COVID-19, social isolation and the mental health of autistic people and their families: A qualitative study.
Lockdowns cut the social lifeline for autistic clients, so relief from demands could not outweigh the mental-health crash that followed.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Pellicano et al. (2022) talked with autistic people and their families about life during COVID-19 lockdowns.
They asked how lost face-to-face contact changed mental health and daily routines.
What they found
Families felt two ways at once. Less social pressure brought relief. Yet losing in-person therapy and friends hurt badly.
The strain showed up as new anxiety, sadness, and burnout for both autistic youth and parents.
How this fits with other research
Hedley et al. (2021) and Bush et al. (2021) saw the same distress in surveys of autistic adults and parents.
Courreges et al. (2023) add that remote school alone did not fix the problem—services still vanished.
Dimitrova et al. (2025) seem to disagree: they link higher family resilience to fewer child problems. The gap is simple. Resilience helped families who kept supports; Elizabeth’s families lost them entirely.
Why it matters
When clinics close, your clients lose more than therapy hours—they lose their main social channel. Build two back-up plans: one for telehealth skills training and one for peer meet-ups that can run on short notice. Start each intake by asking, "If we go remote tomorrow, who will you talk to in person?"
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In this study, we show that autistic people and their families have found it very difficult to deal with the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Autistic and non-autistic researchers spoke to 144 people, including 44 autistic adults, 84 parents of autistic children and 16 autistic young people (12-18 years old). We asked them about their everyday lives and mental health during lockdown. People told us that they enjoyed having fewer obligations and demands compared to pre-COVID-19 life. They felt that life was quieter and calmer. But people also told us again and again how much they missed meeting people in real life, especially their friends, and their therapists and support workers. People told us that their mental health suffered because they did not have contact with their friends and services. Importantly, many people (including researchers) think that autistic people do not want friends or to be around people. But our results show that is not true. Many autistic people do want friends and to be around other people. Some people's mental health has been damaged by not being able to see people during COVID-19. Autistic people need support in many areas of life so they can keep socialising and seeing their friends even through difficult times, like pandemics.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2022 · doi:10.1177/13623613211035936