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Neurodiversity News
“It’s astounding to me that you can become a multimillionaire behaviorist.” That is Dr. Paul A. Dores, a psychologist and behavior analyst in practice for 50 years, answering my further query. Dores worked as a behaviorist for many years in Massachusetts, concerning himself with ethics, before moving his practice to California. He points an accusing finger at a misalignment between the mechanisms of payment and treatment. “In the autism field,” he told me, “the people who are paying the money are separated from the people evaluating the results, and the ones connected to the results don’t always know good results from bad results. And so the feedback loop that would normally tell you, if you are bad at what you do, you should be out of business—that’s broken. There’s not enough accountability, and there’s more work than there are people to do it, and as a result we have a lot of really bad behavior analysis that’s going on while the people doing it are getting rich.” Dores sprinkled phrases such as “honey pot” and “gold rush” into our conversation. From his perspective, “it’s become the case that the single most reliable way to make money in the human services field beyond being a physician is to work in autism.”
“As a rule, the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. And they often end up being less successful at a task they're completing than are people who weren't offered any reward for doing it. (Even more damaging, according to the research, is an arrangement where people are offered a reward for doing something well.)”
“Critics of the neurodiversity movement say it paints autism and certain other diagnoses in a positive light, when in fact they can be incredibly disabling. What that critique misses, is this: autism is a medical diagnosis bestowed by a trained clinician. There is no limit to how severe autistic disability can be.
Neurodivergence, on the other hand, is an identity a person adopts. Whether you are clinically diagnosed or you just see traits of autism or ADHD in yourself, you are free to say, “I identify as neurodivergent.” - John Elder Robinson
“Last year, the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg stood on the steps of her country’s Parliament to urge radical action on climate change. Her unusually blunt, unsparing statements quickly attracted a mass following. She argues her Asperger’s was vital to that success—that if she wasn’t “so strange,” as she once described herself to an interviewer, she “would have been stuck in this social game everyone else seems so infatuated with,” instead of telling hard truths about how much people in rich countries will need to give up to significantly cut carbon emissions.” - Connor Friedersdorf
“ Baron-Cohen mentions “social difficulties” as a disability in autism, and for many autistic people, their social struggles are indeed disabling. But that’s an incomplete picture. Some autistic people genuinely prefer their own company. Many autistic people socialize better with other autistic people than with typical peers, so perhaps we shouldn’t judge their social skills solely on their interactions with neurotypicals. And, perhaps most importantly, one of the biggest social difficulties faced by autistic people is neurotypical people’s reluctance to interact with those they perceive as “different.” That’s a social problem caused for autistic people by nonautistic people, not a social disability in autism.” - Aiyana Bailin
Ten Minutes of ADHD-ing or What a 1930s Anti-War Novel Has to do With Neurodiversity
By Joel Schwartz, Psy.D
May 17, 2019
“Without neurodivergence, we don’t have the autistic Nikola Tesla nor the ADHD Ozzy Osbourne (one of the inventors of Heavy Metal). The Neurodiversity Paradigm is in opposition to the medical model of mental illness, which posits that differences such as ADHD and autism are disorders to be gotten rid of– that they are non-disordered normal way of being and deviations from this norm are psychiatric illnesses.” - Joel Schwartz, Psy.D
“Reading the news, the prognosis for autistic adults looks like a very mixed bag. On one hand are hopeful stories about Project Search, Autism at Work, and Neurodiversity in school. Those accounts portray autistic people as loyal, kind, eager to work, and wanting to make a meaningful contribution. Employers talk about superior attention to detail and exceptional caring about quality and correctness.
Then there are the downsides. One study found that autistic people are nine times more likely to die of suicide. An autism website says 80% of autistic adults are unemployed. Autistics are far more vulnerable to diabetes, anxiety, obesity, depression and a host of other serious medical problems. Most autistic adults never get married, and if they do, it doesn’t last.” - John Elder Robinson
“Perhaps the loneliness would be endurable in a misery loves company sort of way if it were not potentially lethal. Unfortunately, as human beings - we are wired for relationship with others. We know this from infancy, and it has been demonstrated true. Deprive the youngest of humans touch, being loved and they fail to thrive, often die. Autistic persons are no different than other human persons, only in the way their minds work. Deprive autistic persons of relationships and they wither as persons.” - J. David Hall
“You see, I actually am my brain and I am autism and all my personality traits and interests come from my Autistic brain and that’s why I refer to myself as Autistic rather than trying to create some kind of artificial separation between myself and …. Myself. It makes no sense to try to separate myself from autism because I am my brain and my brain is Autistic. And my brain is beautiful and wonderful and not something I want to try to disown by using person-first language to try to create some kind of pretense that my self is not my self due to shame about my self or a false belief that being my self makes me less than a whole person.”
“The core problem with ABA is that “the focus is placed on changing behaviors to make an autistic child appear non-autistic, instead of trying to figure out why an individual is exhibiting a certain behavior,” says Reid, a young man with autism who had the therapy between ages 2 and 5. (Because of the controversial nature of ABA and to protect his privacy, he asked that his full name not be used.) The therapy was effective for Reid. In fact, it worked so well that he was mainstreamed into kindergarten without being told he had once had the diagnosis. But he was bullied and picked on in school, and always felt different from the other children for reasons he didn’t understand, until he learned in his early teens about his diagnosis. He had been taught to be ashamed of his repetitive behaviors by his therapists, and later by his parents, who he assumes just followed the experts’ advice. He never realized these were signs of his autism.” - Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn