Barry Ingham

1 Introduction Autistic individuals often experience sensory under- and/or over-responsivity throughout the lifecourse (Crane et al. 2009; Germani et al. 2014; Kern et al. 2006). Restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRB) are suggested as a coping mechanism to manage sensory processing (SP) differences (Gal et al. 2002; Glod et al. 2019; Moore et al. 2021; Schulz and Stevenson 2019, 2020).

Introduction Autistic people are more likely to experience anxiety disorders and depression than the general population (O’Nions et al., 2024). For example, using primary care data from Wales, UK, Underwood et al. (2023) report clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders as present in 27.56% of autistic people compared to 13.60% of a matched sample of people who were not autistic, and depression at rates of 31.39% compared to 17.90%.

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