abusive treatment for autism

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The kid probably didn't want to do it and his mother made him just like I hated doing my homework or being forced to do things I didn't want to do and what would my mother do about it? Take something away I was doing and tell me to do it and I can get back to it. If I was watching TV and she told me to take my clothes upstairs and I refused, she turn the TV off and tell me to do it. She say the more I don't do it, the more of the show I will miss so I would finally do it realizing I can have the TV turned back on a lot sooner if I do what she says. I turned out just fine.

I also have vague memories of getting therapy and I have always enjoyed it from what I remember. I am sure if I was starting to get frustrated, my mom have me take a break and get back to it later.

I don't think that was the kid's mom. It might have been a behavioural therapist but who knows?

http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/54077.html

That's my opinion on ABA.

Basically, they are training kids to show the symptoms of autism less; and then they are rating the success of treatment by whether or not the kids show autism less. The studies that tested ABA all used autism rating scales as measures of success; but the autism rating scales all measure basically one thing: The superficial symptoms of autism. Train a child to hide those, and the treatment is "successful". There was no measurement of whether the children were emotionally happier, gained ability in daily living and academic activities, or were better able to communicate their own ideas instead of ABA-scripted phrases. There was no long-term outcome study at all.

The whole question gets so complex. How much could the child have advanced just spending time with a loving and attentive mom who cheerfully worked with him on various skills and areas of interest?

At the beginning of the video, I saw a happy child who interacted with his world. At the end, I saw exactly the same, just matured. In the middle I wanted to cry, for who in their right mind forces a toddler to do such silly things for reward or punishment? The hand game - what was THAT all about?

They may have been able to get the same "recovery" without any of it. Now that is the interesting question, isn't it? And the one that I kept coming back to.

He's happy in the beginning; he's just not smiling. Check out that ceiling fan. Wouldn't you be happy watching that, too? (Well, if you like spinning things, you would, anyway, don't know if you do...) He's very peaceful in the beginning of the video. Check out his relaxed posture and the lack of tension in his movements. I know, I'm reading him like I read my cats; but if he's anything like my cats, he's relaxed and happy in the beginning. He's just not smiling.

Plus, who wants to bet they picked a clip of the kid happy afterward, and left the viewer to assume he's like that all the time? Even kids who've survived abuse are happy sometimes (in the absence of major depression, anyhow).

I couldn't see what the kid was doing that was so wrong. He was looking about like kids do, hanging onto whatever came off the fan,and looking at the camera.

Then this woman's got him trapped against a wall, she's in his face, and pulling him back again when he's obviously trying to get away. Piss off! Maybe if people don't like the stimming they should show a little tolerence and just not look. They're forcing this kid to cover how he normally expresses himself, and conform to what they think he should be.

It's possible to act how people want just to get them to stop harassing you, and secretly resent it. It's also possible to be happy without grinning like an ape.

Neither of us know the full story, but you're talking like this is some kind of 1984-esque propaganda film. What if a child has behavioral problems that may put himself at risk but he is oblivious to that fact. He might've broken that fan, by, say, trying to swing on the pullswitch. I dunno, I'm going out on a limb, and saying if he was happy and unproblematic, then the parents would love him unconditionally, but if he was difficult to deal with, then they would use ABA.
A lot of Aspies here seem to have no problem with 'rebeliousness' and 'nonconformity', and preach indeviduality, the latter is fine, but I have a problem with the former. I remember a mother of an autistic child and a Non-autistic child saying the NA child had done something she considered unreproachable, and a fair few aspies blamed the mother and said the child should be taken into care. I sympathise with that mother, but the cynic in me says that if the autistic child did it, those same aspies who condemned her would've told her her child was acting out his indeviduality.
That's the problem with discrimination, it works both ways.

YES! I really liked your blog entry. This is what I found so off-putting about ABA and I'm glad my daughter didn't get it. What it teaches are not the things a kid REALLY needs to know. There are other therapies like animal therapy and music therapy (assuming the child gets along with animals and likes music) that I think do a much better job of expanding a child's world. And quite frankly, stimming in a forest would probably ultimately be a better use of time than sitting at that table learning to not stim- or rather learning to expend lots of mental energy to not stimming. "Teaching to the test" indeed. Your analogy to NCLB is a good one. Both ABA and NCLB endless testing are teaching styles that give the illusion that teaching has taken place but it's just rote response rather than actual mind expansion.

I was just thinking about something, with the ABA thing... the "abusive" part of it mightn't really truly be any slapping or shocking or whatever that went on; or anyway, mightn't need those things going on to be abusive.

It might be worse, for many kids, to be told "No. Wrong. You're doing it wrong. That's wrong." Over and over again.

When somebody tells me I am doing something wrong, when I've done my best at it, it hurts more than just about anything you could say to me. Sometimes it's necessary, sure; and I don't hate people for doing it. But when I have tried my best, and when it's still no good, it feels like... well, it feels like I'm worthless. I want to do well, very badly. When I'm told I haven't done well, I feel like there is something horribly wrong with me and with the world.

One shouldn't blame a dyslexic person for not reading a word correctly, nor a deaf person for failing to recognize a tune, nor an autistic person for not reciting the correct greeting. And yet... this ABA thing... it is setting the child up for repeated failure. For everything the child learns successfully, he will have been told, "No." "Wrong." repeatedly; and it's even worse when the skill is developmentally unavailable to learn at all, and there isn't even a success at the end of all that failure.

It's not really failing that's so bad. You have to fail a few times before you get something right. It's that the failure is pointed out, made obvious, repeatedly. If a child fails at school, you (ideally) don't ignore it--you get him tutoring and show him how to catch up. You don't just sit him down in front of the problem until he chances on the correct answer. Long before he does, frustration and the repetition of "No!" and "Wrong!" will have caught up with him, and he'll get the idea that he oughtn't to try at all, lest he fail.

Having to hear someone tell you to do something in order to do anything at all could be directly connected to the natural hesitance that anyone feels, after repeatedly having been told "no!" when he takes any sort of initiative, to take initiative in the first place. I realize that for some it's an executive function issue; but for others, I would surmise it is closer to, "If I try anything on my own, I risk being told I'm wrong; so I'd better play it safe and not try at all."

We don't know why he was happy or how much good the therapy actually did. The question is how necessary is all that? It certainly wasn't pleasant to watch. During the therapy the child seemed absolutely miserable despite the toys and the cookie reward. Does it really do that much good?

ooo0anna, that is what I always wonder, as well. What progress the child could have made without what clearly is stressful therapy.

I also take issue with the parents calling the child recovered in any way. Improved, but not recovered - he quite clearly is still autistic. He has the mannerisms of an autistic child his age; I can see it. Maybe he makes eye contact and talks and plays sports, but he is still autistic. Do the parents "get" that? I just wonder.

ooo0anna, that is what I always wonder, as well. What progress the child could have made without what clearly is stressful therapy.

I also take issue with the parents calling the child recovered in any way. Improved, but not recovered - he quite clearly is still autistic. He has the mannerisms of an autistic child his age; I can see it. Maybe he makes eye contact and talks and plays sports, but he is still autistic. Do the parents "get" that? I just wonder.

ooo0anna, that is what I always wonder, as well. What progress the child could have made without what clearly is stressful therapy.

I also take issue with the parents calling the child recovered in any way. Improved, but not recovered - he quite clearly is still autistic. He has the mannerisms of an autistic child his age; I can see it. Maybe he makes eye contact and talks and plays sports, but he is still autistic. Do the parents "get" that? I just wonder.

ooo0anna, that is what I always wonder, as well. What progress the child could have made without what clearly is stressful therapy.

I also take issue with the parents calling the child recovered in any way. Improved, but not recovered - he quite clearly is still autistic. He has the mannerisms of an autistic child his age; I can see it. Maybe he makes eye contact and talks and plays sports, but he is still autistic. Do the parents "get" that? I just wonder.

ooo0anna, that is what I always wonder, as well. What progress the child could have made without what clearly is stressful therapy.

I also take issue with the parents calling the child recovered in any way. Improved, but not recovered - he quite clearly is still autistic. He has the mannerisms of an autistic child his age; I can see it. Maybe he makes eye contact and talks and plays sports, but he is still autistic. Do the parents "get" that? I just wonder.

This is why I'm grateful that my daughter had a PDD-NOS diagnosis for so long before it got reclassified to autism. Professionals don't default to ABA when they see PDD_NOS written on the form. They don't default to anything because they aren't sure what PDD-NOS means because it's so vague and no highly specific and rigid therapies have been attached to it. Instead, at least in my daughter's case, since there was no default therapy they just had to wing it. And that meant trying a whole lot of different things and observing her carefully to see what worked best and constantly adjusting, no rigid plan. If she didn't get something, they didn't repeat "no, wrong" a million times until she just stumbled across the correct way and then give her a cookie. Instead they did the far superior way of changing their approach and finding different ways of presenting a subject. That's what I've done at home, too. ABA is so incredibly rigid and even when done without aversives (yikes), there still is that problem of hounding the kid with their wrongness.

There is also the problem that, as far as I can see with my daughter, autism can cause rigidity and a difficulty in generalizing from specifics. What does ABA do? It REINFORCES!! ! those very liabilities. It gives positive rewards to rigid behaviour (so long as it is the approved rigid behaviour) and punishes or yells "wrong! do it again" to any attempts to go off-script. It discourages generalization skills and reinforces sticking to specifics.

In contrast, the sometimes bumbling, "how do we teach this kid? Dunno, let's try everything we can think of" approach of my daughter's school (because she was labeled PDD-NOS, not autism at first) is the eaxt opposite of rigid and I think has helped her with generalization skills. They didn't stick to one tried-and-true approach and keep doing it no matter what. They tried all sorts of different things until they found something that worked. And doing THAT is a skill an autistic child can really use. They taught her through example that if it doesn't work this way...try a different way. Priceless!