Friday, October 29, 2021

"I Have Been Through This Before."

Ann Bauer, mother of an autistic son who died at 28, writes a long, heartbreaking piece about how unquestioning obedience to experts and their well-meaning hypotheses can ruin lives. A snippet, and you need to read it all.

That’s what county social workers saw when they were called to assess Andrew, following his meltdown at our public library. A tiny house, a fraying marriage, two depleted parents in cheap clothes. It was winter on the Iron Range, where advances in psychology took some time to travel. The experts—a stoic North Country man-and-woman team—decided we were the cause.

They questioned us separately and casually brought up the idea of temporary foster care. We protested and were told we could keep the boys but only if we submitted to frequent visits and attended parenting classes twice weekly, which we gladly did.

While we were being taught how to impose consequences and establish routine, Andrew and his brother were taken to a child care room where teachers helped them sing, play, and socialize. At first Andrew seemed to improve, brightening and even talking a bit, but then he regressed again, a pattern we’d see repeat on a loop for the rest of his life.

When an older relative came to visit us in spring she took one look at my 4-year-old sitting in the corner, staring at his hand. “You’ve ruined that beautiful child,” she said, her face tense with fury. “You and your careless life. Ruined him. Aren’t you ashamed?”

We eventually moved to Minneapolis, where treatments were supposedly more advanced. At 5, Andrew was diagnosed with autism and enrolled in a program that involved rocking boards, chewy toys and roughing his skin with surgical brushes three times a day.

We blamed ourselves for our son’s problems and most of the new theories did, too. His autism was because we’d had him vaccinated. Because we fed him wheat or dairy or corn. Because we hadn’t employed a team of workers to have constant “floor time” with him (the so-called Son Rise cure) or apply behavioral techniques according to the Lovaas method, beloved not only by late ’90s autism parents but also by conversion therapy folks.

Each new wave was certain: The approaches to autism that had come before were barbaric and uninformed, but this most recent breakthrough was the one clear truth. Science had spoken. Over and over for a dozen years.

We were heartbroken each time a treatment failed—and guilty because without fail, someone would insist we hadn’t tried hard enough. Sure, we’d gone gluten-free, but had we cleansed with hyperbaric oxygen? Behavioral training worked, but only if you did it 18 hours a day. Why hadn’t we taken a second mortgage and flown to the Catskills for a workshop at the Son-Rise Institute?

Just shy of his 36th birthday my then-husband gave in and began drinking in earnest. He lost his job and grew dark and silent. One day he apologized, hugged us all, got in his truck, and drove away.

Accountability is entirely absent from the assessment of our educated "gurus," the bureaucracies that enable them and their joint records of failure. Once a credentialed hero is raised on a pedestal, attempts to point out all manner of quackery--and worse--are ignored or shouted down. 

This is why my sympathy for skepticism and good people who buy into conspiracy theories never vanishes entirely. Given the bad examples of our institutions, it's understandable why people would buy in.

Thanks to Amy Welborn for the find.

4 comments:

  1. This article hit a very raw nerve. I have known some of what she has gone through, and could write and article of my own. There's too much to say in a small space like this. I also have some sympathy for the first husband who apologized, kissed his wife and family, and left. I would never do it, I could never live with myself if I did, but I understand the temptation.

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  2. A school psychologist told us both our boys were autistic. I told him he was wrong. Larry was autistic and Donnie was not. The non-autistic boy has now been practicing law for four years. In autism there are a lot of theories and little common sense.

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  3. The article was disfigured by her libel of Ofc. Chauvin.


    I think what she describes is a particularly intense manifestation of problems with psychiatry, clinical psychology, and social work over several generations. Adept at consuming time and resources. Adept at generating iatrogenic problems. Not so adept at anything else.

    Have a gander at this

    http://www.psychcrime.org/news/index.php?vd=243


    I just discovered this. Here's the kicker. He was 65 years old when hit with this sanction and had been practicing psychiatry for nearly 40 years. It occurred to me to search for him because he'd been my sister's doctor.

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  4. The pre-adoption story of our daughter could fill a small book of outrage. The foster parents we met were nice enough, but they and their hand-picked experts were just wrong. Foster mom #4 got things moving in the right direction before we came along and put the kibosh on the psycho-silly diagnoses. I think there are all sorts of "experts" in the world, and there always have been. We may have the technology of computers, mobiles, and nuclear weapons, but in the arena of human emotional health, we are not farther along than the Iron Age. I think there are people who can help to heal real ills of the mind/behavior/emotions. I suspect they are easier to find if one asks people who have been helped rather than the helpers themselves.

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Be reasonably civil. Ire alloyed with reason is fine. But slagging the host gets you the banhammer.

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