Assessment, Consultation & Treatment provides Autism Services to children, adolescents, and young adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders.

 

Autism Services aims to address the core characteristics and deficits of those on the autism spectrum including:

 

• Increasing communication- ability to request and make one’s needs known
• Eye contact
• Reading the non-verbal cues of others
• Sharing attention with others
• Turn taking and sharing
• Functional play and leisure skills
• Perspective taking
• Reciprocal conversationy
• Responding to others
• Initiating interactions
• Decreasing repetitive behaviors
• Decreasing rigidity

 

Consistent with research and evidence based best practices, Autism Services utilizes Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) interventions. ABA has been demonstrated consistently to be the treatment of choice, and the only one approved by the Center for Disease Control to be effective in treating autism spectrum disorders.

 

ABA and behavioral interventions have been found to be effective in treating autism given:

 

• ABA is able to be conducted across client’s different environments including in the home, community, and schools
• Skills are broken down into more manageable and achievable tasks and goals
• Concepts are explained and presented in concrete ways as individuals with autism often struggle with abstract concepts
• Parent training and consultation is provided to help increase clients skills outside of sessions and decrease any problematic behaviors
• Addresses client-specific motivators as individuals with autism may be motivated by different items and activities than their peers
• Motivation is key- we strive to identify effective rewards to increase desired appropriate behaviors and decrease problem behaviors
• Addresses generalization of skills learned across different environments, items or stimuli in the environments, individuals such as therapists, parents and caregivers, siblings and peers, and teachers