Advocating for Institutional Education?!

I want to preface this post with the general comment that the person I'm talking about in this post is actually fairly awesome when it comes to her views on autism and psychiatric disability. Especially when taken in light of her background. Nonetheless, I felt our interaction illustrated some common autism stereotypes in a rather interesting way.

Today my college hosted representatives from our graduate program to speak to undergraduate students about their programs, admittance, etc... There was a representative from Experimental, Industrial/Organisational, and Clinical. Being an undergraduate student hoping to get into grad school and also having helped set up the event, I was there. After the short introductions, of course, people were given the opportunity to ask questions.

After the event I approached the representative from the clinical program and asked her some questions pertaining to the medical model of disability and the interactionist model of disability. I got some good answers but I felt that she didn't really understand my question. Communication barrier, that's okay. What's important is the attitudes behind the language rather than whether or not a person can speak the same jargon as I can.

So I decided to apply the question in a very specific case and I proceeded to give her a kind of case study of an autistic 14 year old who's failing to make eye contact and engaging in stimming behaviour, asking her opinion on what she would do. Turns out, I got what I would consider a very positive response: She told me she would consider whether or not the behaviours were harmful to the child such as self-harm stims and then work from there to determine what function the stims served such as relaxation, communication, ect... but that she wouldn't consider such a behaviour in and of itself a problem. The stim was a tool to help the client rather than a pathology. Which is good, it's what I wanted to hear. (Yay!)

This, of course, got us talking about applied behavioural analysis, because how can you talk about stimming and clinical psychology without talking about ABA. Naturally, I criticised ABA and we got into a lively debate, which was good.

What got me was when she criticised me for taking the side of the educational industry.

To her, she assumed that I was criticising ABA from the grounds that it was too expensive and therefore a problem for limited special educational budgets. I of course told her that, no, I was not arguing against ABA because of an economic, or any other, practical stance, but that I was advocating as an autistic adult questioning the actual clinical value and ethics of the treatment.

It's nothing overt and it's certainly nothing that speaks to the representative's character or attitudes towards autistic people. But it does make a point, I feel, about the inclusion of autistic people in the discussion regarding our own care that someone would automatically jump to the conclusion that I'm arguing from a non-autistic perspective.

Of course, it very likely was just due to recency effects or any other number of factors that could have primed her to think about economics and the educational industry. It, of course, wouldn't surprise me if it was just because the self-advocacy perspective is so drowned out by other special interests in our current medical culture. Nonetheless, it's something to think about.

All of that being said: From what I have seen of the graduate clinical program at SJSU I would be very seriously considering it if my professional emphasis was more in line with the clinical bent of the degree. As it is, I'm much more interested in community organisation such as designing and operating harm-reduction programs than working as a clinical psychologist.