Nature’s Answer to Over-conformity
Like a great many autistic people, I do not support autism organizations that promote ABA or PBS. Organizations that promote them are not allies. Orgs that promote behaviorism don't have autistic people in charge.
PBS in schools is a warning sign to us.
We really don't like behaviorism. Really, really, really don't like it. One more really for the rule of threes and to emphasize just how really we're talking. I want you to appreciate how ethically yuck and fundamentally misguided it is to so many of us. It's a crude tool. R. still talks about the public, color-coded behaviorism during his time at DSISD. Doing that to kids is wrong, especially autistic kids. We are intensely private. Public color coding was a constant source of stress and shame. Shame is not a weapon. Behaviorism too often forgets that.
This is why we autistics burnout. Opportunity but not pressure is the approach to take with us. Informed consent is the approach to take, as R.’s nurses came to understand when they saw how agreeable he was when they patiently and honestly answered his questions, told him what they were doing each step of the way, and asked his consent each time before touching him. Build trust. Behaviorism destroys trust. The relationship is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest. This grates against autistic ethics.
Neurodiversity and autism communities struggle with accommodating narcissists. We want neurodiversity to be an umbrella for everyone, but narcissists and autistic people are at ends. Autistic people are vulnerable to narcissists, especially when young.
Behaviorism has the methods and mindset of narcissists. We're training teachers to trigger ethical revulsion in autistic people. We're training people to destroy trust. Behaviorist personalities are dangerous.
Learn how to communicate with us. Behaviorism ain’t it. “The autistic mind is motivated by understanding how some aspects of the world work, whereas the neurotypical mind is significantly motivated by compliance with cultural expectations.” “A lot of the misunderstandings and frustrations in collaboration between autists and neurotypical people can be explained in terms of different conceptions of acceptance, truth, and recognition.”
Demand Avoidance is much discussed right now as autistic people grapple against the priorities of private equity and rich parents who want to scientifically validate their “Not like my child” mindset.There's a lot of money that wants to subtype and commodify autism into subtypes like PDA. Their priorities are not ours. Some autistic autism researchers have rebranded Pathological Demand Avoidance to Rational Demand Avoidance. We tend to be wired for anti-authoritarianism and avoid wielding power over others (Robert Mercer not withstanding, if he is indeed one of us). We're nature's answer to over-conformity. It's our contribution to the conscience of the species. DA is part (along with the sensitively tuned sensory and perceptive bits) of what makes us canaries.
The folks most sensitive and vulnerable to manipulation and coercion are the ones who are the most pathologized and coerced. Industries are erupting around what amounts to autistic conversion therapy. This is of existential importance to autistic communities.
Please note that behaviorism and ABA have money and marketing behind them at the time of anti-semitic white supremacist violence stirred by our own President, massive voter suppression, kids being put in cages and adopted away from their families (a form of genocide Native Americans know a lot about), and other fascism sign posts. Trump calls autism an epidemic and promotes anti-vaccine conspiracies. He resurrected the career of the disgraced Andrew Wakefield. The GOP throws autistic and mentally ill people under the bus every time there's a shooting. Autistic people are hurt by all of this. We deal with it online and offline all the time.
Read NeuroTribes. Anti-semitism is cyclical. Ableism comes with it. Inna’s family has fled anti-semitism every 40 years. It's here again. Watch Stateless for a taste of what they went through and then come visit for the first hand account.
People are not pets. Behaviorism reinforces the worst of neurotypical tendencies (lying, manipulation, coercion, groupthink) at a perilous moment in time, and autistic people suffer for it most. We can't exist as ourselves in such framing.
DSISD buys into a mindset best consigned to dark and sad history. Heed Alfie Kohn. Heed Audrey Watters. Heed Bruce Levine. Neurodiversity and disability communities co-sign their narratives.
Are there any disability studies folks at DSISD? Are they involved in our communities? Do you have anyone in our spaces? If not, why not? How can we serve communities we never meet?
With WordPress, we encourage every company in the industry to contribute developer time to maintaining WordPress, both its code and community. If you're going to make a living off the community, pay your people to participate in the community.
Education and healthcare professionals making a living off of us need to be in our communities. Ignorance begets exploitation. Nothing about us, without us.
https://twitter.com/el_hetherington/status/1058811028899799041?s=21 (Thread between autism researchers)
Albemarle County Public schools in Virginia speaks identity first language. I open my IFL piece with a quote from their innovation and tech director. Albemarle connects us with their student disability advisory board. They amplify us. They're allies. Where is DSISD?
Listen to the canaries. We don't know better than the canaries, certainly not in these pendulous times that have verified everything marginalized people have been saying. The receipts are heartbreaking and staggering. We were told and warned over and over.
At least come meet us and breathe the air and learn our language so that you know which vocabulary and narratives make us cough and cringe. The price of relevance is fluency.
Want to understand autistic experience better? Here’s an insight: the way most decent, honest, rational human beings see Donald Trump and his stooges is essentially the same way I’ve always seen the vast majority of non-autistic people.
We have to learn in very painful ways what happens if we do not oppose or at least ignore demands by others who ask us to do things that are only designed to let them or others enhance their position of power.
We are very helpful if people tell us in clear language what their genuine needs are. But there are two factors that can get in the way:
Via painful application of conscious simulation powers to the social context we conclude that your perceived need is part of a social power game. In this case don’t expect us to “help”.
We are in a situation of sensory overload, or you are asking us to do something that would likely trigger sensory overload.
Source: Autistic cognition decoded for earthlings | Autistic Collaboration
Autists are like the canary in the coal mine of mainstream society. We are amongst the first who are affected by pathologically hyper-competitive cultures.
Source: What society can learn from autistic culture | Autistic Collaboration
Autistic man Freestone Wilson suggested in the 1990s that autistic people are functioning as the “miners’ canaries” of civilisation. When the air in the mine is poisoned we do not prevent canaries being born in case they suffer from the poison and upset us: we clean the air or close the mine.
Source: Discussion paper on eugenics and diversity
And, take my word on this, no one can identify and rebel against an unfair system as efficiently as a kid or adult with ID, except perhaps an autistic person. They know the system is unfair!
Source: PBIS is Broken: How Do We Fix It? - Why Haven't They Done That Yet?
'The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children's mental health'
Source: ClassDojo app takes mindfulness to scale in public education | code acts in education
We are incapable of maintaining a hidden agenda, but in certain environments sensory issues or anxiety may impact on our ability to interact or function
…The strip lights overhead, flickering constantly in pulsing waves, each one shooting through my eyes and down through my body; I can physically feel each pulse humming and vibrating…
… So we take more and more on, we allow our plates to get fuller and fuller, our anxiety heightens, our sensory processing becomes more difficult to maintain, our Executive Functioning abilities spin out of control and again this attributes to burnout. We aren’t generally terrific at juggling plates.
Jeanette Purkis, who is an Australian Autistic, an absolutely wonderful writer and a Member of my network organisation, The Autistic Cooperative, has written an excellent piece called “‘Too Nice’: Avoiding the traps of exploitation and manipulation.” In it Jeanette says:
"There is an actual concrete reason that we tend to be taken advantage of and it starts with the difference in communication between autistic people and neurotypical people. Autistic communication is generally on one level. We are honest, up front and do not often do things like manipulation and deceit. We generally do not lie although many autistic people are capable of lying if they feel the need but usually it doesn’t come naturally.
Source: Myths that help keep the autism indu$try in bu$yne$$ – Autistic Collaboration
If we were not threatening to the social order in some way, there would not be therapies designed to control how we move our bodies and communicate.
The hardest part for me was coming to realize how much the entire identification and naming of people with my neurotype was part of a tireless search to purge the Reich of all the non-compliant people. Asperger’s full name for our neurology was “autistic psychopathy” because our lower-than-neurotypical interest in social compliance was viewed as dangerous to the state. Sheffer says those identified as psychopaths were people “such as ‘asocials,’ delinquents, and vagrants” who “threatened social order.” We Autistics are still fighting lifelong battles against those who go to great lengths—sometimes abusive and deadly lengths—to force us to comply with their wish for us to not be Autistic. We still threaten social order. I opened this book thinking “history,” and closed it thinking “origins of an ongoing human crisis.”
One of the best things that could come out of this is a wake-up call, because concepts like eugenics reassert themselves in every historical era—whether it’s Nazis talking about “life unworthy of life,” geneticists in Iceland talking about “eradicating” Down syndrome through selective abortion, a presidential candidate mocking a disabled reporter from the podium while bragging about his “good genes,” or autism charities framing autism as an economic burden on society. Resisting institutionalized violence requires perpetual vigilance.
…at the same time, Asperger insisted that the non-compliance of his patients, and their tendency to rebel against authority, was at the heart of what he called “autistic intelligence,” and part of the gift they had to offer society.
Our non-compliance is not intended to be rebellious. We simply do not comply with things that harm us. But since a great number of things that harm us are not harmful to most neurotypicals, we are viewed as untamed and in need of straightening up. Sheffer writes that Dr. Asperger called this non-compliant trait malicious, mean, and uncontrollable. She notes him describing Autistic children as having a “lack of respect for authority, the altogether lack of disciplinary understanding, and unfeeling malice.” That appears to be the majority opinion of us today as well. If we were not threatening to the social order in some way, there would not be therapies designed to control how we move our bodies and communicate.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not anti-therapy. I embrace therapies that help me with some of my Autistic co-occurring conditions like circadian rhythm disruption and digestive malfunction. I welcome treatments for epilepsy-a co-occurring condition found in 25% – 30% of Autistics-because I’ve seen how much suffering epilepsy brings. My late fiancé died from SUDEP, a fatal complication of epilepsy, and before his death I watched seizures shred his attempts at living a full life. What I am against are therapies to make us stop flapping our hands or spinning in circles. I am against forbidding children to use sign language or AAC devices to communicate when speech is difficult. I am against any therapy designed to make us look “normal” or “indistinguishable from our peers.” My peers are Autistic and I am just fine with looking and sounding like them. But seeing more clearly that we have always faced the barriers we face today has stirred some pride in being part of a people who survive against the odds. Seeing non-compliance pathologized by Nazi doctors makes me proud to belong to a people who resist oppression.
It is deeply subversive to live proudly despite being living embodiments of our culture’s long standing ethical failings.
Max, for instance, based on your reading of Sheffer’s book, you said earlier, “Asperger called this non-compliant trait malicious, mean, and uncontrollable.” That’s partly true, but that’s also a result of Sheffer’s relentless cherry-picking, because at the same time, Asperger insisted that the non-compliance of his patients, and their tendency to rebel against authority, was at the heart of what he called “autistic intelligence,” and part of the gift they had to offer society.
One of my favorite anecdotes from Asperger’s thesis is when he asks an autistic boy in his clinic if he believes in God. “I don’t like to say I’m not religious,” the boy replies, “I just don’t have any proof of God.” That anecdote shows an appreciation of autistic non-compliance, which Asperger and his colleagues felt was as much a part of their patients’ autism as the challenges they faced. Asperger even anticipated in the 1970s that autistic adults who “valued their freedom” would object to behaviorist training, and that has turned out to be true.