ABA: The troubling history & legacy of autism’s most common therapy
Beginnings: From gay conversion therapy to autism treatments
The Dead Leaf butterfly (Kallima inachus) is a nymphalid butterfly found throughout Tropical Asia. With its wings closed, Kallima inachus closely resembles a dry leaf with dark veins, easily camouflaged from predators in the natural environment. The average hiker would only see what looks like an old brown leaf—or likely not even notice it--as the insect sits, frozen, on a nearby branch. But when Kallima inachus opens its wings to take flight, it reveals a pallet of dreamy, luminous blues with a broad band of vibrant yellow and black wing tips, each dotted with white spots, known as oculi.
As humans, we camouflage too. Sometimes by choice and sometimes for survival.
For decades, many autistic children in the United States and Canada have been conditioned to camouflage through a Skinnerist therapy system called Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA). ABA uses a system of rewards, punishments and repetitive drills known as discrete trial training (DTT), to gain “compliance” from autistic children, with the claim it can make autistic kids, in its founder Ole Ivor Lovaas’s words, “indistinguishable from their peers.”
Around the same time he popularized ABA in the 1970s and 1980s, Lovaas founded a similar form of therapy that he claimed could stop gay males from being gay: gay conversion therapy. While Lovaas’ method, which is not based in science, has been broadly disavowed in the context of gay men, it remains the most ubiquitous form of autism therapy in the US and Canada.
I’ve been wondering why.
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