Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Rise in Adults with Autism Worries Caregivers

Check out The Sacramento Bee article about how society is unprepared to meet the needs of the rising number of children with autism spectrum disorders who are becoming adults.
"We don't have the programs. We don't have the research," said Dr. Robert Hendren, director of the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute. "We have this very large adult population of autistics coming along, and we don't know how to deal with them. We just haven't come to terms with it."

But the futures of hundreds of thousands of autistic people in America cannot be ignored for long, said Hendren and others.

Nationally, the number of autistic children expected to need extensive adult services by 2023 is about 380,000 people, and the bill for caring for them will be in the billions of dollars.

Care providers are just beginning to grapple with how to deal with the surge, even as governments slash social services to cope with budget deficits.

Read David Kirby's take on this on Huffington Post

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