Three Faculty Fellows awarded grant to study social connections and suicidal thoughts in older autistic adults
UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute Faculty Fellows Clare Harrop, PhD, Dara Chan, ScD, CRC, and Laura Klinger, PhD, are recipients of a National Institute of Mental Health (R21) grant, allowing them to study the associations between social connections and suicidal thoughts and behaviors in older adults with autism.
NIMH R21 grants support the early stages of exploratory and developmental research. According to the NIMH, these studies are considered high-risk but with the potential to lead to breakthroughs and make significant impacts in the area of the research.
“Our team has been working to understand various risk factors for suicidal thoughts and behaviors in autism,” said Harrop. “Suicide is the leading cause of death in autism and a major public health issue.” While there is an increased risk for individuals with autism to think about and die by suicide, it remains an overlooked crisis that the team is studying with hopes to change.
In this fully remote study, the team plans to recruit 65 older adults, including 40 with an autism diagnosis. The participants will be asked to complete a series of surveys about their social connections (in person and online) and community activities and attend a clinical interview on Zoom, which will address topics such as suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
In addition, the participants will wear GPS trackers for a week that will allow the team to record the locations in which they are traveling in the community, their resource utilization, and their time spent away from home. Subsequently, a second Zoom interview with the team will be conducted to discuss their community activities and social connections collected from the GPS data.
“Our goal is to use this mixed methods data to understand how different sources of social disconnection serve as potential risk factors for suicidal thoughts and behaviors in older adults,” said Harrop. “We hope the data will provide actionable areas for which we can begin to develop effective and scalable interventions for this vulnerable population.”
