I’m so glad you asked.
View attachment 531559
I work for a small company providing of applied behavioral analysis (ABA) services, working to build communication and advocacy skills in autistic people and the people in their support systems. Some of my adult clients received ABA services at a very young age, back when it was universally compliance-based and unethical. Parents were told the lie that “your child will never (x) without ABA” and many of them bought it.
The reality is that autistic people develop skills throughout their lives and shore up many of their previously underdeveloped areas. Many master interpersonal skills well enough to effectively be invisibly autistic, which contributes to the contradictory myth that “your child will grow out of being autisic”. It’s also why it’s so common for people to be diagnosed late in life, by which point they don’t meet diagnostic criteria. (Such kids were often labeled as stubborn, weird, stupid, defiant, [insert derogatory adjective here] for decades)
ABA mainly purports to provide a path to quicker mastery, or mastery at all, depending on what truth or lies the caregivers are told, but the compliance-based methods generate identifiable and clinically diagnosable anxiety issues. Some of my adult clients constantly ask whether they’re “being good” and confuse directives to engage in a calming activity for a punishment.
Some of them also previously had behaviors targeted for elimination that were not harmful but merely uncommon in the non-autistic population. Hand flapping, for example, is one that it often stamped out in such models when it actually serves vital sensory or motor functions.
How is this an example of an exploitative market? Well, ABA services are extremely labor intensive, creating a high demand for qualified professionals. As a result, the minimum criteria to become a Registered Behavioral Technician, or RBT, is only a high school diploma and 40 hours of training. Only 3 of these hours must be on eithics and only 1 must be on obtaining and maintaining proper supervision from Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBAs). The BCBA credential allows full rights to practice independently but is only a Masters degree equivalent.
In case you can’t tell, these qualifications are
pathetically low for somebody given such clinical responsibility, and they are dictated by the market.
The targeting of non-conforming but otherwise harmless and clinically insignificant behaviors was also borne about by perverse profit incentives in behavioral studies and clinical practice. Clients were subjected to interventions that they not only had no need for, but caused obvious psychological damage in the name of profit for the provider and for insurance companies.
Autistic people are also unemployed at a much higher rate than the population, something like 60-70%. This is much, much higher than the proportion of the autistic population who never learn skills sufficient to obtain employable qualifications, so what gives?
Much of that is due to the required interpersonal and leadership skills required to exploit the labor of autistic people being so much higher than the general population. Most people can tolerate a toxic boss (or coworkers or customers) for a while, but the widespread societal abuses perpetrated against autistic people mean that they require training, supervision, management, and leadership from
competent people for a successful outcome, and competence is not as common in the world of business as you’d probably like to think. If the markets served the people, every autistic person who wanted employment they were qualified for would get it.
So would everyone else, to be fair. But we find our job security at the mercy of prevailing economic conditions (namely the balance of the top 1%’s bank accounts).