Two months ago I posted the testimony of my friend Victoria, who was appearing before the Minnesota legislature in support of adding autism as a qualifying condition for medical cannabis. Victoria stated that cannabis saved her son Julian’s life. I said I agreed with her assessment. Cannabis likely did save Julian’s life. In the year before he started using medical cannabis, Julian had shuffled in and out of the hospital, including several extended stays during which he had to be restrained. Julian was in so much pain that he repeatedly concussed himself with his own fists.

Last month I spotted an article suggesting that Julian’s situation is not uncommon enough. These paragraphs interested me the most:

Nationally, the number of people with an autism diagnosis who were seen in hospital ERs nearly doubled from 81,628 in 2009 to 159,517 five years later, according to the latest available data from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The number admitted also soared, from 13,903 in 2009 to 26,811 in 2014.

That same year, California’s state health planning and development department recorded acute-care hospital stays of at least a month for 60 cases of patients with an autism diagnosis. The longest were 211 and 333 days.

The problem parallels the issue known as psychiatric boarding, which has been an increasing concern in recent years for a range of mental illnesses. Both trace to the shortcomings of deinstitutionalization, the national movement that aimed to close large public facilities and provide care through community settings. But the resources to support that dwindled long ago, and then came the Great Recession of 2008, when local, state and federal budget woes forced sharp cuts in developmental and mental health services.

“As more children with autism are identified, and as the population is growing larger and older, we see a lot more mental health needs in children and adolescents with autism,” explained Aaron Nayfack, a developmental pediatrician at Sutter Health’s Palo Alto Medical Foundation in California who has researched the rise in lengthy hospitalizations. “And we have nowhere near the resources in most communities to take care of these children in home settings.”

The first quoted paragraph suggests a steep increase, from 2009 to 2014, in both ER visits and admissions among persons with autism. The second paragraph notes how long some of those 2014 admissions were. The third paragraph suggests that autism hospital admissions, like psychiatric boarding, originate in “deinstitutionalization, the national movement that aimed to close large public facilities and provide care through community settings.” Read closely, though. Autism admissions might (I express no opinion) originate in deinstitutionalization, but nothing in the article establishes that deinstitutionalization could account for a near-doubling of autism-related ER visits and admissions from 2009 through 2014.

I am saying “autism-related” on an assumption. The article discusses ER visits and admissions among “people with an autism diagnosis.” Given that autism is a medical condition, that the hospital staff involved would have specifically noted that the patients had autism, that a high percentage of the visits resulted in hospital admissions, and that the article is about care for autism, I think we would be hard-pressed to argue that the hospital visits were not “autism-related.”

Instead, according to the article, resources for care in community settings dwindled before the Great Recession in 2008, which itself predates the 2009 initial statistics. So while persons with autism might have started being seen at and admitted to hospitals because of deinstitutionalization, something else is driving the increase in such cases from 2009 through 2014.

That “something else” is the rapid increase in autism rates.

The article lends support to an argument I’ve made before, namely, that increasing rates of autism cannot be explained by better diagnosing, because rates are increasing across the spectrum. Better diagnosing might (no opinion expressed) account for more cases at the mild end of the spectrum, the kids formerly known as “quirky” or “antisocial.” But we’re also faced with a wave of severely affected kids: the self-injurious who are unable to verbalize their pain (which, so long as we fail to treat autism medically, continues to manifest). This wave, and the attendant phenomena like hospital admissions and extended stays, cannot be dismissed as better diagnosing. These kids would never have been undiagnosed.

Victoria’s son Julian is one such kid. Over the past three years—to be precise, in the three years since Julian jumped from a balcony and broke his back and both his legs—Victoria and her husband have made tremendous strides in restoring Julian’s health through diet, supplementation, and homeopathy. Julian has progressed from small and underweight to tall and substantial, his allergy shiners have faded, and he has begun to verbalize. Medical cannabis stopped the self-injury and lashing out at others. His path suggests he is done with extended hospital stays.

The article I quoted does not deny the increasing autism rates, or pin them on better diagnosing. The developmental pediatrician is quoted: “As more children with autism are identified, and as the population is growing larger and older . . . .” On the other hand, the article does not highlight the increasing rates, and it does not end the way I would prefer, which would be something like: “We have an emergency on our hands,” explained Aaron Nayfack, a developmental pediatrician. “Not only do we have nowhere near the resources in most communities to take care of these children in home settings, we have more and more children being affected, including severely affected by autism. We need the resources to care for them. And we need the resources and the research to stop this epidemic. Now.”