New article: Anxiety and aggression in ASD HS teens

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Anxiety and aggression in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders attending mainstream schools, by Pamela Gaye Ambler et al. in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 18 (2015)97-109.

104 high schoolers aged 12-18, 52 of them autistic. They self-reported more anxiety and reactive anger as compared to typically developed peers. Their teachers reported them to be more often engaged in aggressive behaviors and at a higher risk for being suspended from school.

I read through the whole article (wasn't able to download it) and I didn't see anything else of note in it.

So...what I would have liked to have seen is a comparison between teenagers of color and white teenagers. Or gay and straight teenagers. I would bet that they ALSO experience higher levels of anxiety and aggression and are also noted to have higher aggressive behaviors and are suspended more often. It's stressful being a minority, especially while you're a teenager. Punishing teenagers makes them act out.

This was an interesting article, but it could easily be misused. To say that aspies/auties are dangerous or whatever.

Thoughts?

Did they specify the issues/events in the study's environment that the ASD teens were negatively reacting to?

Oh, that's a good point. No they did not. I just took a closer look to make sure.

They used something called the Adolescent Anger Rating Scale (AARS), which is a 41 item self-reporting scale to gauge anger. The Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale 2nd Edition (RC-MAS-2) for anxiety, which is a similar scale with 49 items. The behaviors were gauged by the teachers, but there was no discussion as to what brought on the behaviors. No discussion as to what brought on the feelings either.

I was meek and anxious in a mainstream high school back from 1971-1975.

I had anxiety and aggression in my teens and then my mom cured me from the aggression by threatening to sent me to a mental hospital so I moved onto other things. One of them was self harm and I still have two scars on my hand from cutting myself during one of my meltdowns. I also had OCD so that was also part of it.

Oh jeez. I guess that would do the trick. Have you talked to her about it since then? Was she really going to send you?

This was totally me in HS. I was one loose cannon back then. I was suspended 8 times sophomore year of HS, none of which were violent though. i also cut/burnt myself often during part of 10th all of 11th and most of 12th grades. It lingered into my early 20's.

This would take barely anything to trigger. Like a sports game on TV or a video game.

Funny you mention that. I didn't live with my little (autistic) brother when he was a teenager, but when he was little he'd go into rages about video games. He'd throw the controller across the room so hard that they'd sometimes break. My idiot mom got him a pet mouse once and he threw the mouse like a controller. The mouse didn't make it, and she replaced her so he wouldn't know. Of course he did it again because he didn't realize he'd hurt the mouse. Did I mention my mom is an idiot? She pretended THAT mouse ran away but thankfully gave up on the pet mouse idea.

I'm glad he didn't get into trouble for acting like that, because he didn't know, but it would have been helpful if things were explained.

It's not that hard to control the environment around your kid when that kind of thing is happening. Explain things to the kid, listen to the kid, make things more comfortable, make rules, make time for them. Change schools if you have to. I don't get why people don't take control of the situation if their kid is in trouble. Like don't give my brother mice and find out why he's frustrated. It's not rocket science.

I think a better study would have been anxiety and aggression in bullying victims. Fake or skewed science is a very dangerous thing.

I have talked about it a few times since and she said it was a very hard decision for her to make and she had a right to be safe in her own home and my brother too. She got tired of the abuse so she finally snapped and said it. She also thinks all kids should be in hospitals if they are violent and not make other peoples lives safe or their environments. So I do think she was serious and she would have sent me but I am not sure if it would have actually happened because I found out you can't always send a violent kid to a hospital if they feel the kid isn't bad enough and you just can't send them back every time they are violent or otherwise you can be arrested for tress passing and you will be seen as a lazy parent and I think we still lack awareness about abusive children or otherwise more of them would be given help and more families would be given support instead of living in fear and silence. Also it costs money so if the insurance won't pay for it, you're screwed. So if I had this knowledge then as a 16 year old I may not have taken that threat seriously because I wasn't chasing anyone with knives or giving anyone black eyes or breaking any bones or throwing axes at people or breaking windows or furniture but I was tossing things and hitting my family members with brooms and hitting and hair pulling to control my environment. And I wasn't violent in school, only at home. I would come home and do it.

I would think the victim would only be aggressive with their bullies like I was.

You would think that, but that is not actually what happens. Being abused makes someone stressed, and stress lingers. Being very stressed makes people, surprise surprise, anxious and aggressive. People tend to take out their frustration on other people, resulting in a chain of stress. This often takes place in a hierarchy, were a stressed person takes out their stress on the person below them, making them more stressed.

Same reason why some kids bully, some bullies are bullied victims themselves so they take it out on others by bullying them, same as why some abused children would go to school and bully others. But yet we all paint bullies with the same brush but yet lot of people don't do that with abusive kids who are violent. Lot of people see it as making excuses for the bullies or justifying it when people say why some do it. But yet when anyone suggests that a violent child is abused, no one says they are justifying their aggression or accuse them of making excuses for the violent child.

I hate these studies and all these statistics released by people who only look at the big picture.

Maybe, just maybe, these same teens had been bullied most of their younger years and are now fed up? Maybe just maybe most of these teens have been treated horribly by their parents, therapists, caregivers and have high anxiety? Maybe these same kids have been told they are wrong so many times they won't put up with it anymore? And there are many other things to consider, but you know, anyone can do such research nowadays and then claim they have the answer...blah

PS reminds me of data analysis I did at work for a few years...which company gives the lowest price? Sure enough, I would find which one gave the lowest price, but would later tell the upper management, "but wait, that doesn't mean that their price is correct, because in fact, the one with the lowest price is not even charging the required taxes, so it just makes it seem like it's lower at THIS point"...but no, they didn't care...instead they messed up the system logic even if that meant that the information provided to the customer was incorrect...amazing.

My anxiety levels were peaked when I was in high school and I got suspended very often for getting into fights with bullies but of course the teachers never cared what happened to me. In fact they even wrote a letter to my psychiatrist telling him that "I'm a bad kid, I look for trouble, I dont care about other people, I'm the one who starts fights"...etc etc...

Oh and bad enough being harassed daily at school and ignored by teachers and being denied an education I also got bullied at home by my own father for my autism and dyspraxia symptoms. Life is truly fair.

My inclination would be to agree with what others have said.

Being bullied, or forcibly stuffed into a box into which you simply do not fit, raises anxiety.

Anxiety tends to be expressed as either withdrawal or aggression.

Even the meekest individual gets tired of withdrawing from everything eventually.

Either the anxiety is reduced, a constructive way is found to cope with it, "flight" takes such an extreme form that the individual becomes a hermit, or it explodes into aggression.

I took my aggression out in political arguments (at school, anyway). At home, I was one contentious, short-tempered teenager. And that was AFTER I figured out how to box myself up enough to stop the majority of the bullying.

It could have been worse.

I don't have the aggression (so much) any more. It does get worse if circumstances come together such that I am afraid to be myself in what passes, at the time, for my own home. It does not come out in violence, but it does come out in grouchiness, judgmentalness, and proneness to rise to an argument (or start one).

I'm sure it could rise to violence if it continued long enough, though I hope I'm smart enough now to remove myself from the situation long before that point.

Autism, obviously, remains constant. Different situations can make it more or less of a problem (or asset), but autism does not fluctuate much. Some symptoms do (auditory and tactile hypersensitivity, how much energy I have to dedicate to "acting normal"), but autism itself is relatively constant.

Therefore I doubt autism, itself, is the cause. The correlation is obviously there-- remove autism, remove the anxiety-provoking stressors of navigating the world as an autistic-- but causality lies elsewhere.