some day i shall have a header ... not today

Having been forced to deal with them and organizations like them, I can safely say “No.”

It is obscenely worse.

You see, any idiot can look at things like “we need a cure” and their anti-vaccination advocacy and realize how ridiculously stupid that it. 

But that’s not what they sell to children’s hospitals. Instead, they push extremely unconventional medications to “help” autistic children (usually by sedating them into a catatonic state). I mentioned earlier that Risperidol eases overstimulation, but Autism Speaks doesn’t like Risperidol because it’s not controlling enough.

Autism Speaks absolutely loves “treatments” and “counselling” based around controlling everything autistic children do. Stimming, self-coping mechanisms, even strange and oddball quirks like kids who wear gloves everywhere, all of these are taken from them and doled out as privileges. It’s all about turning anything an autistic child likes into something they can control.

They treat these children like fucking animals and really enjoy forced isolation as a punishment. The IWK has several “Secure Isolation Rooms” that they will place autistic children in their care into for hours at a time unsupervised when they start acting out. And not “having a meltdown and might accidentally hurt someone” kind of acting out, even just mouthing off or getting lippy with a nurse.

I am personally convinced that the whole “cure” motto is a sham, because studies into Autism long ago disproved the theory that it was something that needed curing. Autism Speaks behaves more like a eugenics organization. And they are slippery bastards about it too. 

I’ve had the displeasure of having to interact with them directly because they have such a stranglehold on Nova Scotia’s youth mental health that any counseling group inevitably gets calls from them. Speaking to them and hearing the tone with which they spoke about these poor kids made my fucking skin crawl.

If you’re an autistic child and they’re talking to your parents or counselor about you, they won’t even use your name. The Child, The Patient, and The Boy/Girl are all common ways to refer to these kids. On several occasions they’ve referred to some kid as “it.”

I’ve said before that Tumblr especially doesn’t quit know what Autism Speaks is, and that’s because their public persona is very carefully crafted. Their reputation is so cartoonish that doctors who don’t know better won’t believe it, and so they swoop in with a lot of pretty language and faux-politeness. The skeezy, contemptuous way they behave when they think they’re doing business is enough to make you fucking vomit.

You quickly learn why so many hospitals willingly work with them. They are very good at getting their claws into health care organizations because they have this almost sinister “Friendliness” to them, and when you combine this with the fact that a lot of child psychologists have absolutely no concern for the actual well-being of children (just making the parents happy so they continue footing the bill) you have a recipe for a truly horrifying experience.

I can’t fully articulate just how sickening they are. Take however bad you THINK they are, multiply it by a hundred, and then think about how Quentin Tarantino would inflate that to make a movie out of it.

That’s how fucking gross and vile they really are when they think nobody is watching.

Oh, and speaking of foul friendliness, the person who founded the clicker training business, Karen Pryor, does the same thing - she acts super-friendly and makes all clicker training sound like fun-fun-fun, making sure to cite some of the few areas in which clicker training actually works as a great tool as some of her prime examples, yet in her book Don’t Shoot the Dog, she advocates being super manipulative and passive-aggressive and she assures us that clicker training is never dehumanizing, even when it’s used to “manage” autistic behavior as if the autistic person is a wild animal who needs to be controlled, which is a dehumanizing goal any way you slice it, no matter how “fun” the training is (and perhaps especially when it’s “fun”, given how many disabled people, including me at times, have had occasion to distrust any assurances from adults that certain toxic things they did to us were “fun”, or to feel guilty when we didn’t find those things as “fun” as we were supposed to). And incidentally, she apparently lumps wildlife rehabilitation in with zoo training, which says that for those she doesn’t see as human, she sees no reason why you can’t teach someone to live independently (which is what wildlife rehabilitation training is for) using methods that are designed to make you easy to control. and if she can’t see that in that area, you can bet she feels the same way about autistic people, that it’s totally okay to use methods designed to control them, believing that that sort of teaching will somehow magically translate to them knowing how to live independently and/or autonomously and gleaning that from methods designed to get them to be dependent and lacking in autonomy.

China: we built multiple hospitals in just a couple of days, now have more cured cases than active cases, and our response has been praised by the World Health Organization

Cuba: we invented the medicine being used to fight coronavirus in like a week, have tons of testing kits on standby and have been giving them to other countries, and that damn virus won't even dare show its face in our country

Vietnam: we've isolated sick neighborhoods and made sure everyone who might be infected has free healthcare, housing, and food while they're in quarantine. Our response has been praised by the WHO. We also invented our own testing kits.

Sometimes stimming is “ugly” and “annoying” and “weird”. Often stimming is inconvenient for neurotypicals, and makes them uncomfortable.

Sometime stimming is chewing on something you’re holding so much that you drool on your hand. Sometimes stimming is rocking back and forth and flapping your hands. Sometimes stimming is making noises, with your mouth or your hands or any other thing. Sometimes stimming is hitting yourself or pulling your hair or biting yourself.

1. absolutely nothing in the entire game requires dexterity or quick reaction time. you can beat the game with no problems even if you have the reaction time of a shuckle

2. game mechanics based on categorization, things placed neatly into categories that are easy to memorize

3. there are multiplayer elements but the game itself? completely single player. no social interaction required to enjoy the hell out of this game

4. you are not only encouraged but expected to have empathy for and form an attachment to these virtual creatures that do not actually exist, which is very easy for an autistic person with hyperempathy to do

pink + lavender

To the autistics who cry over “little things”

To the autistics who get so happy they flap and bounce and squee

To the autistics who have to work so hard to control their anger or who can’t

To the autistics who don’t know what they’re feeling but feel it strongly

To the autistics who have panic attacks easily

To the autistics who are “over emotional”, “too sensitive”, “weird”, or “irrational”

You experience the world intensely and the ways you react to that are valid. There’s nothing wrong with reacting to emotions as long as you don’t hurt others. You are not too sensitive or too emotional, you are exactly as you should be and that is valid and that is good.

Live authentically

Live radically

So much of this is appalling nonsense

“correct source of stimulus control” you mean he finally figured out what you wanted from him? Water, water park are completely accurate a plausible responses to that photo! How’s he supposed to know what you want? Has this child developed their knowledge about swimming pools through this? No, he clearly knows what one is and is able to talk about it (it’s wet, you go swimming in it, you need a bathing suit) he’s just finally figured out what you want. This is a WASTE OF TIME! 

challenging assumptions more like declaring random shit and claiming that anyone who disagrees is not using evidence

“core vocabulary” by the way, means words that aren’t nouns, basically. Words like stop and no, and, go/going, to, because, etc. This isn’t how the burden of evidence works! if you think autistic people develop language in a way that doesn’t involve core language, present your fucking evidence. Especially if you’re proposing teaching language (via AAC, ususally) by denying a child acess to key elements of language. What the fuck.

You shouldn’t need evidence that it “increases language exponentially” to realise that learning the most common words in the english language is important!

Not just arguing that trauma from ABA is rare, arguing that if it caused trauma, it wasn’t ABA, because it’s somehow impossible for ABA to cause trauma? This is patronising as shit, and please remember that there’s now a study showing that children exposed to ABA are traumatised by it.

“more importantly” it’s what parents want? No, the evidence base is much more important that what parents want. Not as important as considering the best interests of the child, but jesus

….

How is that not compliance training?

You guess they don’t have acredditations? Really? That’s not taking our complaints about ABA in general as implemented by qualified pracitioners seriously. It’s a reductionist approach that ignores autistic distress. It’s a fundamental problem with the method, not the method being done wrong.

PTSD and prompt dependance are serious side effects. Autistic people have been shouting about this for years, and the ABA establishment has not:

taken us seriously

issued guidlines and advice on avoiding causing trauma

included anything about the best interests of the child in their ethical guidlines

changed their methods

stopped giving children electric shocks as punishment (google the judge rotenburg center) and inviting the people who do that to present and conferences

Children can learn appropriate behaviors other ways, ways that don’t cause PTSD and prompt dependence.

More bullshit. Honestly if you’re teaching kids the difference between animals you need a) a variety of stimuli and b) stimuli that aren’t shit.

I’m sorry, but that looks like a fucking bear. Yes, it’s got spots, but it looks like a bear. How is a kid supposed to know that spotted bears don’t exist?

Have they learnt how to tell a bear from a cheetah? Or have they learnt that you’ve decided this toy is a cheetah?

What skill does this teach? It’s so useless.

-It’s incredibly normal for small children to mix up animals. For everything furry with four legs to be a “dog,” for example.

-And we address that by TEACHING them the difference between dogs and bears and cheetahs.

That’s…not a behavioral problem that requires dozens of hours per week of highly coercive therapy to address.

-That toy doesn’t look like any real animal. I mean it’s more bear-shaped than cheetah-shaped, but it doesn’t really look like a real animal that I know of. It kind of looks like a puppy?