Allegheny County

Local family struggling to find autism care as prevalence rate increases

ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. — According to paautism.org, the number of people with autism in 2005 in Allegheny County was 2,325. But by 2011 that number had doubled, and today as the numbers rise, finding care is a struggle.

Emily and Rich Hickman have a 5-year-old son, Albert, who was diagnosed with autism in 2017.

Albert does receive group-based therapy, but for one-on-one attention, Emily and Rich have been looking for a specialist for him since October.

“We’ve been looking for an applied behavioral analysis therapy and there are places that have actually closed their waiting lists because so many people have registered that they’re not gonna ever accommodate those needs. If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism. Every one of these kids has different needs and interacts differently with different people.” (Please add who is speaking here)

And as the number of cases continues to rise, families like the Hickman’s are encountering longer wait times and lack of services when it comes to finding a specialist. Emily told us about a recent encounter. “We just got connected with someone a few weeks ago, and all we got out of it was a list of people we could call ourselves. We could’ve Googled that.”

This is something doctor Judith Miller, Clinical Training Director at the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says needs to be addressed.

Miller says one way to fix the problem is to get rid of some of the barriers that are in place. “We put in some barriers, like you had to have a specific test in order to get a diagnosis,” explained Miller. “But now it’s prevalent enough and people have a lot of experience with it so we should really consider removing some of those barriers and saying you don’t need to have scored a certain number on a certain test in order to be eligible.”