Azeen Ghorayshi

And the first is schools.

You know, I spoke with a lot of families who had kids with severe autism who said that as the number of kids with less severe disabilities has increased so much over the years, it's made it harder to access school services that are actually geared towards their kids, their kids needing a lot more help and a lot more support to get through the day.

I talked to parents who said that their kids had been kicked out of multiple schools and

Basically, they're being told their kids are too autistic to be in the classrooms that are actually designated for kids with autism.

I spoke with another parent who talked about having to actually pull her son out of a school where he was eloping, the word for running away, which is a common problem among kids with severe autism.

And the school didn't have gates.

It was just not a safe environment for him.

And there was actually a survey that was conducted by the National Council for Severe Autism that found that

you know, of the 800 parents that they surveyed, 80% said that they had been told that their kid was actually too disruptive, even for programs that were geared towards kids with autism.

So these families are really frustrated because the pool of resources is not expanding at the same rate as the number of children with autism is expanding.

And they're actually finding it harder to get the help that they need for their kids and their kids need a lot of help.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I've heard that from countless parents of kids with severe autism.

We've seen a really similar thing play out in terms of autism research.

Even as the amount of money that has gone towards researching autism has grown substantially year over year, we've actually seen a decrease in studies that are focused on people with the most severe impairments.

Mm-hmm.

I spoke with a child psychiatrist in Boston who actually did a review of all treatment studies from 1991 to 2013.

And he found that the proportion of studies that included participants with severe autism declined from something like 95% of the studies to just 35%.

And this is being driven by some very sort of logistical factors and a sort of perspective on how this research should be approached.

You know, a person with severe profound autism can't go online and fill out a survey.