Therapy, Education & Advocacy Blog | Therapist Neurodiversity Collective

Case Study in Neurodiversity-Affirming Care: A Toddler with Childhood Apraxia of Speech

At the beginning of the evaluation, Adam appeared to enjoy playing with zoo animals with mom and the therapist. He laughed and smiled readily and paired gleeful, albeit, infrequent, babbling with gestures like pointing and guiding his mom’s hands to the toys he wanted her to play with. However, after a few misunderstandings in which neither mom nor the therapist could figure out what Adam was gesturing for them to do, Adam became highly frustrated and emotionally dysregulated. He threw himself to the floor and, in between sobs, began to bang his forehead on the floor repeatedly. His mother was worried that this self-injurious behavior had started happening more and more frequently in recent weeks.

A Parent’s Guide to Respectful Feeding Therapy: Part 2

ABA providers will tell you to break your child, to reward your child for eating food, to re-present food your child has spit out or vomited, to restrain your child in a chair and do not let them leave the chair. There are better ways.

A Parent’s Guide to Respectful Feeding Therapy – Part 1

When children have trouble eating, it can be incredibly stressful for parents. But you’re not alone! There are qualified professionals waiting to help you and your child.

Neurodiversity and Autism Intervention (ABA) can’t be reconciled.

And let’s talk about considerable ethical and financial conflicts of interest with this paper and its authors, shall we?

Reader, every single author of this paper is trained in ABA, (three of them are actually BCBAs), so clearly each author has a vested financial interest in duping people into believing that ABA is “Neurodiversity Approved”.
(It’s always about the $$$.)

They refuse to work. So now what? Just let them become unemployed and play Fortnite and eat Cheetos all day?

ABA Call to Action!

Did you know that there is a Congressional Autism Caucus? This 141-member caucus includes members from both parties in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S.
Now is the time to voice your opposition to ABA!
Contact your State Congressional Members of the Congressional Autism Caucus https://doyle.house.gov/issues/autism-caucus/autism-caucus-membership

Performative Neurodiversity – the appropriation and watering down of a Human Rights Movement for profit

What are some signs that you’ve wasted your money on a neurodiversity-lite product, book, or class?

Confessions of a Previous ABA Technician – 2

Through the pairing procedure, children begin to learn that doing things that feel good to them (e.g. autistic play, stimming, etc.) are less valuable than the things that make the therapist feel good (i.e. neurotypical play, compliance). They learn to ignore their feelings of distress when confronted with a task they find aversive and mask their distress to please their caregivers. They become motivated by the praise they receive when they “do the thing” and become reliant on external reinforcement rather than intrinsic motivation, regardless of how much they are suffering.

“First Do No Harm”: How SLPs Who Ignore Coregulation Reduce Children’s Access to Authentic Communication

Many speech-language pathologists do not think of sensory, emotional, or cognitive regulation as a part of their area of practice. In actuality, though, all communication originates from the need for regulation, and it is impossible to support a child’s communication skills or language development without understanding and supporting their regulation needs.

Confessions of a Previous ABA Technician

Through the guise of play, I often contrived stressful and frustrating situations and placed consistent demands on very small children. For instance, one of my kid’s goals was something like this: The client will engage in 3 turn taking exchanges by relinquishing to their play partner, waiting while their play partner takes a turn, and then requesting a turn with ___ # of prompts.

Medical Neglect – Physician and Court Ordered ABA for Autistic Children

“Hi, I was wondering if I could speak with someone on how to deal with being court-ordered by the family court system to enroll a child in intensive ABA therapy?”

So an SLP was late-diagnosed as Autistic this week…

“… scores on the CAT-Q indicate she engages in a significantly higher level of camouflaging than neurotypical people and elevated camouflaging even when compared to other autistic individuals. It is highly likely that she has camouflaged so much and for so long that she fails to see some of her autistic traits even though they may appear obvious to others.”

Autistic & other Disabled Children’s Rights – Are Therapists in Violation?

“Disregard for the human rights of autistic children, and the belief that they are so fundamentally different from other children that they don’t have the same rights, have become cultural norms within many professional and educational spaces. Often, teachers, therapists, and other professionals working with autistic students don’t even realize the ways in which their treatment of their students is dehumanizing because it is what they have seen from the individuals around them and those who trained them.”

Stuttering is a type of Neurodivergence

I am used to my stuttering and I wish everyone else would get used to it too. My reactions and my feelings about stuttering are relative to how you, the listener, react. I am only uncomfortable because you are uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable FOR you.

Nothing about Social Skills Training is Neurodivergence-Affirming – Absolutely nothing.

But, training the autism out of an autistic person is neither ethical nor accepting of neurodiversity. Deficit-driven clinicians continue to attribute any Autistic social difference as “deficient” but flat out ignore the fact that social communication reciprocity is a two-way street. Nothing about Social Skills Training is neurodivergence-affirming therapy. Absolutely nothing.

Autism, language, and identity. Part 1.

I will raise my hand in shame. As a clinician, I have not always considered the effect that the words I choose. My reports were full of “impaired communication skills”, “limited ability”, “low-level skills”. And I felt quite free to use these labels because my clients would not be the ones to read my reports. If my report was directed to my client, the language would be different. So at least on some level, I recognised how negative these labels are. Yet I used them about people who as speech and language therapist I truly care for.

And then suddenly my world changed. And with my world my perception changed too.

Over the last year my family have all received the label of “Autistic Spectrum Disorder”…

ABA Therapy and PTSD

I was called “unethical” by a professional colleague today.
The reason may surprise you—I said “ABA is abuse”. My peer was naturally taken aback because they are an SLP-BCBA and “would never dream of abusing a child.” I always find this rebuttal interesting because we usually don’t hear about people walking around admitting to abusing people; even overt predators somehow convince themselves that they are helping their victim. The sanctimonious SLP-BCBA told me that it was the “old ABA” and not “new ABA” that was harmful, and then only a small fraction of the time. She accused me of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” (I still don’t really understand how this idiomatic expression applies here) and she further went on to insist that there is “no way ABA could cause PTSD in people with Autism.” (She really meant “Autistic people,” I am sure.)

Rebuttal to critique of “ABA is NOT Effective: So says the Latest Report from the Department of Defense”

“The DoD/TRICARE report isn’t a study in any real sense of that word.” This is FALSE. In fact, they included 3794 participants who had received at least 18 months of ABA services; 2,183 from the eastern region of the United States, and a replication in the western region of the United States with 1,611 participants. As such it is not merely the largest study of the effectiveness of ABA, it is the only large-scale test of ABA . And they determined that ABA services do not meet the TRICARE hierarchy of evidence standard for medical and proven care..

Why We Model Language and Honor All Communication, instead of Using PECS®

Today in a virtual Zoom therapy session, the parent asked me why I don’t use PECS® in speech therapy (with non-speaking or minimally speaking Autistic children). After watching her child laugh, dance, and have fun during therapy, after watching them imitate action verbs, and spontaneously communicate a desire, spontaneously point to my assistant and me on the screen, and smile at us all, it became clear to this parent that there are different kinds of therapy sessions. This kind isn’t all about compliance.

Q&A with Faye Farhrenheit

“They used food deprivation in my program and they made us pair up and do it to each other. I feel incredible guilt over this.

Every morning I’d cut up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into as many pieces as possible. Each piece was like a little bigger than an M&M.

Then I’d be told to force this non-verbal Autistic boy to do behaviors for each piece of the sandwich. He’d cry, hit his head in frustration, and say “hungry” which was one of like four words he could use.

I have no words to describe how bad I feel about being forced to do this as a child. If he didn’t “behave” he’d get no food and he’d go hungry.

He and the rest of us were expected to perform like trained circus animals for basic rights, like the ability to go to the bathroom.”

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