The Peers Program and Bullying Prevention, with Dr. Elizabeth Laugeson
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Hi, I'm Dr. Barry Prezant, clinical scholar, researcher, and consultant on autism and neurodiversity, and a Brooklyn boy raised in the big city.
And I'm Dave. I'm none of those things, and I grew up on a farm in Illinois. But being on the spectrum myself, I have plenty of personal insight to lend. And this is Uniquely Human,
the podcast, a show that illuminates and celebrates autism and neurodiversity.
Today on Uniquely Human, the podcast, we are so happy to have Dr. Elizabeth Laugason with us. Elizabeth, welcome to our podcast.
Thank you so much. Good to see you, Barry.
It's great to see you. I think the last time I saw you was at a conference in New York City pre-pandemic. Brain and Language, I believe it was. I forget the exact
title. I think you're right. I think I went and saw Hamilton after that, too. I might have snuck out at some point.
You were able to get tickets. That's amazing.
It was it was a rainy Sunday and it was a half hour before the show. Yes, it was very lucky.
That's great. OK, so a little bit about you. Elizabeth is a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the UCLA Semmel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Elizabeth is the director of the UCLA Tarjan Center, University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, and is the founder and director of the UCLA Peers Clinic, which we'll be talking about in much greater depth. And that is an outpatient hospital-based program providing parent-assisted skills training for individuals from preschool to adulthood. She also serves as the program director for the pre-doctoral psychology internship program in autism and neurodevelopmental disabilities at UCLA.
And she's trained thousands or tens of thousands of mental health professionals, educators, and families worldwide. As one of the only empirically supported and internationally recognized programs for neurodivergent youth and adults, PEERS is currently used in over 150 countries and has been translated into over a dozen languages. And let me also say, a local parent-run and parent-founded support center called Community Autism Resources, their two co-directors are both PEERS-certified trainers. And I trust them so much and they made good choices. So you do a lot. And so I'm really curious about your history and the early influences that led to your career and what you're doing now.
Yeah, well, thank you for asking. I guess, you know, everybody's got their story. I sort of have the personal story. story and then the professional, and I can share both. I don't know if you have a preference.
Let's share both.
Why don't we start with the personal first then? Okay. So, you know, in addition to being a clinical psychologist and, you know, a practicing psychologist, I also am a researcher. It's a very big part of my world. And, you know, there's a saying in research that research is me-search, right? There's something there. If you're really passionate about about what you're researching or what you're doing, there's probably a personal story there. And so, you know, my journey is that I teach skills related to friendships and other kind of social relationships to people who are kind of struggling. And the reality is that before the age of 24, I lived in 21 different places.
And by
the time I got my doctorate, I'd gone to 14 different schools. So I had to know something about making and keeping friends and really kind of navigating my social world because it was changing all the time. And so fortunately, I was lucky enough that I was able to figure it out.
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