Kathy Lord

I think I like the kids.

I just thought they're so interesting.

The kids that I saw then, we assumed they were not verbal.

We assumed they couldn't talk.

They did not look at us.

We didn't understand why would a child be moving their fingers in an unusual way like starfish?

Or why were they upset when someone put something down in a place that they hadn't expected it to be?

Originally, it was both considered childhood schizophrenia or infantile psychosis.

I think part of it is that we use the term psychosis when people do things that we don't understand.

And live your life because they'll never be able to do anything, which is not true.

But that is what people were telling them.

How do I both adjust the world around them, but also how do I give them tools, for example, to communicate that would allow them to learn?

We were thinking that, wait a minute, there are people that don't have language delays, but who actually have some of the same social difficulties that autistic kids have.

And I think also people were more aware that cognitive disabilities like intellectual disabilities are a feature, but they're not always there for autism.

Not everybody with autism has an intellectual disability.

We then said, wait a minute, we need to make this broader.

We did a study where thousands of kids were seen and all given the same diagnostic battery.

clinic in the Midwest would say somebody had autism and a clinic in the East Coast would say they had Asperger's.

It was very confusing and resulted in kids who often, over a lifetime, might get an autism diagnosis, then an Asperger's diagnosis, and then sometimes have to come back to an autism diagnosis.

So it really seemed like scientifically, this is not useful.