Parents want ban on treatment to unlearn 'autistic behaviour' - NOS

[ME/CFS Skeptic]

Thought that this article on the Dutch public broadcast was quite interesting. It is about the problems with Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) as a treatment for autism.

Here's a short quote from the (english translated) article:

"The complaints to the LBVSO showed that three quarters of the children experienced the treatment as traumatic. And that more than 90 percent of them were subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

"You are forced to suppress your own self and your own being," says Elijah Delsink, who has autism and founded the LBVSO in the NOS Radio 1 News. They take away food, the ability to go to the bathroom and comfort items from the child such as a blanket or stuffed animal. You get them back as a 'reward' if you do well according to them. It's definitely causing damage."

Professor of diversity and inclusion Sander Begeer (VU University Amsterdam) does not recommend the treatments, but thinks it is too early for a ban on ABA. He states in Trouw that these therapies must first be properly researched."​

Full article (In Dutch) here: https://nos.nl/artikel/2476389-ouders-willen-verbod-op-behandeling-om-autistisch-gedrag-af-te-leren

Does anyone know more about this?

 

[JemPD]

All i know about it is from someone i know who is a special needs teacher, & is also autistic themselves. From what i heard from them, ABA sounds really abusive to me. Its a lot of yrs since i spoke with them about it but i was appalled at the time. I think i remember its popular in the states & i sure i recall that even those devices that deliver very small electric shocks can be used. (although dont quote me on that because i not certain).

But its all with the objective of making autistic people conform to neurotypical ways of being in the world.

It sounds like pure barbarism to me. Disgusting

 

[Laurie P]

i recall that even those devices that deliver very small electric shocks can be used. (although dont quote me on that because i not certain).

Matthew Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Israel

Matthew Israel is a controversial American behavioral psychologist who is known for founding the Judge Rotenberg Center and inventing the Graduated Electronic Decelerator.[1] As a freshman in college, Israel read B. F. Skinner's novel, Walden Two, in which the heroes build a utopia by conditioning the residents of a commune through the behaviorist principles of reward and punishment.[2] Israel said that reading Walden Two was like a "religious conversion" for him. After reading the book, Israel devoted himself to making the utopia described in it a reality.[3] Israel said that the period between reading the book and his first attempts to start the utopia was a very difficult time of his life. "I thought about committing suicide," he said. "If I couldn't bring a community into existence, [in] what sense was life worth living?" Israel went on to study behaviorism under B. F. Skinner and to receive his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1960.

In 1966, Israel attended a Walden Two conference, where he shared ideas with Walden Two enthusiasts about how to start the utopia.[3] Israel created the Association of Social Design, an organization for people trying to create behaviorist communities on the principles laid out in Walden Two. In 1967 Israel tried for the first time to build a utopia modeled after Walden Two by starting a small communal house in Arlington.[4] While at the house, Israel met a 3-year-old resident whose mother allowed him to perform behavioral experiments on her. Israel learned that with the use of punishment, he could control and reshape her behavior as he desired. When his first attempt to build a utopia failed, he tried a second time. The second attempt also quickly failed. Israel believed that the reason the experiments had failed was because he had too little control over the participants, and because they all had the option to move out.

Israel then decided to build a school for people with disabilities, as he knew that he would be able to practice behaviorism on them with very few restrictions.[4] After starting the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, he gave up on further attempts to build a utopia because he was getting so much satisfaction from running the school.[4] The school has since been condemned for torture by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture.[1] In 2011, Israel was indicted on criminal charges of child endangerment, obstructing justice, and acting as an accessory after the fact. He was forced to resign his position at the JRC as part of a plea deal to avoid prosecution.[5][6]

Judge Rotenberg Educational Center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Rotenberg_Educational_Center

The Judge Rotenberg Center (founded in 1971 as the Behavior Research Institute[1]) is an institution in Canton, Massachusetts, United States, for people with developmental disabilities, emotional disorders, and autistic-like behaviors. The center has been condemned for torture by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. The JRC is known for its use of the graduated electronic decelerator (GED), a device that administers electric shocks to residents through a remote control. The device was designed by Matthew Israel, the institute's founder.[2] While the FDA issued a formal ban on the GED in 2020, the device continued to be used on some residents pending an administrative stay for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.[3] In July 2021, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FDA could not issue a "partial stay" but must issue a blanket ban or no ban at all, thus allowing the JRC to continue using the device on 55 people in the meantime.[4]

Graduated electronic decelerator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduated_electronic_decelerator

Edited to fix link.

 

[Hoopoe]

Reading that makes me think the founder of the institute doesn't spend time with his patients without a security escort.

 

[Mithriel]

Reward training maybe helps teach dogs how to behave but no amount of this sort of thing will make any difference to someone with autism. They are the way they are because their brains are different. It is just like the way ME kids were getting treated from the 1990s.

Children whose bodies were too damaged by disease were left without food because they could not walk to get it.

Some autistic children will not understand what is expected of them and ones who do will not be able to change. Why are some psychologists so sure of themselves?

Professor of diversity and inclusion Sander Begeer (VU University Amsterdam) does not recommend the treatments, but thinks it is too early for a ban on ABA. He states in Trouw that these therapies must first be properly researched."

How can you do research of a treatment that can cause damage to kids? Again it is the same thing with ME. Would any parent give consent if they were told that there was a good chance their child would be traumatised and if they did not, how could it be ethical?

 

[bobbler]

Reward training maybe helps teach dogs how to behave but no amount of this sort of thing will make any difference to someone with autism. They are the way they are because their brains are different. It is just like the way ME kids were getting treated from the 1990s.

Children whose bodies were too damaged by disease were left without food because they could not walk to get it.

Some autistic children will not understand what is expected of them and ones who do will not be able to change. Why are some psychologists so sure of themselves?



How can you do research of a treatment that can cause damage to kids? Again it is the same thing with ME. Would any parent give consent if they were told that there was a good chance their child would be traumatised and if they did not, how could it be ethical?

Your last point is really pertinent to their whole area. How is it that people sign off allowing 'research' for something that is clearly not actually a treatment. That con needs to be finally cut off at the knees. Behavioural approaches and attitudes have very limited contexts of applicability. And pretending that by combining it with some, often insidious in ideology, 'cognitive' component doesn't make it more justifiable but actually less - the whole movement should have been outlawed decades ago.

Of course it also misses the point, in treating the bit that isn't the actual issue but what said laypersons think need changing rather than actually 'helping' anyone. Hideous. Bully people for being them. For things they cannot change, to treat aspects of themselves as 'needed to be changed or gotten rid of'. Yet noone got forced to do science beforehand to justify why such things either were bad or shouldn't be accepted, nor whether they were useful and important adaptations to underlying issues anyway. Next they'll be punishing deaf people for lip-reading or not speakng properly. I do not get how we can keep allowing the existence of a subject area that is merely for allowing individuals to produce fake manifestos to try and cover-up and officialise their own issues and bigotry.

I struggle to think how, barring maybe some very small areas I struggle to imagine, any normal and kind person would want to get involved in such things it really is such an inappropriate subject matter. Which is why I keep wanting people to emphasise that the Biopsychosocial and the old nice guidelines were behavioural rather than using the psych trope. Because it is such a dirty area and ideology and because that is really what it was, with a sad little manifesto of pretend psych to claim to jusify it - that most patients and medics never actually saw or heard, were just told the lies of 'it won't harm', which was an utter lie it turns out because they never cared enough to check. But they did know enough about how important that was to put that lie in videos.

Certainly the outrages of some 60s psychology experiments were often in this area and caused huge harm, but at least back then it was without the hindsight of them being highly documented which they are now, so the idea there is no such thing as harm from 'psychology' when this is really behavioural conditioning is just hiding what should be termed maybe under criminality/personal injury/health and safety type areas in plain sight.The knowledge on things like autism means that it is possible to predict and map the harm they could cause without having to go into non-scientific inference to prove it, that would be like claiming someone being beaten up isn't proven to be damaged by it unless you've done a trial with subjective measures, when there are enough scientific observations possible to do better science than that.

But is has crept back in, particularly because some professions can't resist it. Because it seems like their easy answer for those in power to keep that and designate the powerless as 'the problem' and it surely takes a system to designate those who believe they can 'fix it out of someone' to be actually dealt with as the deluded one with some sort of complex, rather than the persons they are targeting. But it seems we've crept back into the bad old days where a bit of bad PR against said target and usage of certain power levers (like the mental health act and inferences of such things) are being used insidiously and inappropriately to 'win arguments' based on man-not-ball by removing someone's good testimony by saying their illness or behaviour means their testimony is 'less' than idiocy from someone who isn't targeted by such.

Because it never intends to even acknowledge, nevermind look at what a condition is, just bully the subject into compliance and proclaim them as broken if these strange 'normative' and often arbitrary behaviours are not heeded to, whether it is due to disability or neurodiversity or whatever it is fundamentally the definition of disability bigotry or pure intolerance. Without someone even stepping back and wondering whether what the behaviourist is trying to encourage is actually more antisocial and less logical or useful than what they are trying to extinguish - the really immoral part I find astounding.

It used to be 20yrs ago that psychology at least used to bust open that term 'normal' others wanted to use and question what that really means and whether it is healthy or good or useful - and also to note it was nearly always a facade anyway because underneath it those who pretend to norm are often the strangest of beings anyway.