Do People with Autism Also Have Mental Health Issues?

Lunsky engaged in a study to compare young adults who have autism spectrum disorder to those with other developmental disabilities. She analyzed two groups of people within the ages of 18 and 24 in Ontario, Canada. The first group consisted of 5,095 young adults with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis while the other group of 10,487 had a different diagnosis of developmental disability, but not autism (those with both were not involved in the study). A third group included those who had no developmental disability diagnosis, within the same age range.

The reason they chose to look at people who were at least 18 years old was due to that being the age where you must switch to adult social and mental services (in Canada). 24 was the stopping age because in Canada, those with developmental disabilities usually get out of school at age 22, so using age 24 gave two years of additional data.