Applied Behaviour Analysis

Whilst I’m somewhat disappointed that you chose to print such an ableist dismissal [by James Golbey, FT377:74] of the least fortean point made in my letter [FT374:74], I’m hoping this will be an opportunity to raise awareness about both autism in adults and the horrors of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA). The desire to make us “normal” has always existed even before diagnostic labels and ABA, as the changelings all knew – ABA is just a modern, organised form of beating the weirdness out of us.

Functional labels are misleading and harmful, and this is why modern diagnostics is moving away from using them. They are often weaponised by parents: your correspondent dismisses me as “biased high functioning” purely because I can compose a letter containing something he dislikes (it takes me several hours, incidentally). Autism doesn’t work that way; we have different strengths and weaknesses. I am hyperlexic, but I also have executive functioning issues and other problems that mean I can’t reliably manage my life or even my basic personal hygiene and nutrition. I have physical co-morbidities that mean I am prone to frequent injury and daily pain. I also have self-injurious stims [repetitive behaviour by autistic people], which have frequently left me bleeding and/or concussed. On a good day, after 40-odd years of practice, I can exhaust myself masking it all and pass for “high functioning”; on a bad day I can’t. The day I most look forward to is the day when I don’t feel forced to describe my disabilities for strangers who feel better qualified to talk about what it’s like to grow up autistic than actual grown up autistics. Us lucky old “high functioning adults” are on exactly the same spectrum except we can tell people what it’s like in here, but no one cares and when we say things that the parents don’t want to hear we are dismissed.

Parents are quick to point out that ABA no longer uses physical punishment and so it isn’t abusive. This reflects society’s general move away from corporal punishment, but it hasn’t changed the underpinning principles of ABA. The founder of ABA, Ole Ivar Lovaas, didn’t even think autistic children were people and wanted to train us, like Pavlov and his dog. He said, “You have a person in the physical sense — they have hair, a nose and a mouth — but they are not people in the psychological sense... it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.” 1 These sentiments would be very familiar to the changelings! (In the 1970s, Lovaas also carried out government-funded experiments with this technique on gay and gender nonconforming children; one went on to kill himself because of the damage done.) 2

Lovaas “built the person” using electric shocks and dramatic beatings, allowing children to receive affection only when they managed to stifle their normal behaviour. “Spank them, and spank them good,” he said. Here he is talking about ‘Beth’, an early patient:

“I just reached over and cracked her one right on the rear. She was a big fat girl so I had an easy target... she stopped hitting herself for about 30 seconds and then, you see, she sized up the situation, laid out her strategy and then she hit herself once more... At first I thought, ‘God, what have I done,’ but then I noticed that she had stopped hitting herself. I felt guilty, but I felt great. Then she hit herself again and I really laid it on her. You see, by then I knew that she could inhibit it, and that she would inhibit it if she knew I would hit her. So I let her know that there was no question in my mind that I was going to kill her if she hit herself once more, and that was pretty much it. She hit herself a few times after that, but we had the problem licked.” 3

We’re still on familiar changeling turf here, I’m sure. But these days we (should) know better. Autistic people don’t selfharm for no reason. Usually it’s triggered by sensory or mental overload, manifesting in situations that we find desperately uncomfortable that we’ve been forced into because we live in a “normal” world. Instead of finding out why Beth hit herself, they made her terrified of hitting herself. Before the beating, she was in a state of overload; after it, she was still in a state of overload, but terrified as well. ABA is literally advocating for autistics the sort of treatment that would be considered abuse if done to a person with any other condition that caused “challenging” behaviour.

Modern ABA doesn’t shock or beat, but it is still an intensive programme of behaviour modification using punishment and reward, of which 40 hours a week is recommended from as early as possible. It focuses on behaviour and ignores needs. 4 Parents and therapists just don’t recognise the abuse because they don’t know what it’s like to be autistic and they don’t learn how to communicate with us. 5 ABA teaches them that autistic feelings don’t matter, that their experience of the world is invalid, that they must bottle up discomfort for the comfort of others. It teaches them that their needs, their feelings and their consent don’t matter. It’s teaching them that their senses are wrong, that autism is wrong, they are defective, they just need to learn to be “normal”, maintain that painful eye contact and keep their damn hands still and then their parents will finally accept the changeling in their midst.

Many parents brag about how they have “cured” their children, but there is no cure, just children learning masks. Forty hours a week would brainwash anyone into being anything. It’s not a success to make autistic kids unhappy and terrified. Even articles praising ABA, with parents who think their children are cured, are full of evidence that the children are just masking and are setting themselves up for a whole mess of adult issues. In one article, a “cured” boy even says: “I miss the excitement… When I was little, pretty often I was the happiest a person could be. It was the ultimate joy, this rush in your entire body, and you can’t contain it. That went away when my sister started teasing me and I realised flapping wasn’t really acceptable.” 6

I’m too disabled to be a parent but I am pretty sure that I would never, ever brag to the New York Times that I had “cured” my wombfruit of their happiness just because their bitch of a sister was embarrassed.

In America, where ABA is often the only therapy insurers will pay for, some practitioners aren’t even actually doing ABA. They are instead providing something more like occupational therapy, trying to understand what triggers self-harm and meltdowns, and calling it ABA so it can be accessed! Many have written about how they stopped practising ABA when they realised it was abusive.7 There are alternatives that work, and don’t abuse or devalue children. 8

If all this doesn’t ring true to Mr Golbey’s experience, if it isn’t 40-hours a week of intensive behaviour modification he’s inflicting on his child, then it isn’t ABA and he really shouldn’t be reactively defending abuse. Zoe-Dawn Anderson Bexleyheath, London

FOOTNOTES

1 http://neurodiversity.com/library_ chance_1974.html

2 http://edition.cnn.com/2011/ US/06/07/sissy.boy.experiment/index. html

3 http://neurodiversity.com/library_ chance_1974.html

4 https://theaspergian. com/2019/03/28/invisible-abuseaba-and-the-things-only-autistic-people-can-see/?fbclid=IwAR3Oxczalavnz LMDKY_h_xPkoV8Mj7XQmmGs3nUxIej8I1g8T7T31YpVyjM

5 www.psy.ox.ac.uk/publications/672990

6 www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/ magazine/the-kids-who-beat-autism. html

7 https://madasbirdsblog.wordpress. com/2017/04/25/i-abused-childrenand-so-do-you-a-response-to-an-abaapologist/

8 www.thinkingautismguide. com/2017/04/if-not-aba-then-what. html