I treat an autistic child and one of his parents has an official diagnosis of clinical depression. This parent was also placed for sometime in a hospital psychiatric setting. I was wondering which are the possibilities of my client to perform sometime in his life also a psychiatric condition, like his parent. I searched for papers but I did not find something on the point. Any suggestions would be welcomed.
Anecdotally, which is the only evidence I as a non-academic, non-clinician, can provide here, caring for youth with autism in the US is one of the most frustrating situations for family members, as the system is particularly dysfunctional here for this kind of disability at all levels other than severe mental retardation. Your question is perhaps about genetics, but it is hard to disentangle the situation of family members from their own diagnoses here. (It would be even harder for anxiety, perhaps the most common co-morbid mental health issue with autism, and also built into the US environment for families with a member living with an ASD diagnosis).
Anecdotally I am intrigued to see apparent familial autism, mostly at high levels of function, Although most autism seems to be idiopathic. There are also a lot of people with autistic features of difficulties like hypoxia at birth, who may be conflated with cases of ASD proper under the rubric of Pervasive Developmental Disorder.
What I would be wary of here would be the ghosts of psychiatry past, attributing autism symptoms to "refrigerator mothers" and such. These ideas never entirely go away, it would seem.
--Mark Zanger
In my experience as a clinician, there are quite a few people on the autism spectrum who experience recurrent bouts of clinical depression. Here are links to current research articles that discuss depression in ASD clients:
http://aut.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/10/1362361314536625.abstract
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0891422214001760
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