What happens with adults who got ABA as kids?

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I'm looking at the research on ABA, and I can't find any studies on adults who got ABA in early childhood. The longest follow-up I can find are studies on pre-teens treated as preschoolers. I know when I was a pre-teen no one suspected I'd be unable to live independently when I grew up. (Back then, my independence level was mostly normal for my age.) So it seems odd that the ABA people would claim they can know how kids getting ABA will turn out in adulthood when they've never studied them past 11 or 12 years.

Does anyone here know of any studies I'm missing?

There was once a person here who went through the Lovaas study.

She seemed "normal" intellectually, and I believe she has attained a career, though with some problems.

If ABA is anything like I've read about, then most adults who got it are now deeply emotionally scarred or committed suicide.

I imagine that they have flashbacks. I have flashbacks about the way that my parents raised me and I didn't even have to go through ABA. I've been fighting flashbacks over the past few months.

This.
A large number of adults with ASDs fall off the grid and/or commit suicide in the U.S.
Many also get into drugs and become homeless, due to families and friends (or lack thereof) being unaccepting of them.

I saw something about it a few months ago on PBS.

All forms of behavioral treatment including forcing people to be "normal" causes significant issues in life.

I hated the fact that K-12 school and family enforced me to be "normal" and I was punished when I didn't conform.
Granted they didn't know what was wrong with me then...

Hell my school counselor (she was the counselor for the last 3rd of the alphabet and had to meet with all students in her letter assignment) wanted to delay my graduation for social development reasons.

I was a well liked student by my teachers and did good in most classes, though due to a few math classes and a few health and home issues I only achieved a cumulative GPA of 2.92 at the end of High School (B Average is 3.0).
I didn't need any help getting through High School, even though I nearly dropped out do to the social aspect.

Standard School form didn't work well for me, I would have done better with a different model of learning.

I doubt ABA has been around long enough to do any worthwhile study on adults.

It has been in my area for maybe 6 years, and insurance didn't cover it for the great unwashed until 3 years ago. So the kids that could get into programs that insurance covered, are probably around 12 now.

When ABA was hyped, it was upper middle class/wealthy families who could afford it. They paid out of pocket. Following those adults child is sort of meh, because their families have the means to throw money and influence at the problem. Their families can scaffold them so life isn't a total dumpster fire.

In my area (metropolitan, Midwest state), ABA is not easy to get into. There is trouble finding providers who are not cash only.

You are looking at 20 years before any decent studies come out.

Remember, ABA was pushed through because of a few studies, and because Autism has no cure and no real therapies that seemed to help. So you all are the grand experiement.

I know my school system does not offer it in their Autism Intervention program.

Last edited by Tawaki on 11 May 2016, 11:57 am, edited 2 times in total.

You won't find any instances of ABA being used on people who are now say, mid-life adults because it didn't exist *by that name* when they were children. However, they - we - were children in the era when Psychology and Psychiatry fully bought into what is known as the Blank Slate theory. The idea is that in a very B.F. Skinner wordview, every human is born with an identical brain, one that is purely plastic. All abilities, strengths, weaknesses and failures can be attributed to learned behaviors. Keep in mind that there never was any actual science behind this, it was just a pet theory that seemed "common sense" enough that everyone bought into it. The result was that many if not most autistic children of that era were brought up in an environment that very much resembled ABA in practice.

I actually think ABA has some merit, but having been raised in that era can see that ABA is mostly targeted toward parents who want to "fix" their children's autism and make it go away. If the actual end goal was to bring each autistic person up to the highest level of functioning they can reliably maintain without damage, their methods and the underlying assumptions would be very different.

Could anybody explain the setbacks of ABA? As far as I know, it's one of the only effective autism therapies, and it had been consistenly shown to improve functioning in those with an ASD.
I'm not an expert in the topic though - is there a reason why the benefits of ABA don't outweigh the costs (emotional or others)?

Granted, ABA isn't perfect, but are there any better alternatives? It still seems to benefit those with autism, even when accounting for the emotional and other costs.

While Skinner's ideas weren't perfect, modern behavioral psychology and neuroscience have been shown to be highly predictive and consistent with the evidence up to date. In fact, it's the most empirically and scientifically supported school of psychology (with psychoanalysis being the least supported by science and present day empirical data).

ABA does not work on everyone with Autism. My friend pulled her son out of a district that hypes they use ABA, and everyone fights to get in. The son went from nursery school to pre kindergarten there. Horrible. He fought every single day. Of course mom stayed with it because "it's the only proven therapy that works for ASD."

Took the summer off from all things school. Put him in a different district that does not strictly use ABA. He's flourishing.

Her son is not non verbal. He is not considered low functioning. Maybe ABA works with the children at the very end of the spectrum, but I know more than a few people who's children really didn't gain that much from it. (HFA to Aspergers level of functioning).

ABA is just a tool, and the people who have a vested interest hype it out to the moon.

ABA is not the magic wand that will keep your son from living in your basement, playing video games, and unemployed at age 30.

Parents get scared with an ASD diagnosis and will grab at anything so their kid will wind up "normal".

Yes, ABA may not work for everyone. But it had been shown to work on average, and an addition of ABA had been shown to greatly improve the outcomes of those with an ASD. If something doesn't work for everyone, it doesn't mean it doesn't work. I'm pretty sure all effective interventions have at least some people for whom they won't do any benefit.
I wish ABA was more developed in my country, so that I could have received it when I was younger. Maybe I wouldn't be so severely hanidcapped today.

Last edited by somebody300 on 11 May 2016, 12:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Nearly if not all forms of ASD therapy is focused on social conformity instead of acceptance.
Though this is reflective of society as a whole.

Essentially forcing someone to be someone they aren't wired to be, leads to a horrible outcome.
This is done to Homosexuals and Bisexuals to make them Straight (until recently in the developed world) and it had horrible life outcomes on them.
Same happens if a Straight person is forced to be gay.

It has even been shown when people who aren't wired for marriage/dating are "pressured" into marriage/dating, wind up with the same horrible come as all other people who are "pressured" into being someone they aren't wired to be.

It even has equally as powerful negative life long effects when people, especially women are wired not to have and keep children are "pressured" to have and keep children they don't want.


It really just boils down to people who aren't allowed/able to be themselves, wind up being horrible depressed among other things for their existence. Many of which driven to suicide.
Even if they are allowed/able to be themselves later on, it doesn't undo the effects of the earlier peroid.
This is especially true for those who had it happen to them as a child.

It just alters you to a degree.

I take offense to this (I am 30 and unemployed).

It's actually quite common to be unemployed in your late 20s and early 30s now in most of the developed world due to the economic situation still working itself out.

This does seem to be a very good point. But can't autism itself lead you not to be able to express who you are as well? What if someone with autism is very unhappy with some of their behaviors (or a lack of thereof)? When done to an extreme, ABA can certainly have negative consequences (emotional and others). But when the behaviors caused by autism are very problematic (such as head banging and other forms of injury), shouldn't they be corrected?

Let's take some of the behaviors I have as an example. Due to the fact that the state of autism treatment was very underdeveloped in my country, my self-injurous behaviors, such as head banging, weren't corrected when I was a child. I have them up to the present day, and they pose a great stress and discomfort.

Maybe head banging is indeed a part of who I am. And it certainly is. But I don't want this part of my behavior to be present, as I find it to be extremely problematic. Improving something (some behaviors) is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe improving upon oneself changes who you are, and if it does, I'm glad to accept the new behaviors as the part of the new, imporved me.

And to address your other point, no, a behavior like head banging is not the same as homosexuality or bisexuality. Homosexuality and bisexuality can't be changed, nor are they problematic. However, behaviors like head banging are problematic, and have been shown to be changeable (or at least manageable). High glucose levels in those with diabetes have been shown to be highly manageable, even though insulin resistance which leads to high glucose levels is a part of who those with diabetes are.

There is one thing to have your body misfunction leading to health issues like Diabetes, High Blood Pressure, Cancer etc... This is due to damaged genes, bad genes being inherited from parents, damaged cells and/or environmental factors.
These lead to treatable health issue, which left untreated will lead to a shorter life than you would have without those issues.

DNA, Genes, Cells regularly miscopy or misgenerate leading to health issues, which is the body normally repairs but sometimes for unknown reasons they slip through.

No one knows the root cause for Autism and ASD.
We went from parenting and nutrition (for most of human history) to pollution (1950-80s, though pollution has shown to cause other issues in humans, plants and animals) to blaming vaccines (1980s- to present, though no link has been found) to blaming the anything now.

They've studied the Human Genome for almost 30 years now to find the cause for Homosexuality, Bisexuality, Pedophilia, God, Religion, etc....

To date they have concluded that Homosexuality, Bisexuality, Pedophilia, God, Religion, Autism, ASDs, etc... are not rooted in a single gene or genes, or a strand of DNA.

The Human Genome and DNA doesn't hold all the answers to varied outcome in Humans (Sames goes for other life).

Oddly enough they have found out that your brain go through rewiring during the first few years of puberty, leading to some people developing an ASDs, who were fine as a child.
It has also lead to those who had an ASD as a child, being rewired to NT as a teenager and adult.

This also happens with other neurological and biological disorders such as MS, Mental Heath Disorders, suicide, etc...

The most dangerous years for Human Males is the onset of puberty to ~35 years old.
If something bad health wise is going to happen to you, it's most likely to occur in this age range.

Once you are outside of this age range, you are essentially home free until old age (provided you don't screw up your life).
If you were born with something, it's more likely to get worse than stay the same or get better when you hit puberty.

No one knows why!


As for peoples personalities, mentality, emotionality, and sexuality; it's much better for their health to accept them for who they are instead of trying to force social norms and social expectations on them as long as they are good people who aren't harming themselves or anyone else.

Intervening on them to make them conform to social norms and expectations has shown to cause horrible health and life issues even leading to suicide.

If someone wants to change and is hell bent on it, then that's a different story.


I'll put it to you this way.... Steve Job's teachers and doctors wanted to medicate and therapy his ass into being normal back in the 1960s and 70s.
His parents told them all, to F off and there was nothing wrong with their kid not adopting to social norms and expectations.
They said he wasn't harming anyone or himself, so everyone should accept him.

Or I'll use this person instead....

Henry Ford was very weird and odd kid. His Dad, teachers, doctors, and ministers though something was wrong with him. They set out to make little Henry normal, but his mother refused and forced her husband to cater to their son's interest because she wanted him to be happy and believed he would be successful person.
His Dad, teachers, doctors, and ministers wanted to "correct" him because they felt he would wind up being failure, broke, poor and unwed by the time he was 30.
But his mother chose to follow her heart on him.

Henry Ford eventually moved down the road to Detroit where he found the environment he needed to blossom into the industrialist which changed the world.

Sadly he wasn't an accepting father who drove his son into an early grave.

Same thing nearly happened with J.D. Rockefeller, who would later become the world's first billionaire and richest man until the U.S. Government broke them up for violating antitrust laws.

Though is family is still one of the richest in the world, in part because he nurtured and accepted his kids for who they were.

Same thing happened to Bill Gates, Steve Bezos (Amazon founder and CEO), Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO of Facebook. etc...


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As for you, there is no guarantee that any form of therapy would have changed you let alone stopped headbanging.

As for me therapy didn't stop me for tapping my finger, tapping my leg (when II get nervous or am learning something new), it didn't stop me from rocking myself to sleep (I sleep worse when I don't).

Nor did it stop me from being quirky and weird.

Though when I was forced to control (Which never made it fully go away), I wasted a good amount of energy, exhausting myself a lot sooner in the day. I also ended up gaining more weight.
I also appeared outward as more unfriendly, uncomfortable, and in other negative means due to controlling my quirks and oddities. I just looked unnatural.

Also all those quirky and nervous ticks burn a lot of calories as studies have shown.

Interesting. What are your credentials?

ABA has existed since at least the 1970s. I believe Lovaas did his study late 70s-early 80s.

The person who was one of the subjects of the Lovaas Study is about 45 now.