Azeen Ghorayshi

Her career basically tracks our understanding of autism.

She is a legendary autism researcher.

She has been actively involved in defining criteria for the disorder.

So she's really been at the center of a lot of this change.

So she's a clinical psychologist.

Hi, Kathy.

Hello.

She's at UCLA.

She has spent her whole career studying and working with people with autism.

What drew you to the field of autism in the first place?

Kathy, in the 1970s, as an undergrad, started working with children who had what today we would call autism.

The kids that Kathy was seeing, many of them had intellectual disabilities.

Some of the kids would be rocking back and forth, avoiding eye contact.

Many of them wouldn't talk, couldn't talk, or even would just repeat what was said back to them.

And at the time, psychologists and psychiatrists thought maybe this was a form of schizophrenia.

Why did they think it fit the profile of schizophrenia or psychosis?

Yeah.

It was really in the heyday of a pretty dark period in psychiatry's history where institutionalization was very common.

Kids were sent off to often state-run institutions where they were basically hidden from society.

So, yeah, when Kathy was entering the field, this is a time when there was a shift away from thinking that these kids could not be helped to realizing that actually there were things that psychologists could do that could help these kids.