CW: Post discusses ABA and possibly Trauma, internalized ableism

Hello there! I’m currently researching the issue of ABA. I’m reading a lot about the criticisms, but most of the resources I found so far are (likely) made by level 1 autistics. As level 2 and level 3 autistics are not as well represented within autism self-advocacy, I would like to understand their position better on the topic. A usual defense for ABA is that it can help high-support-needs autistics to learn important skills, but I would like to read about that from an autistic perspective.

So if there are resources on the subject you can recommend, I’ll be grateful! thank you

edit: I’m updating because users in this thread changed my view on this issue. I’ve been caught up in functioning label, which at the end of the day “levels” of autism still are. Here is what changed my mind:

Those needs you are looking for in an autistic person are completely and utterly irrelevant to you as a reader of their experience, and as far as you’re concerned any or all of the people who have already written about their experience of ABA fit in to your narrow and ignorant category, they just didn’t mention it because again - it isn’t fucking relevant.

There is no reason for me to specifically look for “level 2 or 3” autistics since their experiences are valid, regardless of them disclosing their support needs. It is ableist to expect them to disclose to me how “disabled” they are in order for me to validate their experience. Thanks @[email protected] and @[email protected] for helping me understand this. So in a way I found the answers I was looking for, and now I have some thinking to do

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    Okay, so I’ve recently (unfortunately) become embroiled elsewhere in an argument about ABA and forced to look into more details. Figured I’d post my findings here for anyone stumbling on it in the future.

    So conversion therapy (ABA is a type of conversion therapy) is based on an old theory from the 1950s that everything was a “behaviour”. That includes things like stimming, special interests, eye contact, physical sensitivity, emotional sensitivity, sexuality and gender identity. The idea then continued that normal methods of teaching children behaviour would help “cure” autism symptoms. Like you would teach a child to say please and thank you by gently saying “what’s the magic word?”.

    However it turns out that many of these things are not behaviours, they are just part of how someone’s brain works. So if the child learns anything, they learn to mask and lie to make the mean scary teacher happy. The guy that pioneered this technique was also morally empty and didn’t consider autistic people “people”, so… Yeah. Torture and abuse everywhere. You can find accounts where it gets pretty nasty. Maybe “modern” ABA doesn’t do that, but maybe it does. The theory behind it isn’t sound anyway.

    This has resulted in autistic people being treated as “special needs cattle”. Persons without any autonomy that exist just to be “cured” and put to work in society. I would have said that they were treated like diseased dogs, but people tend to feel sympathy when a diseased dog is put down.

    Personally, for me (someone who is quite “high functioning” if you can tolerate the label), I’m fortunate to live in a country where that sort of thing isn’t really encouraged. However I did have pretty bad anger issues in high school. I can certainly see that if I grew up in a country with laxer mental health awareness I might have been put in one of those therapies. If that happened, would I even still be alive here to talk about it? Who knows…

    To get to your point, which I think you were looking at, which was whether it’s good for people that really can’t communicate, have severe anger issues or have hypersensitivity issues. I guess there’s an argument that there’s a line where causing people to “mask” or pretend to be someone else to function in society might be warranted. It’s an uncomfortable idea to me, but you could probably argue where such a hypothetical line lies. You do need to accept that you are taking away some autonomy away from the person though.