calling the baby Nikki, we decided to name her that. Nikki’s situation was so touch-and-go that she spent the first three months of her life in an incubator. Having a child changed me in ways I didn’t even understand. Despite all the hits I had already written and all the success I’d had in the music business, none of that seemed all that important to me any more. When Nikki was a young child, I couldn’t really tell if there was something wrong with her, even though I definitely felt something about her was off."

Burt and Angie were married for 15 years before the strain of caring for their daughter drove them apart

Burt Bacharach: "The first time I realised something was wrong with Nikki was when Angie got up to speak at a big charity event where my dad and I were being honored as ‘Men of the Year’. It took place at the New York Hilton in November 1969. The guest list read like a Who’s Who of celebrities and the programme was filled with congratulatory messages from people like Frank Sinatra and Richard Rodgers. That night, Angie was wearing this incredible white dress that left her stomach bare, and she looked terrific. I don’t know what set her off, but as Angie started talking about children, she suddenly lost it and began to cry. I thought, ‘Maybe there’s something going on with Nikki I don’t know about.’ Nikki was three years old at the time, and until then, I thought my beautiful little blonde daughter was doing fine. By the time Nikki was four years old, her behaviour was so strange at times that neither Angie or I could really understand it."

Angie Dickinson: "Early on, Nikki started cutting the hair off her dolls and the manes of her toy horses. When she was around four years old, she began saving everything – broken toys, pieces of glass, old batteries and dog poo – in a mound on top of a dresser in her closet. She also started coming up with names for herself like ‘Yellow Collar’ or ‘Instead Blender’, and you had to call her by those names. When Nikki was five, she decided she was Lorne Greene from Bonanza. When she had exploratory surgery on her eyes, she wouldn’t let them put on the wristband unless it said ‘Lorne Greene’."

Burt Bacharach: "By the time she was eight years old, Nikki was really out of control. She would take the pet mice Angie would buy her, throw them against the wall and kill them. Then Angie would go out and buy her some more. It’s hard even now for me to explain how stifling it was to live like that, because at this point, Nikki was really quite nuts. As she got older, there was definitely a kind of deterioration, because if a child was born as prematurely as she was back then, there was no way she was going to come out with a full deck." Angie was a smart woman, but when it came to Nikki, she was lost. She was so tied to Nikki, and Nikki was so tied to her, that I wound up leaving. I moved down to our beach house at Del Mar, near San Diego, and Angie stayed with Nikki in the big house in Los Angeles. When Nikki was 14 she decided to become a Sikh. Angie would get up with her at four in the morning so Nikki could go to the ashram."

"My daughter was getting weirder and weirder but I didn’t know what to do about it. While Nikki was in her Sikh period, which lasted for two or three years, I thought maybe she was thinking, ‘My dad’s good-looking and my mother’s a beautiful movie star, and I can’t compete with that, so I’ll cut off all my hair and I won’t bathe or shower and I’ll let the hair grow under my arms.’ Nikki was 34 years old when we found out what was really wrong with her. Her inability to interact with other people, her total lack of empathy and all the compulsive and obsessive behaviours Nikki had demonstrated ever since she was a kid were all symptoms of a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome. Back when Nikki was born, no one knew nearly as much about this disease as they do now. Nikki spent ten years in a treatment center from the age of 16, which she hated, and nobody ever said to me that this was an autistic child. You’d think someone would have seen it, but no one ever did. And all the while, Nikki just kept getting worse. Nikki was really unhappy in the treatment centre there, but I would go see her twice a year. I would take her out to dinner and talk to the people at the centre about how she was doing. After Nikki had been there for several months, her therapist said, ‘We’re having some difficulty treating her. Would it be possible for you to stop communicating with her for a while?’ No calls, nothing. We all agreed to this, and then 20 minutes later Nikki was on the phone with Angie."

Angie Dickinson: "The bottom line was that Burt did it to get her away from me. He thought this would help Nikki, but it destroyed her. She was there for ten years. I mean, Jesus Christ! Ten years. Ten years! Think about it. With no change because she didn’t have the mechanism. Poor soul. That poor darling. She was so heroic and still loved the sonofabitch, because Burt can charm everybody. There was no progress, but I kept thinking that maybe there was."

Burt Bacharach: "Whenever I visited her at Angie’s place, I could feel the venom she had toward me for imprisoning her in that centre. After leaving the house, I would have to pull my car over to the side of the road and just sit there and meditate for about 20 minutes so I could get myself together enough to drive back down the hill."

Angie Dickinson: "I moved into a new house in 1994 and the helicopters drove Nikki crazy. Helicopters, lawnmowers, motorcycles, leaf blowers and weed whackers were like a drill in her ear. She couldn’t get the sounds out of her head and she was really suffering. Nikki talked a lot about suicide. She was very open about it, even to people she didn’t know well."

Burt Bacharach: "Angie knew it was coming and one of her friends had given Nikki a book about how to commit suicide, but I never believed she would do it. At the end, Nikki’s sensitivity to sound was so acute that she kept saying she was going to kill herself because of it. And then it was, ‘If my mother dies, I’m going to kill myself.’ Always her mother, but never her father. Nikki died on Thursday, January 4, 2007. There was a bag over her head with a tube that fed nitrous oxide into it, and that was how they found her. She was cremated and there was no service, but Angie made a memorial booklet for her with photographs and a long poem. The last lines were ‘Nikki put on quite a show when she was here, on this Earth. She was not understood by most, but loved and appreciated by a precious few. And now, she’s finally happy. Her Mom.’"