Mental Health Conditions in Children with Autism

Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “what the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started…

In today’s episode, I wanted to talk about mental health conditions in children that have been diagnosed with autism. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210119114358.htm) A new U.S. study published in January earlier this year by the University of British Columbia and AJ Drexel Autism Institute found that nearly 78% of children with autism have at least one mental health condition in comparison to 14.1% of children without autism. Dr. Connor Kerns is an assistant professor and the lead author of this study, and he stated that “for a long time, mental health in kids with autism was neglected because the focus was on autism. There’s much greater awareness now, but we don’t have enough people trained to provide mental health treatments to kids on the autism spectrum. We need to bridge these two systems and the different sets of providers that tend to treat these children.”

Children with autism are at higher risk of other mental health conditions such as anxiety disorder, depression, behavior conduct problems, ADHD, and more. This study additionally compared the prevalence of mental health conditions in children with ASD to children with intellectual disabilities and children with other on-going chronic conditions that require healthcare attention. They found that mental health conditions were significantly more prevalent in children with autism than in any other groups. Dr. Kerns suggests that “the longer mental health conditions are allowed to exist and worse, the harder they are going to be to treat. It’s much better to catch them early. Right now, we don’t have a great system for doing that.”

This research study revealed some pretty interesting data and factual information about our population of children with autism. Even during my experience as a clinical manager, over half of my clients came in with other mental health conditions, such as anxiety disorders, ADHD, and severe behavior conduct problems. This comes to provide us with another reason as to why our children with autism needs treatment as soon as possible. I’ve encountered quite a large population of parents and advocates that push for neuro-diversity and not treating the autism diagnosis stating that we should seek to “change” our children. Neuro-diversity is definitely something that I strongly believe we need to continue advocating for within our healthcare policies and education systems to provide more learning opportunities for our children; however, leaving the autism diagnosis untreated leaves our children at risk for other mental health conditions that could result in dangerous health risks and safety concerns. The important thing to know is that effective research proven treatments such as ABA does not base their principles upon changing a child. The goal is for us to teach the child life skills that will help promote the children to become more independent in life rather than remaining dependent on their caretakers to provide their daily needs. When we’re looking at shaping the behaviors of our children, we’re not looking to “change their personality.” Rather, we are aiming to provide them functional communication and replacement behaviors for them to continue living life as independent and safely as possible. If you’re interested more about my opinions on ABA and what it can...