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Autistic people's feelings mostly misread – empathy works both ways, research reveals
(www.brunel.ac.uk)
Autistic person here:
I often ask people how they are feeling. Even though 90% of the time I can correctly tell by changes in a person's behavior, language, facial expressions, intonation, etc, I am aware that I can't literally read minds and the most obvious solution to this is just ask.
The 90% correct guessing figure comes from asking people and validating or invalidating my guess.
However, in at least my personal experience, neurotypicals almost never read my emotions correctly, will tell me how I am feeling, and essentially never ask. If they do ask, they will often get frustrated by how complex my emotions are, to the point that they vastly oversimplify to the point of caricature.
Then they go on to do or say things based on how they think I feel or felt and functionally spread lies about me constantly, which I am constantly bewildered by.
I would say that I am far more empathetic than most neurotypicals I meet or know, far more likely to spend my time and energy being emotionally available for them than they do for me, far less likely to assume my initial impression is correct, far more likely to truly engage.
As to the increased suicidality of Autistic people yeah that tracks with my lived experience.
Not in that I've personally considered suicide, but I am in constant tension of wanting to communicate with people vs essentially always being misinterpreted.
So I've just grown to be more and more content with mostly being alone.
Basically everyone I ever once thought I loved or trusted has been so utterly incapable of giving me 10% of the emotional support or availability that I feel I give them that I've learned that most people will exploit me and then scream at or assault me or have some kind of total emotional breakdown which they then blame me for whenever I am able to tell them how I feel.
Its beyond exhausting.
As an example that happens frequently to me: I also have a form of neuropathy, which often causes me to be in extreme amounts of pain for no obviously visible reason. I will tell people, I am not angry with you, I am in extreme pain, I have neuropathy, and they will just say no you aren't, no you don't you're just angry for (insert projection of their own insecurity here).