I'm still reading through Steve #Silberman's #NeuroTribes. I'm currently nearing the end of the longest chapter, "Fighting the monster", of which the latter part is largely about Ole Ivar #Lovaas and the origins of #ABA. It makes for harrowing reading. Samples:

#Lovaas: "You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. 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. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person."

#Lovaas describing an occasion on which he dealt with a self-injuring autistic girl: "I reached over and cracked her one right on the rear ... I noticed she had stopped hitting herself. I felt guilty, but I felt great. Then she hit herself again, and I really laid it on 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 more, but we had the problem licked."

#Silberman as narrator: 'In a subsequent round of trials, instead of the electrified floor, Lovaas employed a remote-controlled device called a Lee-Lectronic Trainer — a box the size of a cigarette pack used in canine obedience tests — affixed to the boys' buttocks.
...
Lovaas put Mike and Marty on a strict behaviorist diet: no food at all, seven days a week, but the token scraps earned by their acquiring the ability to perform a complex social task while pressing a bar to avoid shock. Water deprivation was also stringently enforced, though he noted that, "to avoid dehydration," water was available to the boys "ad libidinum" after six p.m. each day.'

There is much more, but this is quite enough to provide an idea of how the research on which #ABA is based, carried out by its founder, was conducted.

It is a scandal that #ABA is not UNIVERSALLY condemned by both the theoretical and the clinical wings of autism psychology.

#OrcsWithPretensions #OWP

@autistics

Yesterday I did BLS (Basic Life Saving — CPR etc.) training and certification, which is not only socially useful, but also a hard requirement for my job (hospital inpatient pharmacist). The certification is good for two years. Even though the instructor was quite good, two experiences during the training made me wish it were longer until I'll need to recertify.

First, the training was in-person, with 5 other people present in a small room (the instructor and 4 other students). That in itself wouldn't have bothered me especially, but at certain points I was required to take off my N95 mask to blow into a so-called pocket mask to ventilate a training dummy. We also practiced with a bag-mask device that allows ventilation to be done with hands only, but blowing by mouth with the pocket mask was required for evaluation. I tried to minimize the time my mask was off, but none of the other 5 people present were ever masked during the nearly 4-hour training. Not an ideal situation from a #ZeroCOVID point of view.

The other issue was even more unpleasant. In the past the other students were typically nurses or EMTs or similar. But this time one of them introduced herself as a "behavior technician". I wondered what that meant. Toward the end of the training she explained: "I do #ABA with #autistics."

I froze mentally. I thought: TORTURE THERAPIST. Yes, I know they don't usually use electric shocks anymore. No, I haven't (thankfully) had any personal experience with #ABA. But still, my perspective on this "therapy" is essentially what Amanda Forest Vivian expressed so eloquently in her essay "On ABA: they hate you. Yes, you." I had to struggle to remain professional. I had never met an #ABA tech before, and I felt as if I'd been introduced to an #ICE agent or a professional waterboarder. Conversely, I wondered how SHE would feel if she knew that one of her fellow students in this training was #autistic.

#OrcsWithPretensions

https://thinkingautismguide.com/2018/09/on-aba-they-hate-you-yes-you.html

@electricarchaeo @akamran My term for such people:

#OrcsWithPretensions