After an Autism Diagnosis: What to Do First, What Can Wait, with | Dr. Erica Bailen #243

Many families worry about what will happen if they call police for help with their autistic child or loved one. This week, Jeff Skibitsky talks with Officer Laurie Reyes and Officer Amy Stoughton (Ret.) of the Montgomery County (MD) Police Department’s Autism/IDD, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Outreach Unit. They explain what really happens on those calls, how families can prepare, and why calling 911 right away is the most important step. Laurie created the unit in 2004 to address a rise in “missing at risk” calls. It is now recognized as a national model by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Autism Speaks and Pathfinders for Autism. The unit responds to 40 to 60 autism and IDD calls a month, does more than 1,000 family follow-ups a year and gives about 150 community presentations a year. In this episode:

This week, Jeff sits down with Camille Proctor, Founder and Executive Director of The Color of Autism Foundation. Camille started the foundation in 2009 after a long fight to get her son diagnosed and after support groups where no one looked like her. Today it's a national resource for Black families navigating diagnosis and services. Camille talks about why Black children are often diagnosed later or misdiagnosed, and what it's like to wait months to get from diagnosis to services in underserved communities. She shares what providers get wrong when they make assumptions instead of asking families who they are. She also explains why the parent should be treated as the navigator, with the provider as co-captain. Camille walks through the foundation's free five-week parent training. It teaches families to collect data in plain language, advocate in IEP meetings, create social stories, and support a loved one in crisis without calling the police. She also shares how autistic trainers shape the work and what gives her hope for the future. Resources:

For most autistic people, the supports end at 21 or 22. The friendships, the structure, the built-in reasons to be around other people, all of it was attached to a school system that stops. Dr. Rachel Loftin has spent her career with the people on the other side of that line. She is chief clinical officer at Prosper Health, which she helped found and which is now the largest provider of mental health services for autistic adults in the country. She is also on faculty in the psychiatry departments at Northwestern and Yale. In this episode, she joins host Jeff Skibitsky to talk about what connection really looks like in adulthood, why so much social skills instruction teaches autistic people to disappear into a crowd, and what parents of young kids can start doing now. In this episode:

Most parents know their kid plays video games. Far fewer could name the game. Andrew Fishman, LCSW, says that gap is where the nightly fights start. Andrew is a licensed clinical social worker who works with teens and emerging adults, writes about video games and mental health for Psychology Today, and is the author of Parenting A Gamer: Help Your Child Build Healthy Habits, Make Positive Choices, and Find Balance in Virtual Worlds. He has led social groups for autistic teens and adults, and he is a lifelong gamer himself. In this conversation with host Jeff Skibitsky, Andrew explains why gaming works as social scaffolding for autistic players. No eye contact to manage, no body language to decode, and everyone in the lobby already shares the interest. Autistic people play roughly twice as many hours per week as neurotypical people, and Andrew makes the case that there is a good reason for that. What we cover:

Most kids in the U.S. aren't diagnosed with autism until after age 4, long past the window when early intervention makes the biggest difference. The problem isn't that clinicians don't care. It's that a traditional evaluation can take six to eight hours end to end, and there aren't enough specialists to go around. This week, Jeff sits down with Dr. Cheryl Tierney, a board-certified, fellowship-trained developmental pediatrician, professor of pediatrics at Penn State, and Chief Medical Officer at EarliPoint Health. For more than 25 years she has evaluated and diagnosed children with autism, learning, speech-language, attention, and sleep disorders. Dr. Tierney explains how EarliPoint's FDA-cleared eye-tracking system works: 12 minutes of natural video scenes, 120 data points captured per second, more than 86,000 data points if a child watches the full session. The result is an objective read on how a child uses eye gaze to learn from the world around them, plus proxy measures for social engagement, language, and cognition. She is clear about what it is not. It is not a standalone diagnosis, and it is not about forced eye contact. The conversation also covers what happens after diagnosis. Repeat assessments let clinicians see whether a child is closing the developmental gap in months instead of years, which means treatment can change course while it still matters. In this episode: