A Bit of Neighborly Advice

Guest post by Rita Skeeter, award-winning journalist and ultra-reliable source for all the dirt you've ever wanted to read.


Whilst slumming in the dismal wasteland that is Muggle television, I came across an ad by Autism Speaks called Neighbors, which makes the rather astounding suggestion that providing more therapies to autistic children would result in their having more friends. This can be done, according to the ad, through insurance mandate legislation.

Now, some therapies ought indeed to be made more widely available. Physical, occupational, and speech therapy can be very helpful to many children. In magical society, it's a matter of considerable importance to ensure that our little ones are provided with these therapies at an early age, if the need arises. After all, the study of witchcraft and wizardry can be quite difficult if one cannot hold magical objects firmly and recite spells clearly. If a young Hogwarts pupil stumbled over the words of an incantation, she might end up turning her hair into snakes, or something equally unpleasant. Even after the spell was reversed, I found it dreadfully scaly and hard to comb for weeks afterward. But I digress.

To be nothing but Muggle pretenders, Autism Speaks and Dr. Lovaas certainly have an overinflated idea of their own abilities. If there really were some sort of alchemy that could magically transform anyone into a friend, well, we'd all be drinking tea and playing friendly games of Quidditch with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and I expect I'd be out of work. Granted, there are love potions and such, but they soon wear off. Turning people into true friends is a matter of time, effort, and shared interests—not of aping their mannerisms. There are no shortcuts or magical behavioral charms.

Besides, we all know why some children have no interest in befriending certain others, don't we? It's the same reason why so many witches and wizards from our most illustrious families have no use for Mudbloods—plain, simple, old-fashioned prejudice. There's no way to magically transform intolerance into something else by putting its targets in behavioral therapy for several hours a day, either. If the goal really is that all children should be friends and play happily with each other in their neighborhoods—well, they're going to have to be taught to accept and appreciate diversity, rather than excluding and abusing those who are different.

As long as we are on the subject of teaching children not to abuse others, if your little horrors—er, I meant to say little darlings—are the sort who like to stomp on insects, you should teach them to show kindness to all God's creatures. Even a beetle can suffer a nasty case of post-traumatic stress when it comes within millimeters of being squashed by a little boy's wretched smelly shoe. Especially if the beetle just happens to be an Animagus—not that I would have any firsthand experience of shape-shifting, of course…

Lovaas Safari Tours at Erik's Ranch

Guest post by Rita Skeeter, award-winning journalist and ultra-reliable source for all the dirt you've ever wanted to read.


You're probably wondering what a journalist of my incomparable reputation is doing on a lowly Muggle blog. Well, yesterday while I was working on a much more important article about the Ministry of Magic's investigation of marauding trolls in the countryside, I just happened to come across a blogger trying to fight off three trolls who had been lurking under a bridge. Of course, all I had to do was flap my lips a few times, and the trolls ran away screaming. I don't know why you inept Muggles can't manage that.

Out of the kindness of my heart, I took the blogger to a nearby tea shop and bought her a nice cup of tea to settle her nerves. Then I slipped a few drops of a truth potion into her cup when she wasn't looking. I never go anywhere without it, naturally. A few minutes later I had this blog's password, and I took the opportunity to do a bit of snooping. Well, wouldn't anybody?

In the drafts folder, I found a half-finished post about a proposed residential facility in Montana for autistic adults, called Erik's Ranch, whose advisory board includes the well known behaviorist Dr. Lovaas. Of course, he's not as well known as I am. Because I'm of the mind that all Mudbloods belong in institutions, I decided to rewrite the post to include a few of my own keen insights.

It seems that Dr. Lovaas' public image has been refurbished somewhat since the days when he boasted that he could cure autistic kids by slapping and screaming at them. Even the cleverly named Autism Speaks, which has never actually had any autistic people speaking for it, has jumped on the rickety old Lovaas bandwagon by touting ABA-centric autism insurance legislation. Now, I told the Wrights they ought to hire a witch or wizard to put a repair spell on that old bandwagon before the wheels fall off. Even a first-year Hogwarts student could do that. But did they listen to me? Nooooo, like all Muggles, they're much too full of themselves.

This morning, just because I don't like being ignored, I stuck a few pins into a voodoo doll where Suzanne Wright's heart ought to be. I still haven't figured out why it had no effect whatsoever. Not that I care what happens to anybody who's as incompetent as she is. I'll just point out here that You-Know-Who does a much more effective job of eradicating bothersome minority groups, as well as dealing with obvious Mudblood sympathizers like Brian Reichow of Vanderbilt University, who, along with his co-authors in a 2008 study, had this to say about autism treatment hype: “There have been a number of different reviews of evidence-based practices of treatments for young children with autism. Reviews which have critically evaluated the empirical evidence have not found any treatments that can be considered evidence-based.”

Humph!

Anyway, back to Erik's Ranch, which is described on its website as "a structured environment for lifelong learning that encourages participation by residents, and serves as a destination location to attract family and friends to share experiences with their loved one. The ranch will offer horseback riding, photo safaris and other ecotourism adventures…"

The website is full of nice warm fuzzy cheerful happy-sounding buzzwords like community, inclusion, and the often repeated phrase "lifelong learning." However, there's no mention of what happens when residents decide that they don't want to stay there lifelong. Too bad for them, I guess. They should've made more of an effort to become indistinguishable from their peers. Then they wouldn't have had to face the consequences of being, in the website's own terms, "children who didn’t make it to the recovery we all hoped for."

Residents will be given "work" opportunities (the website's authors are the ones who put the term "work" in quotes, which shows what they think of it) and will be placed in jobs as groundskeepers, tour guides, and other service positions. Visitors to the ranch will enjoy this fascinating opportunity to create photos and videos of the lovely Montana scenery and wildlife—and, presumably, of the curious behaviors of the savage autistic natives on the reservation. It'll be just like taking photos on an old-timey colonial safari a century ago, when the sun never set on the British Empire, and when nobody except common riff-raff cared about such foolishness as human rights and respecting the dignity of other cultures.

If I were in charge of running Erik's Ranch, though, I'd have better sense than to let the general public roam randomly around with video cameras. After all, what if a slapping and screaming incident, or some other abuse or molestation of a resident, ended up on the evening news? No hype-mongers worth their salt would risk letting their public image get out of control like that. It's all about careful manipulation of the media, people. But then Muggles can't be expected to have the natural journalistic savvy of a brilliant reporter such as myself. I figure they'll just have to learn the hard way.

Gotta run now—there's a hot new rumor about Harry Potter to investigate! I'll just put a Confundus Charm on this blog so that abfh will be too confused to notice the new post. Silly Muggles are always so easy to fool.

Abuse and Behaviorism

Disability rights groups such as TASH and NDRN have been seeking to bring more attention to the serious problem of restraints, seclusion, and other abuse of students with disabilities in America's schools. Among other approaches to dealing with this problem, they have suggested implementing positive approaches to discipline in schools and school districts. They have cited Positive Behavioral Supports (PBS) as an example of such an approach.

These disability organizations are not advocating the use of PBS as a treatment for autism. Rather, they are suggesting that school-wide and district-wide programs, which are called PBIS (this stands for Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports) and are intended to apply equally to all students, can improve the overall disciplinary environment and thereby help to prevent abuse and bullying of students with disabilities.

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has been considering whether, and to what extent, it should support anti-abuse initiatives that promote the use of PBIS programs. Because the behavioral assessment methods used in PBS/PBIS have their roots in ABA, which has a long and sordid history of shoddy research and unethical practices when used as a treatment for autism (as thoroughly documented by Michelle Dawson on her website and blog), some members of the autistic community have questioned whether ASAN should support such initiatives.

The disability organizations that favor the use of PBIS are not relying on the ABA/autism research literature to support their position, however, but on data showing reduced disciplinary incidents among the entire student body in schools and districts that have adopted PBIS programs. Whether or not ABA should be used as a treatment for autism is irrelevant to an analysis of the use of PBIS for general disciplinary purposes. Moreover, many school districts do not even employ psychologists to run these programs, but instead arrange for district personnel to receive training from PBIS consultants. A school district that has a PBIS discipline program is using that program for purposes unrelated to autism and, in most cases, is not employing anyone who has ever used ABA as a treatment for autism.

Of course, in evaluating the effects of PBIS programs on students with disabilities, there are other factors that should be considered in addition to disciplinary incident data. It would be helpful to interview autistic students and their families regarding their experiences with such programs, taking into account a broad variety of quality of life issues. Also, as Ed discussed in a recent post, behavioral programs in the schools should "be critically scrutinized in order to see that their direction is productive and encourages more creativity rather than fewer freedoms."

Researchers Identify Autism Biomarker

A study presented at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America indicates that it may be possible to accurately identify autistic children at a very early age by measuring brain wave patterns to determine if a child has a significant lag in auditory processing. As reported in an Associated Press article:


The brain wave study used noninvasive technology called magnetoencephalography, MEG for short. It measures magnetic fields generated by electrical currents in brain nerve cells, and records brain activity in real time.

Researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia had 64 autistic children ages 6 to 15 listen through headphones to a series of rapid beeps while under the helmet-like device, which recorded the brain's response to the sounds. Those brain waves, shown as highlighted areas on an imaging screen, were compared with responses in a group of non-autistic children.

In autistic children, response to each sound was delayed by one-fiftieth of a second.

"We tend to speak at four syllables per second," said Timothy Roberts, the study's lead author and the hospital's vice chairman of research. If an autistic brain "is slow in processing a change in a syllable ... it could easily get to the point of being overloaded."


Although the study did not include younger children, the researchers believe that it may be possible to use the same method of brain wave measurement for diagnostic purposes in very young children.

The reporter suggested that the benefit of using this biomarker for diagnosis would be that "it could mean behavior treatment much sooner." But as I see it, a diagnostic biomarker would be valuable for precisely the opposite reason—because it would take autism out of the subjective realm of behavioral observations and define the condition, for the first time, in terms of hard science. Autistic children would receive more of the services that they need from speech and language professionals, instead of spending large amounts of time in intensive behavioral programs that lack solid research to support their practices.

Although reasonable people can differ on the issue of whether some autistic children may be helped by behavioral therapies, it is a fact that behavioral practitioners are not trained or licensed to provide speech therapy or related services. If autism is to be defined in terms of auditory processing differences, then I believe the logical conclusion is that services for autistic children should be provided primarily by, or under the direction of, speech and language professionals.

The Autism Recovery Hoax

I've seen a number of testimonials floating around on the Web from parents who declare that after a few years of X biomedical program or Y behavioral therapy, their child has now "recovered" and has been evaluated by reputable psychologists and found to have "no trace of autism."

Many of these parents appear to be sincere, unlike the hucksters who tout their endorsements. However, their claims reflect a basic misconception of how an autism diagnosis is made. Quite simply put, it is not possible under the DSM-IV criteria to have a "trace" of autism. The diagnosis requires a showing of significant impairment in certain identified social and communicative behaviors. Therefore, if a child or adult has autistic characteristics but does not have (in a clinical psychologist's subjective judgment) any significant problems associated with those characteristics, the psychologist will conclude that he or she is not autistic.

Indeed, because many autistic adults have become familiar enough with society's narrow behavioral expectations to be able to blend in (at least superficially) with the majority population, it is often extremely difficult for a psychologist to diagnose an autistic adult. Some psychologists will not even attempt to diagnose an adult unless he or she comes to the evaluation accompanied by a parent or another older relative who can accurately describe his or her childhood development.

The flaws in this diagnostic approach are pretty obvious. It's basically the equivalent of identifying a young girl as female based on evidence of significant female behaviors such as playing with Barbie dolls, and then declaring her to be miraculously recovered from her gender when she outgrows the Barbies.

Yes, there are many parents of so-called recovered children who have in fact seen significant changes in their children's behavior over a few years. To a large extent, these changes are attributable to the natural process of maturation. Just as girls outgrow playing with Barbies, autistic children outgrow behaviors like jumping on the couch and climbing on the furniture. Children also develop better language skills over time.

Some changes also may be related to psychological factors in the family. That is, if the parents react to the autism diagnosis with shock and despair, the child is likely to become very anxious as a result of observing the parents' distress and probably will have more behavioral issues because of that anxiety. If the parents then become convinced that they have found a wonder cure and that everything will be just fine, the overall level of anxiety in the household will decrease greatly, and the child's behavior will improve just because he or she is no longer feeling as stressed.

On occasion, alternative diets do have beneficial effects. Gluten intolerance and lactose intolerance are both fairly common in the general population. If an autistic child who happens to have one of these conditions is put on the popular GFCF diet, the child's digestion will improve, and he or she probably will behave better as a result of feeling better. This doesn't mean that the child is no longer on the autistic spectrum, however; it simply means that he or she is a healthy and happy autistic child.

A biomed enthusiast or behaviorism supporter may ask, perhaps, whether it really makes any difference if a child is described as "recovered" or as an autistic child who has developed a socially accepted set of behaviors. In either case, they may say, aren't we talking about the same positive outcome? Does it really matter what language is used?

The difference is, of course, that using the word "recovery" implies that autism is a disease. This in turn implies that autistic people are damaged, that the autistic way of being is inherently flawed, that it is not possible to be both healthy and autistic, and that (as Autism Speaks would have it) the entire autistic population ought to be eradicated.

There's also a subtler set of implications. When social conformity is equated with neurological health, the objective of "recovery" then becomes conformity for its own sake; just looking normal (whatever that may mean), rather than developing truly useful life strategies, is the ultimate goal. Instead of valuing diversity and helping every child to find a niche based on individual strengths and interests, we end up crushing an ever-widening array of human differences as our society lurches toward Camazotz. Becoming socially accepted, regardless of what is lost in the process, should not be assumed to be a positive outcome.

And then, of course, there's the implication that the hucksters want to create when they speak of "recovered" children: that autism is a tragic disease, and therefore if you are a loving parent, you'll gladly go into debt to pay for the latest and greatest miracle cure. If they honestly acknowledged the simple fact that autistic children mature over time, they wouldn't be able to stampede so many parents into buying unproven and possibly dangerous products and services.

Parents—don't be fooled by this hoax!

Autism Causation Mad Libs

After reading Bev's Aspie blog post generator, I was inspired to create the following Mad Libs story for your enjoyment. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Mad Libs, which (for those who haven't seen them) are stories that contain blank spaces. One person reads the story to another; the listener, who hasn't seen the story, provides words at random to fill in the blanks when asked for verbs, nouns, etc. The results are often quite funny.

If you're in the mood for some merriment, feel free to print out this post and share it with a friend!


AUTISM CAUSATION


Autism is a ___________ (adjective) ___________ (noun) that involves ___________ (adjective) behavior. It may be caused by ___________ (noun), or perhaps by a combination of ___________ (adjective) ___________ (noun), ___________ (plural noun), and ___________ (adjective) ___________ (noun).

Because people in positions of authority have described autism as ___________ (adjective), some parents have become convinced that they need to ___________ (verb) their autistic children ___________ (adverb) by means of ___________ (noun). They may take their children to visit ___________ (plural noun) for therapies such as ___________ (adjective) ___________ (noun) or buy dietary supplements consisting of ___________ (plural noun) and perhaps also some ___________ (adjective) ___________ (plural noun).

This has been claimed to result in autistic children becoming ___________ (plural noun) who are indistinguishable from ___________ (adjective) ___________ (plural noun).


Grab a pencil and have fun! And remember, no matter how silly the answers end up being, they're probably going to make more sense than most of the autism causation and treatment claims out there.

Useless Readers

In Nazi Germany, people with disabilities often were described as useless eaters, as an intolerable financial burden to society. In recent years, similar dehumanizing propaganda has been used in describing the purported cost to society of autistic people. Sometimes it looks as if there's no attack too vicious, no bigotry too revolting, and no stereotype too absurd to be parroted by politicians and the mainstream media.

Even so, I was taken aback when I saw how autistic children were characterized in this Newsweek article about early diagnosis, in which Rebecca Landa of the Kennedy Krieger Institute was interviewed about behavioral treatment for infants. Would you believe... useless readers?


In a typically developing infant, everything is a learnable moment. In an infant or toddler with autism, their attention gets hyperfocused on things that aren't important--like for example, the letters on a wooden block.

How do you stop such behavior?
You redirect the child's attention, you engage them in other toys. You also teach them how to pay attention to really important social signals, like people's eyes, people's faces.


Once upon a time, in a simpler world, I was one of those infants who had a strong focus on "unimportant" letters. According to my mother, when I was about nine months old, I often crawled to the TV and touched the raised letters on the logo at its base. Because I was so interested in letters, my parents bought some Dr. Seuss stories and a set of illustrated children's encyclopedias, and they started reading to me regularly.

I'm not sure if I learned to read before I could talk, or if I developed speech at about the same time, but I could read fluently by the time I was two years old. Books were my constant friends, my loyal companions in adventure. After I started school, writing always came easily to me—all through my childhood, and then university, and graduate school and a professional career.

But now it seems that, as Rebecca Landa would have it, my parents raised me all wrong. If only they'd put me in a behavioral program and systematically deprived me of books and anything else I enjoyed, I might have been successfully transformed into a nice pleasant drone with a lovely smile and flawless eye contact, perfectly obedient to social expectations, a paragon of normality and mediocrity.

Before I go any farther, let me make myself completely clear on one point: I'm not writing this post to brag about my personal accomplishments. In fact, I don't give a rat's ass what anyone thinks about that. I'm writing it in white-hot outrage at what is being done to our children.

Sometimes I feel as if I've fallen through a time portal and landed in the middle of a long-ago witch hunt, among primitive, superstitious, pitchfork-wielding peasants who would happily burn at the stake any child or adult who had the audacity to open a book; after all, only a witch would show any interest in such a useless object.

To put it another way—the barbarian hordes are at the gate, trying to destroy everything that brings beauty and meaning to our world. Grab your children and your books, hide them away in a safe place, and get ready to fight for the survival of civilization.

What's Wrong with Early Intervention?

I was going to comment on a post about early intervention by Joey's Mom, but I decided to write my own post instead because this is a complex topic that could use more in-depth discussion. Joey's Mom wanted to know why some people object to early intervention, which she found helpful for her son; what's wrong with it?

First of all, as Camille mentioned in a comment, it's necessary to define our terms. Many early childhood services have gotten little or no criticism. There seems to be a general consensus that early speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy are useful services that are well worth the expense. To the extent that there is a controversy, it has to do with behavioral programs—ABA, in particular.

Part of the problem is semantics, as Joey's Mom suggested. The word "intervention" has strong connotations of urgency and negativity. One intervenes to put an end to a dangerous situation. A family might do an intervention with an alcoholic or drug addict, for example, as a last-chance effort to save him or her from a tragic life on the streets. When we talk about early childhood education for our non-autistic children, we don't call it intervention—we just call it teaching.

Some would say that it doesn't matter what we call it, as long as autistic children get services. But it does matter. When alarmist language sends parents into a panic and convinces them that they must fill every waking moment of their child's days with treatments and therapies, or else the child will be hopelessly lost, that puts a tremendous amount of unnecessary stress on every member of the family. It also portrays autistic lives as less meaningful and valid than others.

Of course, ABA is not solely responsible for the mass hysteria surrounding autism, and I don't think anyone contends that it is. Autistic adults object to ABA chiefly because it has a strong emphasis on suppressing autistic behaviors. This criticism is separate and distinct from the semantics issue and from the question of the effectiveness of ABA teaching methods (as to the latter, it hasn't been scientifically established whether or not ABA has any significant advantages over other methods of education).

In an article in Time Magazine last year, a behavioral therapist was quoted as saying that 50 percent of ABA instruction consists of teaching autistic children "behavior to look good." I see at least three serious problems with that. First, the considerable amount of time spent teaching these children to suppress their natural autistic behavioral patterns is time that the children otherwise could have spent learning useful everyday skills, as well as just playing and enjoying a relaxed life with their family (all children, whether autistic or not, need some amount of unstructured downtime to rest and recharge their energy). Second, when young children are forced to behave in ways that they find uncomfortable or distressing, one should question whether the results justify the distress to the child. (On the long-term psychological effects of being forced to hide one's true self, I recommend the essay Let's Pretend on the autistics.org website.) And third, in our diverse multicultural world, do we really want to teach our children that rote conformity to a narrow set of social constraints is essential?

ABA programs often emphasize making eye contact as a major goal. Autistic children tend to avoid eye contact because they find it unpleasant and distracting. A recent article on MSNBC.com describes teaching an autistic child to make eye contact by means of behavioral therapy:


"We used to say it was like it burned his eyes to look at you," said his mother, Tamie Day of Antelope, Calif. "It was like a physically painful thing for him. It wasn't just that he wasn't looking at us; he was purposefully looking away."

...Before he turned 2, Jacob began daily intensive behavior treatment...

He gets 33 hours of weekly home treatment with trained college students, including six hours most days. The tab is $70,000 yearly, paid for by California, one of the few states that pay, through state and federal funds, for early intensive autism treatment.

Jacob's sessions involve lots of repetition, and rewards, including praise and treats, for a job well done. For example, to improve eye contact, teachers bounce him on a favorite giant ball, then stop. If he turns to look at them, he gets praise, maybe a piece of candy, and more bouncing.


Does young Jacob actually feel more comfortable making eye contact as a result of this behavioral program? Yes, to some extent he probably does, in the same way that a person who has a phobia can be desensitized through repeated exposure. But here's a hypothetical scenario along the same lines: If you had a small child who became upset whenever she saw a spider, would you hire a team of behavioral therapists to dangle spiders in front of her face every day and reward her when she looked at them?

Perhaps you're thinking that the two scenarios are not comparable because a fear of spiders is only a minor inconvenience, while eye contact is a matter of proper social functioning. But when you look at social expectations across different cultures, there are other parts of the world (mainly in the Far East) where making eye contact is considered impolite and is carefully avoided. The human brain is not hard-wired to require eye contact as a condition of meaningful social interaction; it's just a cultural preference.

Of course, for a child growing up in Western society, it is useful to learn that there is a cultural preference for eye contact. This does not have to be taught by repeatedly demanding that the child make eye contact in an intensive early childhood behavioral program, however. As the child grows older, the parents can explain it in the same way that they teach the child about other cultural issues. It is a myth that autistic children must first learn to make eye contact before they learn to speak; to the contrary, because eye contact is distracting to autistic children, they may learn speech more effectively if they are allowed to look away and to give their undivided attention to listening.

Bottom line: Early childhood services that help children to acquire useful skills are worthwhile, but parents would be well advised to stay away from expensive and time-consuming programs that focus on "behavior to look good."

Cultural Indoctrination

I've been pondering a couple of issues that came up in the comments to my recent posts: the extent of cultural bias in the assessment of autistic speech and social interaction, and Majia Nadesan's article on how the autism label can give rise to a "looping effect" that reinforces the labeled person's behavioral differences.

Some of the commenters debated what Nadesan meant by a "looping effect." The phrase can refer to any self-reinforcing interactive process. In the context of autism, it could refer to disability stereotypes and the emotional effects of being told that one has a "mental disorder" that makes one behave in certain ways. It could be applied to more specific practices, such as behavioral therapies or the use of drugs to alter behavior.

Andrea just wrote a post in which she points out that there is also a looping effect that reinforces society's insistence on appearing normal. Because there is such strong cultural pressure to hide any differences that might be considered abnormal, most people rarely encounter anyone who does not appear to be within the realm of normality (wherever its boundaries, which often change, may be from one moment to another). This in turn reinforces a primitive fear of difference and the illusory perception that all people are very much alike.

Back when autistic traits were considered to be mostly normal (which was not all that long ago), it wasn't unusual for autistic patterns of speech and social interaction to be clearly recognizable in multiple generations of a family. There was also a looping effect at work there: parents who had autistic traits interacted with their children in autistic ways, such as quietly teaching by example and talking about ideas and values, rather than blathering on about celebrities and fashion and other such fluff. The children, in turn, were likely to develop a similar conversational style and a strong sense of their own identity, whether or not they would have been considered autistic by today's definitions. Because there was no reason to hide autistic patterns of speech and social interaction in those days, they were seen often enough to be viewed as part of the common landscape of normality.

I'm sure that we still have just as many multigenerational autistic families as we ever had, but now—in response to today's strong social pressure to hide or suppress autistic behaviors—many parents are denying their own autistic traits (whether consciously or subconsciously) and are making desperate efforts to transform their child into a more socially accepted type of person. As autistic traits have become stigmatized, those who display such traits are no longer welcome in the community; as a result, the only options that many parents can see for their children are to learn to pass for normal (that is, today's extremely narrow definitions of normal) or to spend their lives being hidden away from the world in institutions or group homes.

This has created a very profitable niche for behavioral programs such as ABA, in which, according to a therapist who was quoted in a Time Magazine article, 50 percent of the instruction focuses on teaching children "behavior to look good." ABA is not a medical treatment, as its advocates often claim; rather, it is a form of cultural indoctrination. After many years of intensive drilling in how to suppress their socially unacceptable real selves, some children, as discussed by Joseph and Not Mercury, will become so thoroughly assimilated into mainstream society that they ask to be "undiagnosed." Parents and psychologists often are happy to oblige.

Even more disturbing, as large numbers of autistics have had to suppress their natural behaviors, many people have become convinced that autistics never even existed. When the vast majority of autistic adults are "in the closet" for fear of being considered abnormal, it's not hard to convince people that there are no autistic adults; after all, that accords with what they see when they go about their daily business. Although scientific studies have clearly shown otherwise, the idea that autistic children suddenly appeared in the past few years perfectly suits the agendas of the epidemic-mongers who are raking in the profits from today's mass hysteria about autism. Once again, it's a "looping effect," and one that is quite likely to make the worldwide disappearance of a minority group—in what would be the largest genocide in history—go almost entirely unnoticed.

Identifying the Problem

A behavior analyst got my goat.



I was reading another ugly, stereotyped article about autism recently. (Although I usually don't link to ignorant scare stories, I've made an exception here because several people provided excellent pro-neurodiversity responses.) One of the commenters in the enemy camp, who signed as Behavior Analyst, claimed to have worked with autistics for over 20 years but allegedly never had seen the words Aspies and Auties.

This person made the preposterous assertion that the neurodiversity activists were the ones doing the stereotyping by "identify(ing) themselves as their disorder," unlike the understanding, caring psychologists who supposedly view each individual as unique. Jeez, if I could mine that mountain of shit and sell it as fertilizer, I'd be a millionaire in no time.

I very much doubt that anything I have to say to you will get through your thick prejudiced skull, Behavior Analyst, but here goes anyway: None of us in the autistic civil rights movement "identify as a disorder." Rather, we see ourselves as capable, intelligent, healthy human beings whose brain structure developed in the way that nature intended. You and your accomplices in psycho-bigotry are the ones who can't look at a genetic difference without labeling it as a disorder. It's no wonder you're so afraid of us: We threaten your livelihood. As soon as autistic people are accepted and respected as a social minority group, you'll be out of business.

But you know what, we didn't all just wake up one morning and arbitrarily decide, "Oh well, I'm bored with watching trains, maybe it would be fun to turn into a militant activist." To the contrary, we were quietly going about our ordinary lives when war was declared on us without provocation (the so-called war on autism) and we had no choice but to defend ourselves. In today's world, autistic children are abused, bullied, treated as damaged goods, targeted by quack-cure peddlers, and put into segregated classrooms every day because of prejudice. Autistic job applicants are rejected and left to struggle with unemployment every day because of prejudice. Our very existence is described as a plague and an epidemic every day because of prejudice. Our tax money is being used (in the US, by a purportedly pro-life government) to fund eugenics research to exterminate the autistic population through prenatal testing and routine abortion. And who is responsible for the prejudice that has put us on the brink of the largest genocide in history, Behavior Analyst? Go look in a mirror.

No doubt you and all your behaviorist pals thought you had a great business model, terrorizing ignorant parents into believing that their children would end up as helpless zombies in institutions if the parents didn't immediately empty out their bank accounts to pay for your services. But you incited fear and hysteria all too well, and now those chickens are coming home to roost—great big squawking murderous chickens, a whole flock of 'em. And what they're saying is that autistic children are too expensive, too different, too much trouble to raise, not cost-effective, better off dead, Lebensunwerten Lebens. It's Nazi-style eugenics all over again.

This is the bottom line, Behavior Analyst: Unless you have a hefty retirement fund, you had better start retraining for another career, because one of two things is going to happen in the next decade. Either there will be no more autistic children because they will all be aborted, or the neurodiversity activists will succeed in persuading society to accept autistic differences in the same way that the natural genetic differences of other minority groups have been accepted. In either case, there will be no more demand for your services. To put it another way, you don't have much longer to enjoy the gravy train, buddy.

Attack of the Brain Snatchers

A fearsome epidemic swept the land, seizing the brains of defenseless young people in its merciless grip. Terrified parents wondered if their child would be next. There was no way to predict who would fall victim to this horrible plague, which transformed previously normal youths into mindless empty shells who did little but repeat meaningless words all day.

This devastating affliction had no cure, but some parents turned in desperation to the enterprising providers of a behavioral treatment that was said to restore the normal functioning of victims' brains. Although these intensive behavioral sessions were very expensive and were traumatic to the young people who were forced to undergo them, some parents nevertheless spent their savings in the hope of rescuing their children from the hideous depths of the catastrophic abyss into which they had fallen.

What might this awful tragedy have been? You probably wouldn't have guessed "religious conversion," but in the 1970s, there was a mass hysteria in the United States about the danger to naïve college students and other young adults from religious cults such as the Hare Krishnas and Reverend Moon's Unification Church. These cults were said to have a sinister plot to brainwash young people, rendering them incapable of rational thought and turning them into zombie-slaves who chanted mindlessly in airports all day long. Sensational media coverage declared the cults to be a terrifying danger to America's youth.

Some parents sought to recover their adult children from religious cults by hiring practitioners of deprogramming, which generally consisted of grabbing recent converts off the street and whisking them away to isolated locations where they could be "persuaded," with verbal and physical abuse, sleep deprivation, etc., to renounce their new beliefs. The deprogrammers, some of whom gave interviews to the media, were often very personable and convincing individuals who represented their services as a form of behavioral therapy that was reasonable and necessary under the circumstances.

Deprogramming eventually lost its appeal after many of its practitioners ended up in prison for kidnapping and other felonies. But even as they were led from the courtroom in handcuffs, there were some who still believed that they had provided a valuable service by helping young victims of cults to become indistinguishable from their peers.