ASD is outta control and will be a meaningless diagnosis.
Not a fully thought out gripe: I feel like I'm watching ABA die... The field will become ruined, reimbursements will lower, private equity en****ification, and weak in treating autism as it continuously gives up effective behavioral interventions. ABA is emblematic of a larger issue about the USA - how to handle guilt from the past. (boo hoo someone used ABA in unethical manners). A field that was mostly male is now becoming becoming mostly female (women are much more kumbaya/less disagreeable) and they get more captured about colleges of education, which are cesspools of postmodernist thinking. Not that women in the field is a bad thing, it's just that too much of a desire for kumbaya and emotional appeasement of critical justice tends to ruin science. Remember teaching circa 1900-1970s used to be considered an honorable profession. This has mirrors in modern public education. Once the focus shifted from teaching kids to read and do math, and schools were taxed with fixing all of society's problems, schools lost the plot. DIrect instruction is still the clear winner. Once the science is over, the field is over. My god this sexist.
IF we are gonna expand trauma, more people need trauma - post traumatic growth is also a thing.
Interesting take. Here's mine:
-ASD is not THE ONLY explanation for problems in social reciprocity
-Not all differences (from societal norms) in social reciprocity is indicative of pathology
-There is probably not one thing that is "autism" that falls along a linear spectrum, but rather multiple spectrums that reflect different underlying pathologies/etiologies
-ABA has benefitted EXPONENTIALLY from the shared experiences of clients who have received ABA services in the past. The field expanded greatly with the wave of Autism insurance mandate legislations in 10-15 years ago, and we now have a very large cohort of young adults that grew up with ABA who now- to paraphrase Catherine Maurice- have a voice that we can hear. If we don't listen, we are being obstinate jerks! It makes us better clinicians when listen to our current and past clients (it also- IMHO- makes our conferences much more interesting when, instead of purely technical talks, there are many more things like panel discussions related to how we apply our technology, how we revise it- or not- based on the perspectives of client, and how we revise what we do to meet changing societal trends). Of course when you start listening to everybody, you are going to a lot of things that are extreme (or even just wrong). But you listen to that stuff in order to hear the stuff that is true or more nuanced.
-It's about time that ABA started to make the distinction between "assent" and "consent" and to operationalize assent and incorporate it into our ethics code.
-As pertains to the "guilt from our past", in ABA that past was not that long ago- things like skin shock aversives were only "officially" declared not what we do in the past few years, and the legal challenges from the side that wants to do it are still in the courts. Many practitioners still use default (e.g., non-function based) restraint and response interruption procedures to address repetitive behaviors without any concern for the adaptive, functional nature that these non-harmful behaviors serve for the individual who engages in them. Conversion therapy is barely out of our rear view mirror and many would like it to visible out the windshield. There is still often the expectation of asexuality in individuals with developmental delays, and any non-heteronormative sexuality or sexual behaviors are often seen as a secondary symptom of the DD and associated social problems, rather than just general variance in human sexuality and gender expression.
-I'd suggest being careful with statements (even sarcastically) along the lines of "boo hoo someone used ABA in an unethical manner"- MANY folks who received unethical care and were caused significant emotional or physical harm as a result are still around (and may even be here!) and this does nothing but discount their negative experiences and make them less likely to listen to anything we might say. Seriously-that's a really bad take! But who the heck am I to challenge that
-There are certainly more females than males in the direct treatment and BCBA levels of the ABA field (more specifically, the early intensive behavior intervention-EIBI- with young kids with autism field. I think this is more reflective of overall societal bias against males working with young children. I do think that that's unfortunate, as the kids (and their families) might get something different seeing some positive male role models. Conversely, this bias also limits males access to the benefits of working with younger children. In my area, the lack of non-white, Spanish speaking people in my field is- imho- more of a problem than the lack of males.
-As to your allusion that more females= "more kumbaya/less disagreeable"- assuming that you have actually observed this to be true, perhaps it's a reflection of where you are located, the females you typically encounter, or the females you pay attention to. It is not my overall impression of the women I encounter, including professionally in the context of my teaching ABA graduate courses or working with many women in ABA. I'm old enough to remember going the regional and national ABA conferences and it was largely a group of middle-aged men wearing ill fitting suits with sneakers (or as they called them "tennis shoes"), carrying around briefcases full of cumulative records. We are much better now that we have different perspectives. It's harder to manage it all (especially when it's us that really should challenge our long-held beliefs and problematic behavior), but it'd right.
-EIBI is very much a masters level dominated field, and the graduate training is often, in my humble opinion, not great and too focused on preparing students to pass the BCBA exam, rather act as a professional BCBA. High quality supervision is hard to find. There is GREAT work and research being done at the doctoral and doctoral training level, but MA level practitioners are not accessing it.
-It is F**king ridiculous that our big national ABA conference is held on Memorial Day Weekend. You miss family time, spend a holiday traveling, everything is more expensive (hotels, flights), and it's kind of disrespectful to the original intent of the holiday.
