• Posted August 18, 2025

College Students With Autism Have Much Greater Rates Of Anxiety, Depression

College students with autism have dramatically higher rates of anxiety and depression compared to their peers, a new study says.

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of college students with autism suffer from anxiety, compared with just over 9% of their peers without autism, researchers reported recently in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Likewise, nearly half (48%) report depression, compared to nearly 8% of their peers, results show.

“What we found is really staggering – autistic individuals endorse much higher rates of anxiety and depression compared to their non-autistic peers,” lead researcher Diego Aragon-Guevara, a doctoral student in psychology at Binghamton University, State University of New York, said in a news release.

The results show that teens with autism face special challenges in the transition to college and need more mental health support, researchers said.

“We want to provide the best support for them and to make sure that they have a college experience, where they get a lot out of it, but also feel comfortable,” Aragon-Guevara said.

For the study, his team analyzed data from an ongoing survey of college students in the U.S. and Canada. The data included nearly 150,000 students from 342 universities, including about 1,400 students with autism.

“We were really excited to see what the data would tell us,” said researcher Jennifer Gillis Mattson, co-director of the Institute for Child Development at Binghamton University. “It was a big opportunity to be able to do this.”

It appears that college support people sometimes take steps to address a student’s autism but overlook their mental health issues, researchers said.

“We're shedding some light on the fact that if you have autistic college students in your college population – and we know the number of autistic college students continues to increase every single year – then we really do have an obligation to support these students,” Gillis-Mattson said in a news release.

“To know how best to support these students, we need to look beyond just autism,” she continued. “There are these other mental health conditions, such as anxiety or depression, where people need to be able to acknowledge and understand that additional supports may be needed.”

Researchers next plan to delve into the specific factors that might promote anxiety and depression in this group. Potential culprits include social dynamics, support from faculty or accessibility of care.

“There are so many elements that go into being comfortable in the new environment that is college, so we want to look into that and see if there are any deficits in those areas that autistic college students are experiencing, so that we know where we can help support them, or create institutional things to help improve quality of life as a whole,” Aragon-Guevara said.

More information

Autism Speaks has more about autism and mood disorders.

SOURCE: Binghamton University, news release, Aug. 12, 2025