Fifteen-year old Jaqavius Gordon plays a conversation game with his speech therapist at the autism center in Macon.
The topic of a recent day, picked by Jaqavius himself, is dessert. He and his therapist toss the the ball back and forth as they ask each other simple questions.
“My favorite dessert is vanilla ice cream, chocolate,” he says, and then, after a short pause, adds, “and cookies.”
He tosses the ball to his therapist, so she can answer the question next.
“Oh, no! Jaqavius interrupts. “Milkshakes, sorry.”
Jaqavius visits the Autism and Developmental Center, Navicent Health, four days per week for speech and occupational therapy. His mother, Tracy Gordon, first became worried about her son’s development when Jaqavius was 2 and still couldn’t speak.
“He was pointing. He was making noise, and we could never get him to say anything,” Gordon said.
More parents are having their children screened for autism than ever before, said Dr. Elizabeth Young of Navicent’s autism center. But waiting for a diagnosis can be unnerving.
“I was scared. I didn’t know what to do,” said Gordon, who waited six months to get a diagnosis for her son. “When you don’t know what your child want, or they can’t tell you what they want, it was very hard.”
The wait time for getting an autism diagnosis in Georgia is often upward of six months, sometimes as long as 14 months for young kids and teenagers.
Part of the issue is there is a shortage of child psychologists, said Catherine Rice, director of the Emory Autism Center in Atlanta.
Making the problem worse: a lack of confidence in the diagnosis process, especially with younger kids whose possible signs of autism can be similar to normal deviations in infant behavior.
“People can provide that diagnosis but typically need additional training to feel that that is an appropriate area for them to be practicing in,” Rice said.
That lack of confidence comes from not having much hands-on experience in recognizing autism in kids. Child specialists are schooled on the written criteria of autism, but the disorder is nuanced and requires a detailed behavioral assessment.
Some psychologists choose to take extra training to feel more confident working with kids with autism, but training is expensive and time-consuming. For one professional, it can cost several thousand dollars and take up to a week to complete.
“Honestly, sometimes it doesn’t make economic sense,” Rice said, especially for doctors in rural areas.
The Georgia Department of Public Health started funding a training program in 2015 specifically for autism. It focused on doing hands-on case studies in child behavior. So far it has trained 54 child psychologists.
Dr. Avital Cohen was one of those doctors.
“It was more hands on. Instead of watching, we actually got to do it with other people watching us and providing feedback on and how we were doing with it,” said Cohen, a clinical psychologist licensed in Georgia and Alabama.
State law requires most health insurance policies to cover autism therapies for children up to age 6 (next year, the requirement extends to age 20). Medicaid is now required to provide autism coverage to young people up to age 21.
This increased coverage stems from a greater awareness of autism and a broadened definition of what behaviors fall on the spectrum.
This story was originally published August 16, 2018 11:15 AM.