Hope and Healing for Kids and Families Living with Autism: Dr. Theresa Hamlin

Kate Tucker: I'm Kate Tucker, and this is Hope Is My Middle Name, a podcast from Consensus Digital Media. And wow, do I have a hopeful episode to share with you today. My guest is Dr. Theresa Hamlin. She's the president and CEO of The Center for Discovery, a nonprofit located in Harris, New York, about 90 miles northwest of New York City. The Center for Discovery provides, among many other things, residential, medical, and special education programs for children and adults with complex conditions like autism. It's a place that is known around the world for its groundbreaking holistic approach to caring for these individuals. That approach is called the HealthE6 model, and it was developed by Dr. Hamlin and her amazing team. In our conversation, she shares the wisdom and joy she's discovered in 40 years of serving people with complex conditions. And she explains how simple things like good food, fresh air, and regular exercise can have such a profound impact when it comes to transforming lives.

Hello, Dr. Hamlin!

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Hi, Kate. How are you?

Kate Tucker: Oh, I'm good. How are you? T

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Terrific. Really terrific. I'm really very glad to be here with you today.

Kate Tucker: Awesome. I'm so, so grateful to have this conversation. And I'd love to go way back now, you know, to where you grew up and Just tell me a bit about where you grew up and, and did you grow up in a family of researchers?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: I did not. So I grew up in a family of, we had five kids in my family, but my parents were both educators, um, in local school districts, but my parents were just so committed as teachers ensuring that every one of their students was cared for. And I just remember my parents, you know, even bringing home some of their students, but really making sure that their families were okay. They were so just such genuinely good people and just cared so much about every single child in their classrooms. You couldn't help but have that rub off on you. So I grew up around all of that caring and love and it shaped my life. There's no doubt about it.

Kate Tucker: Did anyone in your family have autism or do you have memories of someone when you were growing up who maybe would have been diagnosed, maybe it was just really misunderstood then?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: No, actually, I did not and autism was not really well understood at all during that time. You know, it was many, many years ago, obviously. But I do currently have members who, in my family, who have autism. But when I grew up, no. You know, as a matter of fact, when I chose to become an educator, you know, my parents were definitely concerned that individuals who were diagnosed as having disabilities or were in special ed classrooms were not most likely going to be successful. They had concerns that that wouldn't necessarily fulfill me, but I loved it. Absolutely loved it.

Kate Tucker: Tell me more about that. So you mean your parents were seeing that in their own experience and then when you expressed Desire to become a teacher. They were concerned you might encounter. Yeah, the challenges and frustrations of being able to help each student.

I mean, because you did become a teacher and there was a class that was very pivotal to sort of putting you on the path you are today. Tell me about that class, that school, how you ended up there and what you were experiencing.

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Sure. You know, it was 40 years ago and students with disabilities at that time literally had the classrooms that were in the basement. They were so excluded from everything. As a matter of fact, my first opportunity to view some of those classrooms, I saw students, you know, stuffing envelopes and then the next student unstuffing the envelope. And then the next student stuffing it again, and I thought to myself, Oh my goodness, what is going on here? What type of learning is this? I think what I really came to understand was that there was very little knowledge about children who had neurological conditions or other disabilities. And there was little hope for any sort of positive outcome or ability to learn for these children. And that, that just sparked my interest. I just said, there must be a better way to really support these children and really understand what they're capable of. And that's where my journey began.

Kate Tucker: So you went into teaching to be in special ed, or you went to be in teaching and then ended up...

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Exactly, right. So I did go into teaching to be in teaching first, and then I, you know, had this incredible teacher and he talked a lot about how you analyze tasks. It's called task analysis. How do you break down learning so that everybody has an opportunity to learn? Simplify every part. So if you're brushing your teeth, you break that down into all the simplest tasks and then you figure out how each student can participate in that task and what type of learning they need in order to further their skill sets. It just made so much sense to me that if we could break down things and really understood the student and meet them where they were, that we could probably help everybody. And so I switched majors to become a special educator and just really think through learning for every single student, which is what is needed to teach individuals with really complex disabilities.

Kate Tucker: How did you apply what you learned already there about task analysis?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: What I ended up doing was really creating a very collaborative team. So I knew that the children that I taught, I couldn't help by myself. So I needed to get very friendly with a physical therapist, and I needed the occupational therapist and the speech therapist. And at that time, everything was, and it still is to a certain extent, unfortunately, in public schools, but where children are sort of pulled out for therapy, and the clinicians don't really integrate themselves, and they don't. teach each other a sort of a trans-disciplinary approach. And so I very quickly figured out that I want them all in my classroom at the same time. And we all want to talk together and I want to understand exactly what the physical therapist is doing. And then I learned to ask why all the time. I just said, why are you doing that? And what if I, you know, tried that while they were eating lunch? And what if I tried that, you know, while they were in the bathroom or in a school speech session. Like, how would that all work? And so I just created a very smart team around me that could really teach me why so that I could then teach the children and teach their families. And it started me essentially on a journey where teamwork, where I work now is just so essential. And it's why people stay here because they know that they're part of a team and they're part of that collaborative effort. And it, it just makes a huge difference.

Kate Tucker: Hmm. By the time you were teaching and you were bringing these people together in this holistic way that would potentially kind of create a roadmap for where you would go next, you know, what did you understand by that point about autism? And did you have the idea that some of these kids were possibly dealing with that?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: I did. I mean, I had. a little bit of an idea. And again, you know, it wasn't until the early nineties that really autism started to be identified. I knew that there was something very different about these children in the way that they interacted or or didn't interact, I should say, with their environment and with other individuals. But I saw I saw opportunities where kids did pay attention in the right environment, and I saw that kids could learn. I definitely began to understand that these were kids who may have been diagnosed even with childhood schizophrenia, but actually were kids with autism. I believe it was around 2005 or so that Autism Speaks illuminated autism for all the world to see.

Kate Tucker: What were you seeing in those early days that maybe informed the holistic approach you have now?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: I think early on, I think it was just in general that I did recognize that so many of these children were also quite unhealthy. Many of these children were eating highly restrictive diets, just having like chicken nuggets and french fries, and they were 12 and 13 years old. We would speak to mom and dad, they would say that's all they've ever eaten their entire life. And I thought to myself, well, that can't be very good for someone's health and well being. And many of them were obese or morbidly obese, um, very sedentary. So I knew that there were a lot of health problems in the population that were just not being addressed. And parents would tell me that their kids would suffer from severe gastrointestinal problems. Constipation is a big issue. And the doctors would say to them, that's just part of being autistic. It's part of the diagnosis. And it, it really isn't. There, obviously comorbid medical conditions, but it's not part of the diagnosis. It needs to be treated separately. There just wasn't. that understanding.

But there was this one young man, and I'll call him Jay, but he had transferred from the public schools to our school. And his mom wasn't in the picture. She just could not care for him. He had pretty severe autism and his dad unfortunately, he had been jailed and it's just a very, very difficult story. But grandma and grandpa had him and the grandmother reached out to me and said, please, can you help? He's been expelled from school. He had a severe behavior. He actually threw a rock through the principal's window of his car. Not a really good thing to do. Um, but I went to visit him and said, absolutely. I know we can help him.

And so we admitted him to our school, but it was you know a couple months, two or three months later, after he experienced our program and we started to address some of his medical issues that he had, and really tried to understand where these behaviors were coming from. And he said to me, he said, I was so scared. I hid in the bathroom. I was bullied. He said, I had no friends. I had nobody. And he turned to me, he said, now I feel so much better. I have a friend, and, um, it's just one friend. And I said, what makes him your friend? He said, he ties my shoe in the morning. But it was that little, that tiny, tiny change, seemingly tiny change, to have just one kid who you could relate to that transformed his life, absolutely transformed his life. And he was excited about learning then, and he trusted he would do more things and trial more things. And it just transformed him. It transformed his grandma. He's had a beautiful life and I know he continues to do very, very well.

Kate Tucker: So what was it that ultimately led you to move from teaching to The Center for Discovery. I know it wasn't called The Center for Discovery then, but tell me a bit about your journey from teaching to where you are today.

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: I actually started out teaching here very, very early on. We had a small preschool program here, and we had mostly just students coming in for our day school program at that time, and we were challenged by the state to expand and think about looking at individuals for residential placement, students who were being placed in large institutions at the time, and these were children as well, and to really think about opening up a residential home for these kids. And there was nobody else on staff at the time who had any experience in the very medically complex and those with really challenging developmental disabilities. But I had that experience. That was my background. And so I volunteered and said, Yeah, I, I will take this on. I'll do this and build a program for these children who had severe autism and other medical complexities.

We started out with taking just 12 children, some were already institutionalized, some were in psychiatric centers. There were just a handful living at home, but were on the verge of being placed into a psychiatric center or, and those were the only places that were available for these kids at the time, you know. I started to build the program. It's called the HealthE6, you know, with a team, I should say. I never do anything by myself. I have fantastic people here who work with me and around me. And we built a program that is, you know, a center of excellence in New York state, but has a very good reputation throughout the nation and throughout the world at this point, because it really it looks at an individual from that holistic perspective and ensures that they're in the best environment and, you know, have the best foods and the right amount of activity so that their brain can function, their brain and body can function and learn and thrive.

Kate Tucker: I want to take us through a few quick things to sort of help the audience understand The Center for Discovery and the work. So could you just tell us, what is The Center for Discovery and could you describe who it's for?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Sure. The Center for Discovery is multifaceted, I should start out by saying, It's a residential facility as well as a school. And it also is a medical facility with a research component for individuals who have really highly complex conditions. So these are children, and we have adults as well, but children who really cannot function well inside the public schools and inside their family's situation. So they need a lot of extra help. Many of the children that we care for are kids who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, but they also have a lot of comorbid or co-occurring medical conditions. So the gastrointestinal problems, the constipation, the immune problems they have, many of them have seizure disorders. They may have metabolic issues and genetic abnormalities. A high percentage of them have anxiety disorders and other mental health issues. So really, really complex profiles of children that require 24/7 support. So we offer that.

We also have a very large, 170 children who come to us just for our day school program. So they come during the day and then they go home at night with their families. But they have more supports inside the community where they can get the help that they need so that they can stay in their homes, but obviously not take advantage of the public schools because they're just too challenging for the public school system. And then we have over a thousand individuals that we see through our clinic here. It's a Department of Health certified clinic, so we have all of our medical professionals, all the subspecialty physicians inside the clinic, we have OTPT speech, all of those types of physical medicine supports as well. And then we also have, as a support to our staff, but we have about 110 kids in a daycare program, so those are our staff's children. We have 1,700 staff right now. We're about to open up. another short term stay children's hospital. And so our staffing will go to 2,000 shortly. And then we have other plans for expansion in the near future.

So we're growing, um, but there is just a huge, huge need for services like the services that we provide. We know that nutrition is really, really important. We have research that demonstrates that. So we're situated on 1500 acres of land. It's gorgeous. It's in the country. It's magnificent. And we grow almost all of our own food here to ensure that our children don't have highly processed foods. They don't have a lot of additional sugars in their food. So we just make sure that the kids are healthy from the inside out. And then our environment, and I'm sort of describing our model here, our environments, if you were to come here, you would immediately feel probably like you're in a spa. So based on, you know, the colors that we use, there's a lot of light, a lot of windows, a lot of fresh air, anything that we can do that works to calm the nervous system down is really, really important for our children and our families and our staff.

As I said, anxiety is a major issue, but just stress in general, when you have difficulty learning and difficulty interacting, stress is a major issue and stress, as we know, can really negatively impact all of your health and well being. So anything that we can do in the environment to reduce stress is really, really important. So we have a lot of outdoor walking trails. There's a lot of access to nature. There's research that shows that even just looking at a tree, so people are hospitalized and one, you know, they have the same procedure and one has, you know, a concrete building outside their window and someone else is looking at a beautiful tree, the person with a beautiful tree experiences less pain and they heal more quickly. So yeah, there's just tremendous research behind our model, but we take advantage of all that research and have created an environment here that is essentially a healing environment. It's all designed around, you know, trying to reduce stress and anxiety and promote healing.

Our model is called the HealthE6. So, as I talk about environment and eating, energy regulation, they all begin with the letter E. So, it's H E A L T H with an E, capital E, and a six to the power of six. So, the E is energy regulation. So, that's something that you see in school systems for these children. Very rarely are they out of their seats, you know, teachers want them to sit in their seats and learn. And I say to them, if you want this child's brain to turn on and to be able to learn, you have to let them move first. So like do a Zumba class first or let them jog around the room, whatever you have to do, but get some movement in there first. And then their brain will turn on, and then they can learn, and then they can sit. So it's counterintuitive, but it's really what works.

So exercise is really important for ensuring quality sleep. That's a major problem in children with autism is that they don't get good sleep at all. And a lot of it has to do with their diet. It has to do with lack of exercise. And we create daily rhythms for them that are consistent. So they wake up at the same time. You know, they have breakfast at the same time. They go out for a walk at the same time. Our brains love rhythms like we just do as humans. You know, our brains thrive when we have rhythm to our days.

And then we really focus on emotional regulation. We have a psychophysiology lab here where we study stress in our kids and we see that kids have great difficulty with emotional regulation and people describe it, families describe it as they go from zero to 60, right? So one minute they're perfectly calm and the next minute they're flipping a table over. And what we've been able to demonstrate through monitoring stress, and we have these monitors that the children wear on their wrists, and it measures sweat, basically, which is your first measure of stress, like your pupils will dilate, and your body actually starts to dilate. Sweat, you may not see that, but we can monitor that on these children and what we can demonstrate is that they're really not going from zero to 60. That stress is building, building, building, and then it looks like it went to 60, but really it went 10 miles an hour up to the 60. So we can intervene before it gets to 60.

Like we can see the stress coming in the kids, and we can stop the activity. We can go outside for a walk. We can do something that will calm that stress level down again, and then teach the children how to recognize their own feelings.

We teach something called size of the problem here, where we say, is it a pea-sized problem? And we talk about what that means. And, or is it, you know, is it the watermelon, the cantaloupe or the watermelon? You know, if it's a watermelon, we have a problem. So if it's the pea-sized, it can wait a few minutes, like we'll deal with it. But it's a very different approach than what's typically available for these children or what professionals think autism is, you know, it's mainly classified as a sort of this behavioral disorder and very few programs think about all of the medical issues associated with autism and they also only look at what is observable. So if a child drops to the ground, we'll have clinicians from the outside or a family saying, well, they just don't want to go to the next activity or they're being non-compliant. And what some of our research has demonstrated is that their heart rates are so high. They're so anxious because they don't know what's coming up next, that if you could just sit with the child, and this is what we do, and we've built in, we call these transitional benches. You just sit with a child, show them through a social story, through pictures, what's coming next. They have no problem going. They don't drop to the ground. They get up and they go to the next activity. But we have insights into their physiology in a sense into what's happening biologically with them. And it's changed how we think about the kids and, and how we teach them. And you know, we have tremendous outcomes here, unlike other programs. And I'm hoping it can be replicated all over the place.

Kate Tucker: I mean, I was gonna ask you what makes it unique, but it's so obvious now. What I mean, just for an understanding of the broad sort of scale of things, are there any other places like this in America or are you aware? Are you looking at other places? Are you working with other people to build similar models?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: We are working with other places. We are actually working on certifying our model right now so we can help other places. But we are in school districts, we're helping other schools, we're helping other facilities like ours at least integrate some of the components of our model and our clinicians are teaching all the time. Especially our psychologists are at many of the conferences for autism, really talking about the importance of thinking through stress and anxiety, all the medical issues. And I think they're having real impact. You know, it's not just the classical model that's out there, which is a behavioral approach. So people are thinking a little bit differently now.

Kate Tucker: I mean, it's so evident. I read your book, Autism and the Stress Effects, and it's so helpful. And also just, you know, looking around, you have a beautiful website with so many resources. It's just evident that what you're doing is so much about empathy and not sympathy, you know, so how can we understand what it's like to live with autism spectrum disorder? I know it widely varies, but I mean, is there an analogy or a way you help family and caregivers imagine what people are dealing with?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: I think, um, you know, sometimes you're in your car and your radio is going and then they're static, right? And it's so annoying. And when you turn off the radio, all of a sudden it's like, Oh, okay, I'm okay now. Like, thank God you turned that off. It appears, and not in everybody, but that's some of the description that we hear from our children from, you know, those that can articulate that it's like having that just that constant, constant stress and noise all the time that causes confusion. It just wears you down all the time. You know, just shutting off the noise and having silence makes a huge difference. And it's just you, you know, it impacts you immediately, immediately. You know, our kids live in that static all the time. So anything that we can do that can minimize that chronic effect that they have all the time is really, really important.

Kate Tucker: What was it that helped you see, like, was there a lightbulb moment where you identified the role of stress in autism? Because, I mean, you know, talking with parents who have children with autism, sometimes even today when you mention anxiety or stress, it's like we don't even realize that that's something I mean, we just assume that's just life, right? But it's like such a huge factor. When did you start to see that and what led you to kind of come to the understanding you have?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: I think it was just through a lot of observation of these children, I knew a lot about fight or flight and you could see in the eyes of many of the children just that constant vigilance, that hyper-vigilance really, and it just made me really think about stress and what is that impact and then again engaged other professionals and really decided to set up a stress lab here to really understand whether or not stress was really impacting our kids and how they were able to interact in their environment. And that started, gosh, probably 15, almost 20 years ago now. We see a lot of inflammatory markers in blood work in our kids when they first arrive. And we watched that change over time as well. So you're reducing that sort of cellular stress on them as well. So it's emotional stress, it's physical stress, it's cellular stress, it's all of that, that impacts these kids.

Kate Tucker: Could you walk us through what happens when a child is stressed in the classroom?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Sure. So, we build in regulating activities such as sound healing. We build in sort of quiet time. We build in exercise into the classroom. All of those things that help reduce stress, but sometimes a child may not sleep well the night before. And we know that sleep affects stress levels the next day. We have a lot of research on that as well. But we'll see that a child is vocalizing more or getting out of their seat much more frequently than they normally do. And so we understand that that child that day is probably more stressed for some reason. Sometimes we know it's sleep related. Sometimes we know it's GI related. We don't push the child as hard. And I know that, you know, we'll have other professionals say, you just have to work them through it. You just have to make them do it well. That doesn't work out really well for these kids, you know, but we just say like back off a little bit.

We'll go out for a walk or we'll listen to some calming music or do something that is not so stressful. And then we may have to do that for the entire day, but then the next day is better and the child doesn't experience a negative interaction where somebody has to physically intervene with them or something like that, that negatively affects them and cause their stress levels to even get worse, and the staff stress levels as well. And we teach kids to tell us when they're having a difficult time, when they need to step out of a classroom situation, if it's too noisy or there's too much going on. And we allow them to do that. And that allows the child to trust us.

I mean, there's huge differences in the amount of physical behavioral interventions that we use here than in other schools like ours. We just don't do it here. We don't need to do it. Yeah, I mean, they have to actually do for some of these children, real physical interventions. It's characterized as like a tackle, like a takedown is what, you know, so there's like two or three people intervening and it's to protect the child. It's to protect the environment and other children in the environment. So I understand why they do it. My question always is, but why do you have to get to that? Like what are you missing here? And, you know, From time to time, we admit a new child and that's what they've experienced. And so the team comes together to say, okay, how do we prevent that? Like, what do we have to do here? What do they look like from a biological perspective, from an educational perspective, from a clinical perspective? And what can we do to change that outcome? Because that's not okay for anybody, for the child, it's very traumatic and traumatic for the staff members and the families as well. So we take it very seriously.

Kate Tucker: I mean reading your book I was just struck by how applicable it is to everyone and I also hadn't really thought of stress as being contagious or the ripple kind of effect of someone, you know, myself if I'm in a stressful situation and how that impacts my family. Talk to me a bit about that and if there's a story or something you can share where you saw that happen and then maybe by using the tools you have to regulate, you were able to kind of bring the classroom or the students back together.

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Sure. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about our psychophysiology lab here is that it's not just the children that we're measuring the stress on, it's also our staff members, if they consent to do that. It's really interesting because we have some staff members and they outwardly appear totally calm and they say, you know, I can handle this. I'm fine. You know, not a problem. But then we're like, come on in here, like come into the lab. Let's take a look at your data here. You're really not doing that well. And over time, this is going to become a problem. So I want to make you aware that you are getting really stressed.

Kate Tucker: That sounds terrifying, but also very helpful.

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: It is! And it's just like, you have to take a break. Like, don't think you can just do this. But we can see when one staff member leaves the room after an event happens, a negative event or something, you can see the stress going down. Then you see another person coming in. totally stress free on the monitor. As soon as they come into the environment, the stress goes up. When the child's stress goes up, it's everybody in the classroom. It really is, stress definitely is contagious. That's the hard part about the families. When they're trying to manage and support a child who has a lot of anxiety, the whole family breaks down and parents will come to us and just say, I haven't slept.

in years, haven't had a good night's sleep. They're hyper-vigilant all the time, and they just cry. They have such limited bandwidth to deal with anything, and you know, they appear almost outwardly angry, but it's not, they're just, it's, they've suffered from chronic stress, so when we can talk to them about that and have them understand that they have to do things to support themselves, you know, if they place their child with us, and it's really difficult to place your child in residential placement, but we're a team here. We're all together, and the parents know that, you know, that we're going to help, but we also help the family. We see the parents come back two weeks, three weeks later, and they look rested and they have more tolerance, um, and they can interact better. It's a better situation for them and for their child.

Kate Tucker: You share a story in your book about Billy and his dad. Would you be willing to tell that story?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Sure. Yeah. Um, Billy, incredible kid. He was expelled from school. He was actually in his home environment for two years without being able to go to school. There were people, clinicians who were asked to work with him in the home environment, but Billy had pretty significant aggressive behaviors and that's why he was expelled from school. When I saw him, his parents had called and said, can you help us? And so a couple of us went down to see him, but he was in his bedroom. Literally the family had resorted to even putting a portable toilet in his bedroom. He ate a block of mozzarella cheese and a pizza, every day. He was morbidly obese when he had aggressive behaviors. because his iPad broke or his computer broke or whatever, the family had to call the police. They couldn't manage him. Actually, the first couple of days that he came to us, he would repeat, you're going down, you're going down. And dad said, you know, that's what the police officers would say to him. They put him in handcuffs and bring him down to the police. It was just a horrible situation. Everybody was reticent to help and I just said, you know, I think given the fact that we know he's got a really poor diet, he's got no interaction with people or activities, I said, it's not, it's not going to be easy for the first couple of weeks, but absolutely we can help.

You know, he's a prime candidate. for what we know we can do to help him. And so we did, we were able to transition him up to the center. We immediately started to change his diet and I have it all on videotape. And we gave him pizza, but we gave him our own bread here that we bake in our bakery here, our own tomatoes, you know, all of the healthy things and just substituted his food. He began to eat more healthy foods and he started to feel a little bit better. He started to engage and we did just a lot of physical activity with him. But within, you know, nine months time he had literally lost, under physicians' supervision and the nutritionist, but almost 60 pounds, you know, I had this wonderful video of him and this was a kid who just wouldn't interact at all, just on the treadmill interacting with his physical therapist. And, you know, he just turns to the physical therapist and says, Hello, Hurleyville, because he lived in Hurleyville. And it just was so beautiful.

His family was able to take him home for Thanksgiving dinner, and they said it was the first time like he didn't pull the turkey off the table and upset the entire dinner for everybody. He sat, he used a fork, a knife, something they would never even allow him to even go near a knife. But it changed his life. We didn't cure his autism at all. He still has autism. It's pretty evident. But we were able to reduce that level of stress and get him interacting with people. He's got friends now. His life is wonderful. These kids can do it. They absolutely can. You just have to be willing to, to work with them and work through their issues and work as a team to support them.

Kate Tucker: I first heard about the Center for Discovery through the Antidote documentary, featuring, I think, the dance and theater program that you have. Could you speak a bit about, you know, music, therapy, the arts, dance, and how that factors into the work you do, and maybe share a story of a, of a student who's come through that and, And really excelled there?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Every year we have a big production. This year was The Wizard of Oz, which was absolutely amazing, but we definitely use creative arts and music therapy to really support our kids from a social emotional standpoint. One young man in particular, none of us actually knew that he really had a voice. He would whisper, but we never really heard him talk very much. He didn't interact very much. And every single play is customized so that regardless of what your skill set is, there's an opportunity for you to participate. So they go to play practice and they learn to interact with each other and take turns and wear costumes and stand up in front of an audience, like things that kids with autism are not supposed to do. Like, you know, if you look at the hallmark of the diagnosis, they have these social and communication issues that are supposedly lifelong, but our kids are able to overcome them and they are, they're just hams on the stage. But this one boy who literally, we just, as I said, didn't really even think that he had a voice. He just stood up and he didn't do Somewhere Over the Rainbow, but he sang another song. It was just, we were all amazed. Like everybody just sat there, their jaws just dropped and said, did, did he just do that? Like, wow, like amazing. And he just smiled like he was just himself and just smiled and walked off the stage. It was like, wow, where did that come from? But he was so proud. He watched the other kids. You know, we sort of met him, not we, our music therapist, met him where he was, allowed him to be himself. He became comfortable with an audience and just performed!

The young girl who played Dorothy had started out in other plays. She also was not able to attend the public schools and really, really struggled with a lot of behaviors. And the first play, you know, she just held up a sign and then the second play she was able to sit on stage on a bench during one of the scenes and the third play I think they had her reading a few lines of Beauty and the Beast and then by this place she was the star and had memorized all of her lines and at the end you know just said to Kaniyo who's our head of our performing arts program here, you've changed my life essentially and you know I'll not forget you. It was so beautiful, but you watched her just change over time and that level of self confidence and ability to interact with others. She's going to do well in life. She knows what she's capable of and she's quite confident in her skill sets now and she just didn't have that before, but that's what the arts brings and our staff, you know, bring to the table and it transforms lives.

Kate Tucker: I mean it just seems so incredible what you're doing. What is it that determines when a child, or a student, a resident is ready to leave The Center? And how do you equip families to help their loved ones continue to thrive?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: It's all individualized, so it really depends on the family and their ability to support their child in the home environment, what resources essentially are in the community for the child, and then the school district plays a very large role in whether or not they can accommodate the child in the school district. So, I mean, minimally, we have to have school readiness skills for children to even be considered going back into the public school. So they can't have behaviors. They need to be able to sit and attend to lessons. And so if a child reaches that level, and many of them do. then they can be considered. It's difficult for families though, because many of the school districts don't have the resources yet. Their teachers aren't trained to work with kids with really complex forms of autism. And there's a lot of education that also has to happen yet in the medical community so that there are physicians who are readily available to also support the children and their families. So there's a lot that has to come together. When a child turns 21, they need, they naturally age out of our program. So they do have to leave the program at that time and go to an adult program. And so we really work with families to make sure that their child has the best opportunity so that they can thrive inside an adult program.

Kate Tucker: How long I mean, it sounds like this will be individualized as well, but how long on average are residents in the program?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: So many of them come in when they're teenagers. So they may come in at 13, 14 years of age. So they will most likely when they're coming in at that age, they're probably staying until they're 20 or 21. Unfortunately, for the first time, a lot of very, very young children, I think, again, it's just coming out of COVID and these children did not get a lot of early care intervention and they're pretty, pretty complex. So we have a lot of five and six year olds right now in the program. So we're working really hard with their school districts right now to ensure, and the children obviously, to ensure that they get the readiness skills so that they can transition out within two years and maybe less than that for some of them. But I would not like to see the little kids stay. I'd like to be able to get them back into their schools and really support them so that they have those readiness skills to be in a classroom situation.

Kate Tucker: And so you're opening this children's hospital. What inspired The Center for Discovery to do that, and what is going to make it so unique?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Part of the inspiration is that some of the children we felt were absolutely ready to go home, you know, in, you know, in a year's time or less because we resolved their medical issues, but the families were so concerned that they didn't have supports that they opted not to have them go home. And from a regulatory standpoint, if the family says no, or the district says no, we actually can't discharge the child, even though we think they have the readiness skills to go home and I, and you know, it's nobody's fault, the system is just not great. So what we said was that if we developed a short term hospital stay, we could do the same thing. We could, in a very short period of time, for many of these kids, work on their medical issues, work on their educational issues, but resolve those, and there is a discharge component. When you're in a hospital, you can discharge.

So it's a different model. It's set up to be short term for individuals that we know that we can help in a very short period of time, and they can go home, and we will support their school districts. We've built up our training arm now of the agency so that we can provide training inside the school districts. And there is a lot of telehealth and telemedicine right now. So we're also able to help physicians and help these children when they return home so that they do have the supports that they need. I mean, some kids absolutely do need a lot more support, but there are some kids that just have been not treated well, essentially.

Kate Tucker: Yeah, could you speak just briefly on the way that our understanding has grown over the years, like how close are we to really understanding autism and is that increase in research and understanding since maybe Autism Speaks and everything else kind of correlating with the increase in diagnoses, or do you think people are still being underdiagnosed overall?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Yeah, I do think there's more and more individuals. I think we are diagnosing much better now, there's no doubt. But I also think that there is a growing population that we don't have a good handle on. I do think that there's more and more kids who have autism. I don't think that they're being misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed at this point. I mean, these are kids who really are presenting themselves in a way that you're not going to miss them. You know, you're not going to label them as speech impaired. These are kids who are really, really complex. And, you know, we see that in the number of kids that we're admitting, that we're evaluating here, we're hearing it across the state, across the nation, and I would dare say, I'm assuming the world as well. We don't understand why at all. I mean, I do think that there's a sense that it, that there's an environmental component. There's also a genetic component, but we're not close yet to really understanding the complexity of autism and, or autisms, I think, because there's probably multiple forms and multiple genes and multiple things that are happening. And certainly the idea of a cure, it's not there right now at all. There are things that we do understand about the population that can be treated and there does need to be more education across the board from a professional standpoint in order to really support these kids. But we're really far away, I think, from having real treatments that will change the real outcome for these kids, from a genetic standpoint. It's frustrating 'cause there are a lot of people that are working on it, but it's just not there yet.

Kate Tucker: What is something that you really wish people understood about autism and about the work you're doing or maybe something you wish people who who have children with autism spectrum disorder could know?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: I wish that they could know that there's tremendous hope and that this isn't just a behavioral disorder and these aren't just kids acting badly. These are kids with pretty significant problems that we can support and you can change the outcome. I just want parents to have hope. I think that that's really, really important that families understand that kids can get better and life can get better and there can be tremendous outcomes and joy and happiness.

Kate Tucker: Take me into a moment where you've had a breakthrough, maybe recently or just one that you return to, kind of to encourage yourself where you had a breakthrough with a child and really started to see, you know, that this, this work, it works.

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Yeah, I mean, I think there was this young boy who we didn't know what was going on with him.

He had like no attention span whatsoever, constantly in motion. He had been with us just for a couple of months. And I just remember his parents, they had noted to the team that he was able to go home over the weekend. He sat for breakfast, actually chose eggs, and I think it was bacon or something like that, like something like he had never, ever done before. And they just started to cry and just say, like, you've given us our boy back. You've given us our life back. I guess I just felt like a very proud parent of my own staff. But just to see the parent's gratefulness, how it will change their lives going forward. They're younger parents, they don't know that yet, but I do. It will really change how they function as parents, as family members, how they'll be able to interact with the rest of their family, having a child that they can bring home, that they can go to a party with. It will change their lives forever, dramatically. When I see those things, I know we're doing something that's bigger than all of us.

Kate Tucker: What's giving you reasons to hope these days?

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: I think there's just a lot more awareness, as we spoke, about autism. And there seems to be an acceptance now that there's more that can be done for these children, that makes me hopeful that people are really interested and, you know, they want to learn. And there are more clinicians who are in the field now. So, you know, I just can't help but think that things are going to continue to get better for these kids and their families. I really do feel very optimistic about outcomes for kids. I've seen it. I know it can happen. I just know that our team here is more than ready, willing, and able to help. Yeah. It's a great place to be in life.

Kate Tucker: Yeah. And it sounds like an actual great place to be. So thank you so much for the work you're doing and for taking the time away from it to talk with us today. Just really appreciate you, Dr. Hamlin. Thank you.

Dr. Theresa Hamlin: Sure. Thank you so much. I appreciate being with you, Kate, as well. And thank you for all your work.

Kate Tucker: Thank you so much to Dr. Theresa Hamlin for her innovative and beyond inspiring work helping people with autism and their families find hope, healing, and joy. We've got links and more about Dr. Hamlin in the Center for Discovery in the show notes at Hope is my middle name.com.

Hope Is My Middle Name can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening. It would mean a whole lot to us if you would follow the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. We love hearing from you, and if you're still listening, please copy the link to this episode and text it to a friend. That actually makes a huge difference in helping us reach more people with more hope.

Hope Is My Middle Name is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media, produced in association with Reasonable Volume. This episode was produced by Christine Fennessy with editing from Rachel Swaby. Our production coordinator is Percia Verlin. Sound design and engineering by Mark Bush. Music by the fantastic artists at Epidemic Sound, Soundstripe, and me. Big thanks to Conor Gaughan, our publisher and fearless leader at Consensus Digital Media. And thank YOU so, so much for listening. We'll see you next time!