Patterns in Medication Use for Treatment of Depression in Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
Autistic adults often find depression meds and therapy 'pretty helpful,' but men and those with worse baseline mood rate them lower.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Jackson et al. (2025) asked autistic adults about their depression care. They used a survey to learn how helpful people found pills and talk therapy.
The team wanted to know who felt the treatments worked and who did not.
What they found
Most adults said their care was at least 'pretty helpful.'
Two groups disagreed more often: men and people who started with worse depression. They rated the same treatments as less useful.
How this fits with other research
Burrows et al. (2018) warned that common mood scales like BDI-II and PHQ-9 are not yet proven to work well with autistic adults. The new survey used those same tools, so its helpfulness ratings rest on shaky ground.
Lorenc et al. (2018) showed that job and social-skills programs help autistic adults learn skills, but do little for mood. The 2025 data now suggest standard pills and therapy can pick up where those programs leave off.
Moss et al. (2015) found that almost half of autistic adults report no mental-health problems. The 2025 study zooms in on the other half who do seek help and tells us how that help feels to them.
Why it matters
If you support autistic adults, do not assume treatment failure when clients say 'this isn’t working.' Ask about baseline mood and check for sex-based differences. Pair medication checks with engagement-coping coaching (Melanie et al. 2022) and keep an eye on the scales you use until better autism-validated tools arrive.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add two quick follow-up questions to your intake: 'How helpful does your current depression treatment feel?' and 'Would you like help talking to your doctor about it?'
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Currently available treatments for depression show limited effectiveness in adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) based on measures of symptom changes and clinician impressions. Perceived helpfulness is another metric that has been found to be useful for understanding treatment outcomes in the general population, but it has not yet been explored in adults with ASD. Thus, the current study collected online survey data to examine patient-perceived treatment helpfulness in a sample of 144 adults with ASD who reported that they were currently receiving community-based treatment for depression. Findings indicate that while there was variability in the levels of perceived helpfulness for both medication and individual therapy, most adults with ASD perceived treatment to be at least moderately helpful. Notably, adults with ASD reported having been in treatment for a prolonged duration (5 to 6 years). Ordinal logistic regression models showed that adults with more depressive symptoms perceived treatments to be less helpful (i.e., medications: odds ratio [OR] = 0.92, 95% confidence interval[CI] = 0.89-0.95; individual therapy: OR = 0.95, 95% CI = 0.92-0.99). Moreover, women perceived medication as more helpful than men (OR = 2.33, 95% CI = 1.13-4.82). Other individual (i.e., age, race, education level) and treatment (i.e., treatment length, concurrent treatment) characteristics were not significantly associated with perceived helpfulness. These findings suggest that future studies may want to use perceived helpfulness, in addition to traditionally used objective outcomes, to understand patients' treatment experience and evaluate depression treatments for adults with ASD. LAY SUMMARY: Adults with autism are much more likely to be depressed than those without autism; therefore, effective depression treatments are necessary to improve mental health outcomes in this group. This online survey study found that most adults with autism felt that the depression treatments they were receiving in the community (i.e., medication and individual therapy) were helpful. Females and those with fewer symptoms of depression felt treatments were more helpful compared with males and those with more symptoms of depression. Our findings suggest that when examining whether treatments for depression are effective, it may be important to measure adults' feelings about the helpfulness of the treatments in addition to measuring changes in symptoms of depression.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1002/aur.2515