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autistic adults more likely to experience hallucinations?

Alexa

I've just come across a couple of articles in popular scientific journals that claim that autistic adults are three times more likely than allistic adults to experience hallucinations. This gives you a flavour:
https://neurodivergentinsights.com/hallucinations-and-autism/?srsltid=AfmBOoqWoWghLoQP1ZWb7x4fYgCXDAX9Ik4DU7G_oHxR0MgXm2TABIG5

This is by one of the researchers, back in 2017 when the research was published:
https://theconversation.com/autistic-people-are-three-times-more-likely-to-have-hallucinations-77337

I found this repeated within the health service when I googled and downloaded a document from Oxford NHS Trust as a typical example. It stated: Researchers have shown that people with Autism are up to 3 times more likely to have hallucinations. Often when people with autism hear voices, they are hearing their own thoughts spoken aloud in their head. And quoted the second article I linked to, which provided the link to the original research paper:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0177804#sec002

Now, the scary thing for me is the number of autistic adults who were part of this study. It wasn't hundreds. It was 30, 7 of whom were women. Yet NHS trusts and articles in science=based media are circulating this without qualification. In my experience, basing 'facts' on one experiment involving only 23 men and 7 women would be regarded as dicey when applied to neurotypical adults. What do you think? Have you experienced such hallucinations? Is it common? 

I'll post the poster derived from the research in comments (as images and texts put a strain on the forum)

Parents

  • The worst thing is that making such huge assumptions based on such tiny sample sizes are very common.

    The voices in your head, all the commentary that goes along with doing stuff, or not, is called self talk, it's not an halloucination, it's how normal brains work, it would far more interesting to find people who don't have self talk.

    I'm one of htose irritating people who spend hours with a paint chart finding exactly the right shade or white, a lot of people can't tell the difference but I can, this is a function of the rods and cones in my eyes. There are jobs for people like me, just as there are for people like me who have a "perfumiers nose", I can tell what scents are in perfumes, the same with food, I can taste something and more or less tell you whats in it. Not many people can do those things, and again they are highly sought after in some industries, but no one ever does a job advert for people who are really good at smelling things. Then some academic comes along and takes a tiny sample and labels it strange, unusual and weird, when its really not and is can be recognised, named and sought after in other professions

  • in reply to TheCatWoman
    TheCatWoman said:
    I'm one of htose irritating people who spend hours with a paint chart finding exactly the right shade or white

    You too? Last year it was time to paint all the white walls in my new-build house and it took me 6 solid months finding the exact shades for each room. I spent a small fortune on testers.

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