know any research on depression in autism?

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I think we often assume the nearly ubiquitous depression in autistic people is situational, from bullying, to social isolation, to childhood traumas. But I was wondering if any research has demonstrated an elevated incidence of "endogenous" or biologically-based depression in autistic people. It's a hypothetical question, probably not affecting the experience for individuals, but it might suggest preferred treatments and drugs.

That's a pretty interesting question. There's strangely very little, but I did find this;

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstrea ... sAllowed=y

I only skimmed through, and it doesn't seem to be heavy on the research side. However, there are some interesting findings in there. For one, that higher iq was linked to higher chance of depression. I think the conclusion was that those children who had parents with depression were more likely to be depressed themselves, but I found it hard to find if this was a correlation between autism and depression or depression and inheritance. Possibly both.

Thank you for that link. I read (most of) that paper. It has several limitations. First, it's 20 years old. Inclusion criteria include an IQ over 50. Publication date was 1998, and it seems obvious that most of the subjects did not have the Asperger's type of autism. The paper compared depressed vs. nondepressed autistic children, and found that the parents of depressed autistic kids were more likely to have depression history than the parents of nondepressed autistic children. This supposedly implies a biological link. But it could be argued that the parents are depressed BECAUSE the children were depressed and perhaps more difficult to live with.

Anyway, I'll keep looking. Yes, I am aware of the general finding of a range of psychiatric disorders in relatives of autistic subjects.

I think it would be hard to design a study that could claim to have examined endogenous depression when clinically significant ASD is present. The problem is that ASD will inevitably be considered a stressor itself (or just be assumed to have caused stressors), and any depression that occurs in its presence will get coded as being of exogenous origin whether or not there is clear evidence for an external stressor. We can argue with whether it is appropriate to assume ASD is always a stressor, but it doesn’t change prevailing assumptions that shape which studies get published.

Your question is probably more easily answered by looking at the broader autism phenotype (BAP). It is not a clinical diagnosis and, thus, wouldn’t automatically get treated as being (or causing) external stressors. Prior research has shown that anxiety and depression are higher in BAP individuals. And studies have taken steps to show that mental health problems among BAP parents are not the result of having a child with ASD. However, I doubt any of these studies went so far as to determine whether the depression was endogenous or exogenous.

Yes.

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