Rachel Abrams

Mm-hmm.

It's really striking, Azeen, how the label autistic has really changed so dramatically just in my lifetime.

So Azeem, before the break, you mentioned that the widening group of people diagnosed with autism had unintended consequences.

Explain what those were.

What is striking me here is that years of work went into destigmatizing autism.

And the end result of that is that you have people increasingly being included in different aspects of society, included in schools, included in classes, being prouder to talk openly about their condition.

However, that has also meant more people competing for a finite number of resources.

And the irony of this is that the net effect seems to be that the students with the most severe needs are being excluded from places like the classroom, as you mentioned, because they are being told, we simply do not have the resources to support you in this environment and you're going to need to go elsewhere.

Employment is not going to be an option for these families.

They have different concerns.

It sounds like a lot of the discussion that you're describing is actually not about trying to understand what autism is.

It's actually about what kind of resources those designations unlock for families.

And I can imagine that that could maybe pit families against one another.

Is that going a step too far?

So as Kathy sees these unintended consequences playing out, what does she see as the solution?

Wow, so basically it sounds like she's undoing the work that she's backed for decades in order to broaden the category.

So essentially, after years of expanding this definition, Cathy is now proposing something that would chop up the spectrum once again.

But what would the practical effect of that be, of that cleaving off of one other group?

But for now, at least, even if they were to cleave this off into a separate category, it's not like it would direct resources to some of these people that need it most.

Given all of these consequences that we have talked about and this lopsided allocation of resources that some parents have pointed toward, does Kathy think it was a mistake to broaden the diagnosis, just especially given that she's trying to undo some of that now?