silversarcasm:

orangememesicle:

Lovaas literally didn’t see autistic people as human. Tell me again about the respect this man had for disabled people. Tell me he saw autistic people as humans and just wanted to help us live “in the real world”.

This is the therapist who created ABA. This is the therapy people are defending. If you are an “autism parent” who defends ABA, I suggest you read this passage and listen to autistic people when we say ABA is abusive and dehumanizing.

[Image: Text from what seems to be an e-book, a paragraph is highlighted in yellow and reads:

“He explained to Psychology Today, “You see, you start pretty much from scratch with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense - they have hair, a nose and a mouth - but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way of looking at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.”]