Tag: ABA

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.

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 $$$.)

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

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.

Confessions of a Previous ABA Technician

Contriving Situations

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.

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..

First, Do No Harm: An Open Letter to the Minnesota Department of Human Services and Education

Not only does ABA pose ethical issues that must be considered, but its efficacy is also questionable. The US government conducted outcome measures under the new T2017 TRICARE contracts and found that “76% of TRICARE beneficiaries in the ACD (Autism Care Demonstration) had little to no change in symptom presentation over the course of 12 months of applied behavior analysis services, with an additional 9% demonstrating worsening symptoms” (James N. Stewart, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, 10/25/2019).

ABA: Modern-Day Brainwashing

Terrifyingly, ABA has infiltrated our healthcare system, schools, military, hospitals, and nursing homes. But you wonder, how can you even tell if someone is brainwashed? Here are common symptoms that you or someone you love has been brainwashed:

Why Perspective-Taking and Neurodiversity Acceptance? (Part 2 of “Training” Social Skills is Dehumanizing: The One with the Therapy Goals)

Wasted years upon years of endlessly drilling autistic children and adolescents to memorize and parrot “appropriate” rote phrases for specific social situations will not lead to their peers perceiving them as more likable. Social skills training is not a “cure” for autism despite what the ABA industry would like for us all to believe. All “social skills training’ does is to teach autistic people how to mask their autism. And the potential harms of masking (exhaustion, anxiety, depression, frustration, decreased self-esteem suicidal ideation) are significant.

The Problem with PECS®

PECS® uses Operant Conditioning, which is a behavior technique that can be used to target and increase a behavior by pairing performance of the target behavior with a positive or rewarding outcome.[2] Per Andy Bondy, inventor of PECS, “Skinner’s analysis of Verbal Behavior forms the basis for teaching particular skills at specific points in the training sequence and also provides guidelines for how best to design the teaching strategies.[3]” PECS uses picture-based prompting and reinforcement tied to error correction in order to teach language skills. The method allows the trainer to artificially cause frustration through the withholding of highly desired objects or food until the targeted behavior is achieved, even if the communicator becomes upset or angry. It is not a natural or nice way to teach language.

“Training” Social Skills is Dehumanizing (Part 1)

Dictating how an autistic person is expected to communicate in specific social situations takes away their self-determination. Training people as one trains animals is appalling. Therapist Neurodiversity Collective believes in respecting the authentic social communication of all people, which includes all Autistic people, rather than compelling compliance for neurotypical expectations through a system of rewards and punishments.

An ASHA Certified SLP’s Personal Perspective on Collaboration, Interprofessional Practice and ABA

ASHA has guidelines in our ethics code for “collaboration” and “interpersonal professional practice” (IPP), which are two terms ABA practitioners often use in order to attempt to intimidate or gaslight both CCC-SLPs and ASHA into believing that speech-language pathologists are being unethical if we dare to voice negative opinions against the use of ABA practices and/or BCBA and RBT incompetency (as they dangerously or inadequately provide speech therapy services for which BCBAs and RBTs are not educated or trained).