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Catherine Pickard

Catherine Pickard

Associate Professor at Emory University School of Medicine; psychologist and autism researcher specializing in naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBIs) at the Marcus Autism Center.

Jun 16, 2026

12:48
Can you share more about that and what that might actually look like in a clinical setting?
12:52
Yeah.
12:52
I think it first is probably important to talk about the term and how we came to using this term deimplementation, which I think is a really fancy way of saying something that we all think about, which is there may be times when we need to do something less or stop doing something altogether.
13:10
And there are two reasons that we've been thinking about this term.
13:13
The first is, like you mentioned and what we talk about in the paper, you know, as a, as a field, right, we're thinking about, gosh, how do we use more child-led approaches that are grounded in developmental science and recognizing that that actually stands in not full contrast, but sometimes in contrast to the way that we were trained, right? And so really trying to take a step back and think through, okay, if we're gonna do more of this child-led approach and use more NDBI, we may need to actually reduce our use of adult-led kind of, um, structured approaches, and that's hard.
13:44
So we use that recognizing that it might be a more efficient way to train in NDBI, is also to help people understand what they should do less.
13:52
The second thing that I'll say, and our team's work right now has really focused on, like, what do we need to stop and why, and what does that really mean? And I think that's important for us to be thinking about, right? We didn't come to the term deimplementation because we just think NDBI is better, right? Or, you know, to Tracy's point, we-- it'll help kids generalize more quickly.

9 MINS LATER

22:48
But I'm sure Catherine and Rachel have other thoughts too.

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