ABA Therapy for adults

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Why don't they have it? It's supposed to work with kids, why won't it work with adults?

I'm sure they have it, I'm 21 at the moment and my parents are forcing me to get ABA therapy starting next month much to my detest. It more than
likely won't do anything for me, as I don't want any treatment anyways.

they do have it,perhaps are considered to 'mild' and 'able', to benefit.
its something have always had in residential care and had had a brutal form of ABA whilst detained in a intellectual disability acute hospital from september to end of jan.

ABA is fundamentally more objectifying---though it can be done with compassion---than people are typically comfortable being with an adult human being.

Unfortunately (in my view) children are viewed by some people as objects.

As an adult I went through Cognitive Based Therapy (CBT) for help with my autism. In a nutshell CBT is a thinking approach to life - improving one's life through insight, being shown other ways of looking at things, changing the way you think about certain things.

So, whether it be for adults or children, my problem with aba is that it does not even allow for the possibility that our ways of expressing and communicating have validity.

I don't want to make eye contact in any other manner than feels natural to me. I want to stim; it's how I release excess energy. Tough if it makes someone feel uncomfortable.

And some of the endorsing sites suggest up to 40 hours a week of this modification. That's horrible. And the use of restraints. Well if they weren't stressing the person out, maybe they wouldn't have to.

I get that you have to learn not to be rude or violent. It's part of getting along in civilization, but aba seems over the top to me.

Thanks for all the responses. Very thought provoking for me.

Because we wouldn't want to put up with it...at least I certainly wouldn't. Lol I have low enough self esteem and already feel enough like crap I certainly don't need therapy that tells me every way I express myself or do things is wrong and try to modify my behavior to more 'normal' don't need that sort of criticism I don't think.

I'm over 21, healthcare professionals keep recommending BCBA for me...just for gathering information.

I think there's an age ceiling for ABA, however that might be different depending on where you live. I was at therapy today talking about it and I heard you can only get it if you're under age 25.

^^
This

There is ABA therapy for adults. The reason why it's lacking is probably because there aren't enough services for adults on the spectrum in general. From children to adults, the therapeutic approach is different, but the mechanisms are the same.

Dr. Peter Gerhardt does a lot of work in adult ABA. Not sure what kind of services are provided under him exactly, but I went to a full-day presentation he did and I really liked his approach.

Here's a paper he co-wrote on the subject: https://www.sendspace.com/file/uddvwp
Some of the language in it bothered me but again he wasn't the only one who wrote it so maybe that's why it's like that.

I don't think ABA should be used to make people more normal, it should be used to give people the skills and the tools to function better in society. It's unfortunate that people use it to remove the most unimportant behavioural peculiarities in people. Like stimming is okay as long as it doesn't impede learning, for example. Many ABA providers would agree that a behaviour doesn't need to be removed if it's functional for the person, but some say that these behaviours are "stigmatizing" the individual and therefore should be removed. Well, they are stigmatizing because the society stigmatizes them - it's not the person's fault!

In short, ABA can be used for anything and one has to be careful as to how exactly it is being used.

It's only really worthwhile to use with someone with very limited communication. With a person who can communicate well, it's a lot more productive to actually teach them directly rather than using behaviour modification strategies. So the only adults who'd get any real benefit from ABA would be very low functioning.

MathGirl, this link is trying to make me sign up to read the article. Can you paste some of the passages? I would like to read what Dr. Gerhardt has to say.

Have you ever noticed the strange body language of performing dogs - they obviously don't have the faintest idea why they are performing their tricks, but they do it anyway. Horses doing 'dressage' look similarly confused.

I have never heard of ABA until now, so this is definitely a knee-jerk reaction - to me, ABA sounds like something out of a horror movie.

So sorry, I don't want to promote anyone's services, I just googled file hosting sites and this is the first one that came up where the upload worked.

The material is copyrighted and Dr. Gerhardt has sent it to me in a personal communication so I don't want to quote extensive chunks of it here as it will immediately show up in Google and other search engines. You are welcome to bring up short quotes for discussion but please do not copy and paste the entire paper here. Thank you.

I have uploaded the article onto my personal website and I might lock it later if it starts showing up in search engines, but I really would like you (people in this thread) to read it and see what you think. Here goes: http://bit.ly/1m9dbfe