Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article addresses an important missing piece in compulsory education: mental health education. The rate of mental illness and emergency room visits due to it is rising in our children and adolescents, but in all the schools I attended, nobody taught me how to recognize depression, let alone how to help with it. This is one of many gripes that came up in the viral video "Don't Stay in School" which I strong suggest you watch.
Mental health issues are particularly important when dealing with autistic people, because our rates of mental illness are much higher than average. This is especially true for autistic people that are expected to camouflage as neurotypical, rather than accepting and appreciating our differences. But it's true for any of us, including me. I have dysthymia (low-grade, long lasting depression) and generalized anxiety disorder (everything makes me anxious). I've experienced at least one major depressive episode, probably more that went unnoticed. And I have had mild self-harm tendencies in the past. As things go, I got off lightly. Particularly since I have access to effective therapies and nutritional help.
What if my symptoms had been caught much younger? Might my depressive tendencies never have escalated to full-blown depression? Or at least, might I have learned to handle and manage my depression effectively decades ago? That's the hope of this CATCH-IT intervention, and others like it.
CATCH-IT (Competent Adulthood Transition with Cognitive, Humanistic, and Interpersonal Training- yes, this is an excruciatingly devised acronym) is a set of online learning modules, including coaching and motivational interviews. The fact that it's accessible online is promising. I'd be happiest if it was available for free online, but at least it's a start.
At present, young people mainly access the Internet via their phones, so having a set of modules accessible that way, at any time, would be instrumental to catching depression early, and teaching the tools to manage it early makes it more probable those tools will be learned and used over a lifetime. Which means fewer emergency room visits and hopefully fewer suicide attempts. A worthwhile goal, in my opinion!
In the meantime, it seems like apps like Wysa and Woebot might be a good place to start.
(By the way, if you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, you can find more studies that didn't make the cut for a Reading the Research article over on my Twitter account!)
Mental health issues are particularly important when dealing with autistic people, because our rates of mental illness are much higher than average. This is especially true for autistic people that are expected to camouflage as neurotypical, rather than accepting and appreciating our differences. But it's true for any of us, including me. I have dysthymia (low-grade, long lasting depression) and generalized anxiety disorder (everything makes me anxious). I've experienced at least one major depressive episode, probably more that went unnoticed. And I have had mild self-harm tendencies in the past. As things go, I got off lightly. Particularly since I have access to effective therapies and nutritional help.
What if my symptoms had been caught much younger? Might my depressive tendencies never have escalated to full-blown depression? Or at least, might I have learned to handle and manage my depression effectively decades ago? That's the hope of this CATCH-IT intervention, and others like it.
CATCH-IT (Competent Adulthood Transition with Cognitive, Humanistic, and Interpersonal Training- yes, this is an excruciatingly devised acronym) is a set of online learning modules, including coaching and motivational interviews. The fact that it's accessible online is promising. I'd be happiest if it was available for free online, but at least it's a start.
At present, young people mainly access the Internet via their phones, so having a set of modules accessible that way, at any time, would be instrumental to catching depression early, and teaching the tools to manage it early makes it more probable those tools will be learned and used over a lifetime. Which means fewer emergency room visits and hopefully fewer suicide attempts. A worthwhile goal, in my opinion!
In the meantime, it seems like apps like Wysa and Woebot might be a good place to start.
(By the way, if you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, you can find more studies that didn't make the cut for a Reading the Research article over on my Twitter account!)
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