r/ABA_Survivors

Dunno what I should make the official rule so I’m asking. Temp pin so more people see it hopefully

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Hi, I am Vanessa, a Master of Educational and Developmental Psychology student conducting a study exploring the experiences of parents whose child has received ABA. It is being supervised by Dr Nerelie Freeman at Monash University. My supervisor and I believe that lived experiences of ABA vary widely, and we are hoping to capture this through interviews with parents.

Are you interested in talking about your child’s experience of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) therapy?

We are inviting Australian parents/caregivers who have an autistic child to share their experiences of ABA therapy.

This will be done through an online interview on Zoom.

To be eligible to participate:

• Your child must be aged 10 or under
• Your child must have received ABA therapy at any time since 2021 in Australia for autism

(Note: participation is not restricted by frequency and duration of ABA therapy)

Click this link or scan the QR code to register your interest! More information about the research project can be found via the QR code.

https://preview.redd.it/6rche6vn726h1.png?width=1414&format=png&auto=webp&s=e12e3e3a7ce7e8b5265b67e225f39c9008e680a6

I found a local organization run by a moderate support needs autistic who’s previously spoken out against some shitty local places, and the place’s whole goal is to foster community and build connections for more disabled people in the area (with non-disabled people included too, but not the focus). I’m gonna learn more about the place and see if there’s any way I could volunteer or work with the guy on how to expand stuff to support more people in the area.

Besides that, I also found an actually good set of group homes with a day program that don’t seem to be abusing their staff or the people there at all, and I’m gonna reach out and see if I can volunteer there at all.

Also dunno quite how to do it since I’ve never done something like it before, but I’m gonna try making a different group for disabled people in the area as another community building thing and *hopefully* a place to share info about which therapy programs locally are shitty (since one of the non-ABA ones is even worse than the ABA place) and also generally look for support.

I’ve been losing my mind feeling useless about the fact that even in a progressive area a lot of people are being abused in the name of therapy, but I feel like I have a way I can do something tangible now

I feel like it's hard to explain to people how traumatic aba is. I've seen all types of bad things but ABA is by far the worst.

The whole environment treats you like you're retarded, it's very hard to deal with even though I'm in honors in college. Just thinking about it hurts so much. The environment itself is not the words or anything it's just so hard to explain.

When we would cry they would put you in a room and isolate you and basically trap you there. There is a paper that talks about that form of treatment towards disabled children as a violation of their rights and it really still hurts so much.

Involuntary seclusion is the one moment(s) that have been sitting with me for a while and the fact that I was tortured. It's hard to conceptualize this and deal with it.

I was forced to make eye contact and again it's very hard to explain to people why what they did is harmful and abuse. They would get me to practice it for rewards like a dog. For years after I would make people uncomfortable with eyes contact because I really looked people directly in the eyes 24/7 which is largely socially inappropriate. Ironic but I didn't know any better.

TLDR: ABA is linked with a 30% increase in mental health hospitalizations and a 32% greater frequency

I wanna find the full paper for this because I think it’d be pretty effective for at least getting people to think about how little RBTs are actually expected to know about stuff. Also because it’s a rare occurrence of ABA people recognizing a shortcoming in their own stuff