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helpful information. Thanks so much again for taking the time to give that five-star review. Now,

let's get started. Welcome Lisa Morgan to the Autism-A-D podcast. Hi, it's really nice to be here today.

Thank you for coming. We are going to talk about a sensitive topic today. So for those adults

that are listening, if you have kids nearby, you may want to listen to this out of

ear shot because we're going to be talking about suicide in the autism community.

So just to make sure that you know to go ahead and stop the podcast if that's not a comfortable

topic for the people around you at this time,

but certainly it's an important one. So I want to introduce you, Lisa. Lisa Morgan is the founder and

co-chair of the Autism and Suicide Work Group. Lisa has developed three autism-specific resources

to be used when supporting autistic people in crisis.

She is an author, consultant, speaker, and presents training to professionals about the unique communication and experience of autistic people in crisis.

Lisa is a subject matter expert on suicide prevention and support for the autism

community. So Lisa, let's talk about why this is an important topic. What are some statistics?

Yeah. So first of all, I just want to say that something that people don't often understand or know is that suicide is a leading cause of death for autistic people. There are some studies that say it's a second leading cause of death for autistic people. There was a study by Cassidy at all that showed 66% of the autistic people in her study

had attempted and or died by suicide.

And autistic children as young as 10 years old have died by suicide as well.

So it's pretty much across the lifespan.

So studies have also shown that all the warning signs of the general public pertain to autistic people as far as, you know, assessing them and supporting them if they are in a suicidal crisis. But there's also unique risk factors for suicide, for autistic people. And some of the most studied and supported are co-occurring psychiatric

conditions with anxiety and depression being among the most. There's also social communication

challenges,

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