abusive treatment for autism

Post Reply New Topic

I don't know about you, but to me this ABA looks like abuse and I would never put my son through it. All that unwanted touching and stress, he looks like he's basically obeying to get away from the situation. I know he's supposed to be recovered at the end, but to me it looks like he's been subdued and that the "progress" he's made is either a show to please his parents or actually in spite of the harsh manner in which he was trained. I'm all for teaching autistic children social skills, but surely there's a better way?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=426tIOS3Jdk

Yes, ABA looks like abuse to me, too. Especially if it's being applied for the recommended 40 hrs a week. Excuse me, but even a typical young child can't sustain that much work. It sounds like torture to me.

I'm usually anti-ABA, and pretty much any behavior modification, but I'm really not sure what else to do with my severely autistic son. I have made it clear to all of the school staff that he is not be made to make eye contact, and they are to respect his space at all times. I will be popping in to check often. I have also made it clear that the point of any of it (to me) is that he learns how to communicate in a functional way. I don't want him 'compliant' or to be 'indistinguishable from his peers'.

If anyone else has any ideas of how to teach a nonverbal severely affected 5 yo I'm totally open to suggestions.

Unfortunately it seems ABA is the only option that has scientific merit. That being said, success is difficult to measure, and the fact that the child may be similar to his peers doesn't mean he's happy and well-functioning. It's just that every fibre of my mother-soul goes against treating a child the way that child is treated in the video. He's screaming because something is wrong, not to be difficult, I can hear the anxiety in his voice. That kind of anxiety should be taken seriously, not ignored.

Btw, are you going to seek a diagnosis? I got mine less than a month ago, and it's definitely a relief. Like a new stepping-stone, kind of.

I support early intervention, but I don't know what to think about ABA myself. It baffles me that with normal children, they will tell you that if the child's emotionally distressed, they wouldn't be able to learn. Yet it's fine to make an autistic child emotionally distressed while giving them this therapy. It raises the question as whether this is really therapy, but simply conditioning. And that raises the question if it's torture.

And how do we know this child's later developmental progress is the direct result of this therapy? Maybe it is, but I seriously question the emotional distress the child undergoes. It goes against everything the "experts" say about a child's developing emotional needs.

I didn't even watch more than about 5 seconds of the video. I simply can't handle listening to a child scream as he's being treated that way.

To me, it would be the equivalent of taking a non-autistic child, and trying to force them to behave like an autistic. Doing things like stimming, and saying 'do this' over, and over again until the kid's will is broken, and they put on the act to stop the treatment. I just want my son to learn how to communicate, whether that be through PECs, typing, signing, or even words. It's imperative that he learns to express himself somehow. If he doesn't I'm afraid he will be very aggressive as he grows older, due to frustration.

Yes, as a matter fact I have found somewhere that I can get an affordable eval!! ! I am so excited! When I get all of the details, I will post them so that others can also look into it that are like me, without insurance, and can't afford the $1300 for an assessment. Congrats on your diagnosis! I'm happy for you that you've found some resolution.

serenity:

my diagnosis cost something like 4000 USD, because I didn't want to wait over a year just to be evaluated by a non-specialist. fortunately for me a family member (and psychiatrist) offered to pay the bill and I accepted. so I'm one of the lucky ones.

I was watching that video, and I had to stop half way through. I couldn't stand seeing the child being treated that way. If you do something bad, you get restrained. If you do something good, you get a cookie. That seems like training a dog, to me. The type of early intervention that I got, was being enrolled in a developmental pre-school. I've learned to interact with my peers, in a non-abusive way. I'm glad that I was allowed to be a kid, instead of being trained like a dog.

That is ABA? Like, really?

I know that this works.

My functioning-level also increased after being held, forced and screamed systematically. I just wasn't awarded a cookie afterwards.

I don't know that I'd go so far as to call it abusive, but the "unacceptable" behaviors they showed at the beginning of the video looked like pretty much every three-year-old in my family just being a three-year-old. A lot of therapy she was doing looked like the games my family played all the time, but no one ever cried. From what they've shown, I'm really not convinced that the therapy did all that much that wouldn't have come with time, anyway.

My mom works in a school that I think uses ABA & she doesn't like many of their policies. She tries to redirect bad behaviors & fix communication barriers. Is this the method that they're supposed to ignore bad behaviors? Her school does that & she says it doesn't work (duh ).

I thought that ABA is based on the ideas of Skinner.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/s ... 407369&c=2

I don't think this is the way ABA is supposed to work, I think this is just the way these particular people do it. The autism centre where we've been certainly show different things in their movie-clips. I was just so appalled by the whole thing I had to tell someone. Unfortunately I think there's a lot of bad versions of ABA out there, and nobody to speak up for the children.

I guess I think mothers should trust their gut more. I'm sure the mother of that child felt sick to her stomach when he was crying like thatt, and she should have trusted her instincts and taken him out of there. But it seems that everyone's an expert except the parents of the child

I read an interesting article, linked from this website, about the ethics of ABA. I remember it talking about how ABA worked when negative reinforcement (pullng hair for example, which I have seen people do that in therapy) was used, but when positive reinforcement only was used the "success" rate was not as good. They were talking about the so called "scientific proof" that this therapy works. It talked about the rights of autistic people, and how if an NT was treated this way it would be abuse, but it's OK for autistics because it's "necessary". It really changed the way I thought of ABA. I never used it on my son, except for token economies to encourage him to change certain behaviors while working toward something. It worked really well, but my son's AS is pretty mild. I don't know how I would feel if I had a non verbal child with a lot of sensory issues and a low IQ, but I suspect I would feel the same caution.

If I find that article I will post it. It was very interesting.

That. Is. Sick.

That "aversive ABA works" theory is behind the gruesome electric shock treatments of the infamous Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts. They put electrified bands around peoples' wrists or upper arms and shock them if they do some particular thing that they shouldn't. The center has been investigated several times but somehow never shut down. Whenever there is an investigation and then a newspaper article about it, the reporter always finds parents who say something like "my child had detached retinas from head banging and this made him stop". The thing is, I believe them. I bet it did make their child stop doing that. But at what cost? It seems like the the psychologiocal damage from being repeatedly shocked could be even worse than the physical damage of detached retinas. There has got to be a better way. A helmet??

There has got to be a better way. But professionals won't look for it as long as ABA has this seal of approval as either "the next best thing to a cure" or "ok, not a cure, but it couldn't possibly hurt to try". What I don't like about ABA is 1)in the wrong hands it can be literally abusive and 2)in the right hands it shouldn't devolve into literal abuse, but at a proposed 40 hours a week it can take the place of things that I think really ARE helpful like outings to the zoo, animal therapy, music therapy, going to the playground even if only to stim under a tree.

My daughter escaped this by virtue of being older when she got her autism diagnosis. For the longest time she was "PDD-NOS" and doctors don't automatically say "ABA" when they come up with that. The virtue of PDD-NOS is that it's so non-descript and vague that her school's special ed program pretty much brainstormed a series of thoroughly individual IEPs based on what they observed as her learning style. There is no set program for PDD-NOS as there is for autism, so they just winged it. And winging it required they look at her as an individual and come up with stuff by trial and error. Which I think has ultimately been the much better course. By the time "autism" replaced "PDD-NOS" on her medical record and "ABA" popped out of every doctor's mouth by reflex, her school program had already found a better path by trial and error and I had already found a better path at home of frequent outings to natural settings and playgrounds. All of which I think have helped her integrate into the world better than sitting at a table for umpteen hours.

Watching the video all the way through, the kid seems actually quite happy at the end. Isn't it odd that he seems far happier after the treatment than before?