What Kind Of Psychologist Provides Useful Assistance For Individuals With Autism?

Oct. 23, 2008 -- Question: What kind of psychologist provides useful assistance for individuals with autism?

Answer: Well, there are many kinds of psychologists and I think that first of all, it's important to use the right subspecialty of psychology for different stages. If, for a child with autism spectrum disorder, for example, a developmental psychologists or a pediatric psychologist is usually trained in making the diagnosis of autism and deciphering it from other causes of language problems or problems in relatedness.

This is usually done in combination with a medical professional like a pediatric neurologist, developmental behavioral pediatrician like I am, or a child psychiatrist. Behavioral psychologists are extremely helpful to many parents of kids with autism because they work with specific behaviors and reward systems. And actually one of the key therapies that's used in autism spectrum is like Applied Behavioral Analysis, or ABA, is really based on behavioral psychology. Then one would go back often to a pediatric or a developmental psychologist to monitor the progress of the behavioral interventions provided by the behavioral psychologist or the people trained by and supervised by the behavioral psychologist.