Thread by @mykola

IF YOU ARE NOT AUTISTIC please do me ONE FAVOR today: learn what ABA is in the context of autistic people.

Learn that it’s covered by insurance in all 50 states and sometimes legally mandated.

LEARN THAT IT IS CONVERSION THERAPY.

And that it’s coming for everyone who is weird.

https://twitter.com/mykola/status/1531383808779505672

Today could be the day you add a new piece of information to your toolkit for dealing with the world.

This stuff seems fringe but it’s a multi-billion dollar growth industry based on inducing trauma through operant conditioning.

And they’re expanding.

Please don’t scroll past. Take five minutes and just learn about this, so you understand how bad it is and how bad it is going to get.

Autistics are just the canary in the coal mine here. Please listen to us.

“But myk, it says it’s evidence based!”

Their evidence is that if you enroll your autistic kid in ABA at 40 hours a week from the age of two they’ll develop “more normally” over the coming years.

But like. Kids develop anyway. That’s called growing up.

Further, there’s a glaring problem with ABA: if it was actually helpful for the autistic people then late-diagnosed autistic adults would be lining up around the block.

Why doesn’t that happen?

https://twitter.com/mykola/status/1531385714985820160

So who does ABA actually help?

1) parents who don’t know better and think that reducing visible signs of autism is the right thing to do. (It’s not.)

2) ABA franchise owners who are making millions by turning autistic kids into suicidal partial mimicries of allistic kids.

“Myk are you sure? My doctor told me it was essential to get my kid into ABA!”

Doctors don’t know anything about autism. They just don’t. These people will tell you can’t be autistic if you get a joke.

Here, the DoD did a full study of ABA and concluded it was useless at best:

https://twitter.com/fochti/status/1531399620164714506

I’ve got one BCBA on my mentions calling me a propagandist, saying ABA has nothing to do with conversion therapy.

To that I say, ABA was created by Ivar Lovaas who got his started treating “sissy” teen boys. It was conversion therapy from the start.

When homosexuality became more publicly acceptable and was removed from the DSM Lovaas needed a new demographic to experiment on.

He chose autistic kids because nobody cares what happens to them, really.

But hey, don’t take my word for it, this is all public information.

If you’re working as a BCBA, did you know this?

What does ABA look like in practice? It depends. A lot of places don’t do ABA but have to call themselves that for insurance while providing eg occupational therapy. Those places are mostly fine.

Real ABA is about rewards and punishments.

(“We don’t punish anymore!” Fuck you yes you do. Neglect is punishment, planned ignoring is punishment, and the electric shock devices your industry is so *conflicted* about are punishment.)

The goal of ABA is to reward desired behavior while ignoring (or punishing) non-desires behavior.

In practice this may look like a #bcba in conversation with a kid about their day and every time the kid stims they look away, withdraw attention.

This “works”, sure.

It teaches the kid to choose between a natural and necessary behavior that helps regulate emotion, and social acceptance from a *trusted* professional.

And most kids choose to “extinguish” the behavior to get social approval or candy or whatever the reward is.

Now that kid has *lost* one of their best tools for dealing with an overwhelming world. They will smile and meet stressors face on without flinching, because they were *conditioned* that way.

And every relationship fails. Every job falls apart. And they don’t know why.

Listen: when you use the tools of behavioralism to sever human beings from their natural and necessary behaviors you are *causing harm* to those people.

But hey, they’re less distracting to others now. Good job?