A possible Autism cure that I saw on TV

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I have to weigh in on the side that says you cannot be neutral about something like this. Some things are just so offensive, that people need to speak out, and speak out clearly against them. If you see someone getting assaulted in the street, and you choose not to call for help, then I say that you share a portion of the blame. I do not think that there is any difference. This is not a gray area. It is torture, pure and simple. If it were happening to an adult it would be punished as a crime. In fact, it would probably be illegal to treat a cat or a dog in this fashion.

This is not a new idea. This has been tried before. The only thing new is the use of electricity as the instrument of torture. The traditional way of doing this has used beatings, verbal abuse, shame, and other forms of punishment. The general result is not to get an individual to conform to society. Instead, you get an individual who still does not fit in, but has to overcome the damage done by the trauma too.

It is possible to suppress some behaviors. In fact, it might, in some cases, be a good thing to train people to avoid behaviors that are socially unacceptable, but forcing people to adapt to a society that they are simply incapable of fitting into is wrong. While we are at it, why don't we punish deaf children for not listening? Why don't we punish blind children for not watching where they are going?

OMG.

That so, so closely resembles a terrible, evil psychologist I once had. He didn't do ECT, nor skin shock (although he did do behavior mod, and he did use aversives, and hypnotherapy, and other stuff). He actually told me that since the person I was was clearly not a very functional person, he was going to climb into my head, kill the person I was, build a new person, and let that new person live my life. He also said that he himself would get into my head so that he would always be able to control me if I got out of line.

(Keep in mind I had a lot of extreme cognitive issues that made it hard for me to understand that some of the things he was describing were only possible in metaphorical terms. In the same way, a boy once told me that if I broke up with him it would sever a telepathic link between us and I would go crazy or die, and I believed him too. I had no... I don't know the word for it. I struggled enough just understanding the world that I couldn't tell that things like that weren't true, not literally anyway. Many people found it easy to control me with threats like that.)

He obviously didn't succeed. But what he did do was incredibly evil and twisted and hard to even describe to someone who hasn't experienced it. It was like mind-rape of some kind. I was very heavily drugged at the time too (I was on twice the toxic dosage of one of the psych drugs he was having the psychiatrist there give me). I lived at the facility he worked at so he had access to me all the time. This was 15 years ago and I still occasionally find remnants in my head of the crap he tried to put in there.

Anyway, what it actually felt like, is as if he built a construct on top of me, buried me underneath it, and I had to watch it living my life for me until I could break free of it. I don't fully understand what he did to me. I'd often leave sessions with him confused and unaware of what happened during them. And my cognition was so screwed up from a combination of underdevelopment and heavy drugging that I really didn't know which way was up. I basically ended up performing what he wanted to see, and being trapped under the performance somehow, having real trouble exerting my genuine personality. The whole world was like a half-delirious fog, and I wasn't aware what I was doing half the time.

Worse, the damage he did to me seemed to make other predatory types (and that's what he was, he loved his position of power over others) aware of me as an easy target, so they were able to harm me in ways I couldn't have been harmed before he did this to me. It was like he ripped holes in my head, and now they could get in through those holes and hurt me. And they could spot me a mile away.

I still sometimes wonder what he did. I don't understand the mechanics of it. I just know that it has taken me a long time to throw off the conditioning. I know he was a specialist in multiple personalities during the heyday of that fad, and wonder if he was one of those therapists who created other selves in their patients on purpose. (And wonder if he used similar techniques to construct that thing inside my head that did mostly what he wanted.) Other than that, I have no idea. I know he used behaviorism, but he used a lot more than behaviorism and did things in a much less clinical way than most real behaviorists do. He really had a sadistic streak and enjoyed power and control, and I think behaviorism was only one of many means to that end for him.

By the time he was through with me, I didn't know who I was anymore. I would wake up screaming at night. I was guilt-ridden about acting the part of someone I wasn't, but felt that it was something else doing the acting, not even me.

Eventually though I learned something that he didn't want me to know. Every person is connected to reality in a certain way. The sort of mind-constructs that he built on top of me were in the part of me that was detached from reality (just about everyone has such parts, it's how the mind works). All I had to do was hold really tightly to the parts that are most connected to reality, and that other stuff just started evaporating. You can't take away that part of a person. You can only bend their mind so that it is looking away from that part and therefore unaware of it. But some part of that person will always be far more solid than all that crud such a person piles on top of them. So essentially I was there, and quite real, all along, underneath all the BS that he was piling on top of me. And that's the one thing he very much didn't want me knowing (which is why he explicitly discouraged me from things like introspection).

So I did mostly get rid of that stuff, but I really went through hell because of him. He was not able to truly do what he wanted to do to me (the "kill me and replace me inside" thing) but he was able to convince me that he had. And the whole thing you just described reminded me so much of him it was scary. I don't think about him much anymore but for a long time he basically ruled my life. And the things he did to me were completely nightmarish. So even if it's not truly possible to erase a person and replace them, it's certainly possible to royally screw someone up in the process of trying.

Absolutely not effective.

If they teach you to do something automatically under one set of circumstances, you may do that thing; but you won't know why, you won't be able to generalize to a slightly different set of circumstances, and you won't be taught the general principles behind the idea.

Kids going through ABA get problems with "prompt dependence" where they literally can't do anything unless they're told to do it. NOT a good way to learn.

You can learn small things that are always done the same way through this kind of thing--being told when you're doing it right and when you're doing it wrong--but they have to be very, very small things indeed, such as tying a set of shoelaces or writing the letter "A". They have to be very concrete. It just does not work with "fuzzy" stuff like social interaction.

NO f*****g WAY!! ! This blows my mind 50 different ways. That guy should have his license revoked.





That's a good way of describing it.

Your descriptions scare the daylights out of me. God knows there are people out there that love to play god like that. I hope if I ever run into one I am able to recognize it.

What I did was something called Floortime. It's the anti-ABA. The principle of Floortime is meeting your child where they actually are---joining them in their special interest or stim----- and using that connection with them to teach flexible skills. Conditioning is brutal and it's all about faking NT by any means necessary. Floortime isn't about learning to fake NT (or conditioning it so deep the kid doesn't realize they're faking NT until some sort of later breakdown). It's about connecting and communicating and the skills that develop once connection and communication are established.

www.autism.about.com/od/treatmentoption ... imefun.htm

I think this has come up before and posters said more or less that it just looked like a fancy name for playing with your kid. And to a certain extent it is. But it comes with guidlines for the parents that aren't intuitive, such as not trying to steer the kid away from aggression to the toys (Greenspan explains why the child sometimes needs the monster to attack Barbie). I just thought I'd throw in something I thought was a positive approach for parents to counter the truly alarming approach advocated by whoever the OP was referencing.

When I saw this, I thought I'd missed a remark in his post - but it was in his signature. Which just happens to, very neatly, sum up the effect of this "cure".

The only people who might deserve to have something like this done to them are the people who have the idea that it is all right for them to do it to someone else. And I'm not sure it would be justified even then. Even metaphorically, that is pure evil.

That's really, really awful.


Well that's good, and good to know. (The only thing worse than someone trying to 'remake' people would be for them to be able to suceed at it.)

Sometimes I wonder if there aren't a fair number of people who think/feel that way, but just aren't in a position to act on it. Sort of like how abusers commonly have an instinct to tell people they're worthless and such, to try to remake a person's image of themselves. (Ucch, horrible stuff.)

Anyway, sorry for bringing up any bad memories.


(For those who might want to look up the story of the guy I heard about his name is : Dr. Ewen Cameron. Googling that and "depatterning" ought to bring up some hits. Warning: it's graphic and awful stuff.)

Was this psychologists last name Plotkin by any chance? Because of a paperwork error, he held a friend of mine in the psych ward despite the fact that there was nothing wrong with her. Tried to force meds down her throat and said to her attempts to get a lawyer to handle her case that "it would never hold up in a court"

I did. All the hits said "brainwashing". That fits. Some really grim stuff.

This brings something else to mind for me. The goal in raising children is NOT that the behave a certain way as children. After all, they don't stay children. The ultimate goal is how they are as adults. And being able to act like a normal child because of conditioning doesn't mean one will be able to behave like a healthy functional adult.

First off, most kids are not going to be happy in an institution. By the end of the day, most want to be home with their family. So, there's strike one.
I've heard about the drug Namenda being used on kids with Asperger's, Supposedly, it helps some of them. If given the choice between this therapy and Namenda, I'd choose Namenda.
Still, it's risky, because we don't know the long term affects of the drug on the CNS. If I was given the choice not to have either one, I'd choose that. If more studies were done and I knew Namenda was safe, I might go that route, if I were a kid given control over my own destiny, which most kids aren't given.

That is a non sequitor. The idea of biofeedback is to get FEEDBACK on BIOlogical reactions so you can control them. So you see your bloodpressure and pulse so that you can do something to affect it and then gain control.






It WON'T work! ***I*** can almost PREDICT how shows will turn out, I have seen them so much. It DOESN'T help! And we WILL get a reward if we really enjoy it and react as they desire. HEY, they have been trying to do that for MILLENIA, and have FAILED! Why do you think we have wars, etc... Some poverty in areas like the US with able bodied people. The **OLD** testament says that he who is successful with small tasks shall be entrusted with bigger ones. The NEW testament says that a person shall not be a pastor if he can not control his family and treat them right. So HOW can someone believe they have a hope of making an autistic, or even aspie, person behave if they can't make a normal person behave?

To those that are atheists, etc... The Bible sometimes DOES prove things! THIS proves that it is ABSOLUTE FACT that these problems, and the idea of would should be listened to have been around for over 2010 years! SOME say that means over 7010 years(YEP, 5 THOUSAND years earlier). Don't you LOVE how in another 2000 years(assuming we live that long) someone will claim a solution that was disproven perhaps 10,000 or more years earlier? I heard this garbage over 40 years ago. It was not true then, not true 7000 years earlier, why would ANYONE feel it is true NOW!?!?!? Why don't they try a simple test. Bring REAL peace to the middle east and europe! I mean REAL peace. Perhaps NO country has ever had peace. France, Europe, Italy, Germany, Holland, Greece, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, The US, Canada, Mexico, Spanish speaking countries, Arab countries, muslim countries, africa, and Israel are just a FEW of the countries that I KNOW need help. Bring REAL peace to them and THEN we can talk!

HEY, want to know what would have helped with ME? OH, it is REALLY difficult and OFF THE WALL things! Want to HEAR?

1. Listen to and try to understand complaints, like there is too much noise, certain frequencies hurt, there is too much light, too much heat, etc....
2. BE HONEST!
3. BELIEVE the truth!
4. EXPLAIN if an infraction occurs.
5. DON'T try to trick me.
6. DON'T assume it is some manufactured belief that YOU somehow know everything about. There are times when the ONLY person in the UNIVERSE that knows about me is ME!
7. Not move me all opver the planet. I remember a time when I had a few freinds from earlier years. I started moving around the age of 7. If I hadn't, MAYBE I would have been a LOT better.

BTW if you had seen how I reacted earlier, you would NOT recognize me. Much of the stuff people perceive as bad, and I am HOLDING BACK, is because of the jerks that have treated me like that jerk said autistics should be treated. Had I been a bully earlier, I might have killed THOUSANDS! THAT is how it has affected ME!

You know, anbuend, I usually think the best idea is always to forgive whatever was done to you and go on with your life, and pray for whoever wronged you.

Right now, I think I want to advise you to track him down and kill him and I'd still call it better than he deserves.

But you shouldn't do that. You'd probably freeze on his doorstep and then he'd hurt you some more. And if you succeeded, you'd probably get in trouble and the rest of us would get a lot of bad press.

You should probably pray for him. He clearly needs it, seeing how twisted he is. Probably possessed or something. What an awful person. How come I'm having more trouble sincerely praying for him than for murderers?

Because a murderer can only kill you.

Now your talking out your butt. They condition soldiers to shoot at pop up targets so they will shoot when they see the enemy target nowhere in training did they have us shoot at targets that looked like our mothers/wives. I know you cannot be an aspie because aspies have average to above average intellignce and I do not see any sign of that in any of your posts. You really need to leave WrongPlanet all you do is rile people up and spit out false data. Please leave.