Last academic year, I ran a study which measured the mental health of 22 autistic students at the University of Bristol at four different times (from October 2019 through to June 2020), as well as interviewing them about their mental health at university and their experiences of mental health support.

What we found was in line with other research – autistic students have poor mental health overall, reaching clinical cut-off points for anxiety, social anxiety, depression, OCD, and ADHD. This was the case at all four timepoints when we collected data, with the levels of these mental health issues not really changing, even in light of the pandemic. This is different to non-autistic students, who usually show ‘spikes’ in their mental health difficulties around the start of the new year and then around assessment periods, with improvements in between.

We also asked people about how they coped with their mental health, or with difficult experiences generally. Autistic students reported relatively low levels of harmful alcohol consumption, and low levels of recreational drug use, with these again being stable across all four timepoints. They tended to use a roughly equal mix of proactive and avoidant coping strategies, in contrast to non-autistic people who tend to predominantly use proactive approach style strategies. Network analysis revealed a connection between using more avoidant strategies and worse chronic mental health issues.  

When we talked to people about their mental health experiences, the support they have had, and what they would want the university to know to help them do better, Autistic students told us about a lot of positives associated with the move to university. They were more independent, which allowed them to control some of the things which caused them anxiety, for example, and a lot of people told us that they felt they had made some of the most genuine friendships of their lives at university. Sadly, however, there were also some negatives which people talked about. The changes at the start and end of every term were stressful for a lot of autistic students, such as moving between university and home and the changes to timetables as units changed between terms. Similarly, some people found the social side of university caused them anxiety, such as working with people they didn’t know in labs or the larger events like Fresher’s Fair feeling overwhelming. Nearly all participants also discussed that coming up against stigmatising attitudes about autistic people or worrying that people would think this way about them, was a significantly negative thing for their mental health because it meant that they did not seek support when they needed it, or that when they did reach out for help it was less useful than they would hope.

Because of this, I worked with autistic students at Bristol, as well as staff and students from York and UWE, to put together a bid to develop training around autistic mental health for university staff. This bid was successful, and we are now in the process of co-designing the online training which should help staff know more about autistic people, their mental health, and how to best support autistic students. The project starts in September 2021 and runs until June 2023, with a range of staff completing the training and then being followed up to see what impact it has on their interactions with autistic students. The goal is that this will improve the support autistic students get, meaning that their mental health is more positive, that they do better on their courses, and that they have a better time at university overall – which is all anyone wants.