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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
"Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”
and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay."
-a 15yo autistic girl experiencing ABA therapy
*therapy. Sounds like some sort of “Autism cure” by christians. Which would be as effective and tortuous as “Gay convertion therapy”
No, it’s not that. It’s a form of therapy that is highly controversial, and mostly stems from the observation that autistic humans can be brought to “behave” like “normal people” if they are sufficiently conditioned to do that. Yet, it is not founded in religious BS, but rather a result of behavioral approaches to psychology that have been very popular, especially in the US and Canada at least since the 60s (like many addiction-therapies and such). Behavioral therapies aren’t bad outright, but have spawned some questionable offspring (like all approaches in medicine tend to do). “Conversion camps” are such offspring. Regarding ABA: While many studies indicate that ABA does, in fact, bring autistic people to behave more like non-autistic people, that in itself is not evidence that the therapy is working. If depressive people behave like I want them to and get out of bed to clean the house because I hold a gun to their head, they are not “cured”. The same goes for this kind of therapy. There are merits to the principles of the approaches bundled under the term “ABA”, but the line between “helping Autistic people” and “torturing autistic people” is razor-thin. Unfortunately, many approaches that call themselves “ABA” are crossing that line, as do many therapists who deny people breaks or meals, or worse.
You know? Humans are cruel dumpster fires of bullshit once they think what they do is right and “for the best”.
thanks for the clarification. Sounds like exactly what I suspected.
It’s only controversial because the way the therapy has been implemented in the past (and unfortunately in some places still today) is similar to what you describe. However, modern practices don’t try to train their clients to act like “normal people” and any serious technician or analyst will only use punishment (or threats of punishments) as a last resort in programs written to target the most imperative behaviors (like running into traffic). Instead, they focus on the use of reinforcement to teach their clients skills that help them to become self sufficient. Following your metaphor, it would be like offering a depressed person $10 for every chore they complete that day rather than holding a gun to their head. The goal is to establish a foundation for life outside of therapy, not to reduce the presentation of autism.
I’m going to disagree with the other comment and claim that you’ve made a very good observation. Even though conversion therapies and ABA may somewhat differ in their methods, the both of them are born from the basis of wanting to use operant conditioning on humans, and ignore everything else that we’ve learned about the psychology and neurology of humans that explain why it’s a dogshit idea.
Some people think it’s some kind of autism cure. It’s just understanding the reasons behind behaviors in order to increase behaviors that are desirable and decrease behaviors that are undesirable. Problems could arise from what ends up being defined as undesirable behavior and how that reinforcement is done but that’s true of basically anything with the goal of changing behaviors.
My wife is autistic and studied it herself because it helped her understand all the “social bullshit” as she called it.
Approaching it from the point of view of the autistic person trying to understand the traditional social interaction behaviors, to mimic them by choice for their own profit, sounds beneficial. Approaching it from a goal of forcing the autistic person to behave according to traditional social interactions for the benefit of others and the profit of the therapist, does not.
Pretty much yeah. That’s the problem and how it can become a very bad thing. Same as really any method that seeks to shape behaviors. Are you targeting this behavior because it actually causes distress and interferes with the autistic person’s enjoyment of life? Or are you just trying to breed conformity for the sake of conformity?