For years, autism care has centered on one model, but that's changing.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry just redefined what evidence-based care really means.

This shift will transform how we support children and families.

Welcome to the podcast. I'm Dr. Josh Fader, the editor-in-chief of the Carlat Child Psychiatry Report, and part of the growing, decades-old community of providers who've been

researching and implementing both developmental relationship-based

and naturalistic developmental behavioral approaches for autism care that we'll be talking about

today. And I'm Mary Government, a licensed clinical social worker in Southern California with a private

practice and an avid reader of the Carlisat Psychiatry reports.

Today we're discussing a landmark policy statement from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent

Psychiatry, ACAP, on expanding access to care for the autism community.

This is a momentous shift in how we think about interventions

for autism and intellectual disabilities. That's right. The statement identifies not only the

long-standing use of applied behavioral analysis, ABA, but explicitly calls out two other intervention approaches,

developmental relationship-based interventions, DRBI, and naturalistic developmental behavioral

interventions, NDBI. It asks clinicians, payers, and policymakers to embrace a broader range of

evidenced-based care. Today, we'll unpack what that means for clinicians, how to incorporate

this into your informed consent process, how to help families navigate referral options,

and how the research supports these modes of intervention.

We'll also highlight key findings from the 2020 meta-analysis known as Project AIM,

Autism Intervention Meta-analysis for Studies of Young Children by Sandbank and colleagues.

To set the stage, what do we mean by evidenced-based care?

According to the U.S. Institute of Medicine,

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