Fic: Will the cycle be unbroken

I did not manage to sign up for Past Imperfect, Future Unknown this year, but I was able to grab a pinch hit.  My plot bunny was a big one, and I only had like a week to write it, but hey, I can crank out words when I know what I'm writing, and it was a cool idea, and I love time travel, so.  Off to the races!

Aaaaaaaaand then I entered an insomnia cycle, where I get much less sleep even WITH melatonin and other sleep aids, and am just so. frakking. tired. all the time and cannot brain, because the fun thing about autism is that when I'm firing on all cylinders things are great, but it only takes one thing going sliiiiiiightly out of alignment to completely fuck me up.  And the thing is, even in that state, I can still write!  I just ... cannot edit.  So I got it all written, and turned it over to Morbane to beta, and they had some good comments, and I did make some adjustments that improved it, but even with an extra week due to not being able to find pinch hitters for some other pinch hits, I was just ... I like it, it's a good fic, but I was never able to get it quite where I wanted it.

However, my recip loved it, and I got some incredibly lovely comments, so.

Title: Will the cycle be unbroken
Author: beatrice_otter 
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Written for: facethestrange  for past_imperfect 2019
Betaed by: morbane 
Word Count: 13,966 words
Rating: General Audiences, no warnings

Summary: All this has happened before. Hera wakes up on a Cylon ship, before the Twelve Colonies are attacked

At AO3.  Tumblr. Pillowfort.



All this has happened before

 

Hera rose, sputtering and gasping, out of the goo, to the sound of an unhurried murmur speaking the orthodoxy of her childhood.

"All this has happened before."

But not to me, Hera thought, spitting foul-tasting goo out of her mouth. She had never been resurrected—had not known she had the capacity to be so. She was, after all, only half-Cylon. She had seen resurrection, through the memories her mother and her aunts and uncles shared with her through projection, but she had never experienced it.

"You were supposed to be destroyed," she told the Hybrid in the tank with her. "Did whatever Ones who survived manage to re-create the resurrection technology after all?"

 

( Read more... )

 

I am incandescently furious: ABA and "evidence"

Applied Behavioral Analysis, also known as "ABA," is the most common therapy for "treating" autism.  In the US, it is the only autism therapy that most insurance companies will pay for.

It's also pretty universally hated as abusive by those who have been unfortunate enough to have had it inflicted on them.  For those of you who don't know, it was designed by the same guy (Ivor Lovaas) who created gay conversion therapy.  He was working with two kids, one an "effeminate" boy, and one an autistic boy, trying to train them to be "normal."  The same basic reasoning and methodology are at the heart of both gay conversion therapy and ABA.  (Note the sample size he was working with, folks, that's gonna be important.)

Oh, but ABA is kinder and gentler now! its proponents say.  They don't use punishments, only rewards! as if that somehow makes it less coercive.  (And, oh, by the way, while it is true that most ABA therapists don't use punishments, there are still a ton who do, and the practice is still condoned by their professional organization.)

Most ABA professionals are absolutely unaware of how much adult autistics who have been through ABA hate and loathe it, how much trauma it causes.  But even when they are aware of it, their excuse is that it's "evidence based."  We have to do this, because it's the only thing that works!  It's the only thing that's been scientifically proven!  And I knew that part of that claim was bullshit, because there aren't any longitudinal studies of ABA (i.e. what results can you find a decade or two later); all the studies are of immediate effects.  But it's worse than I thought.

Someone just did a meta-analysis of all autism intervention therapies.  And guess what they found!  The vast majority of studies of ABA are not scientifically valid enough to be included in the study.  Either they're case studies of ONE (1) child, or the results are reported by parents and/or therapists (and such reports are NOTORIOUSLY BIASED, parents will report a child received benefit from a therapy the child never even RECEIVED).  Yeah, sure, the results reported are glowing, but the whole "study" is junk!  When you take out the junk studies, not only are there not many studies left but the results are a lot more ambiguous than ABA proponents would claim.  I knew that Lovaas' initial research had been done on only two kids, one autistic and one "effeminate" (i.e. queer), but I had assumed (silly me) that he'd followed up with larger studies once he had his methodology worked out.

And you know what?  It isn't just that the "evidence" for ABA is incredibly flimsy and their whole "but it's EVIDENCE BASED so if you don't like it you're against SCIENCE!" is bullshit.  The meta-analysis showed that when you only include studies that are based on actual scientific method and shit like that, there are two "promising" types of therapy, and ABA IS NOT ONE OF THEM.  There are two studies that, when one looks at ACTUAL evidence and not just ABA practitioners writing self-congratulatory odes about their star victi--er, sorry patient, show actual positive results.  And those two therapies are Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions and DIR/Floortime.  Neither of which, after a decade of keeping up with autism news, I had ever even heard of.

To every ABA "therapist" who's ever justified themselves by claiming to be "evidence based," FUCK YOU.

For those who want a less-academic summary of the study, that has some really choice things to say about ABA and those who practice it, Alfie Kohn has an excellent blog post about it.  Here's my favorite bit:

The uncomfortable irony is that we are apparently supposed to accept such appeals to “evidence” on faith. I have written elsewhere about how research cited in the field of education sometimes doesn’t stand up to close examination. This is particularly true of traditional practices rooted in behaviorism — not only ABA and similar interventions for children with special needs but also highly scripted direct instruction of discrete facts and skills in early childhood (and beyond) and explicit phonics-based strategies for teaching reading.⁹  You might assume that those who use the phrase “evidence-based practice” (EBP) are offering a testable claim, asserting that the practices in question are supported by good data. In reality, the phrase is more of an all-purpose honorific, wielded to silence dissent, intimidate critics, and imply that anyone who criticizes what they’re doing is rejecting science itself.¹⁰  It’s reminiscent of the way a religious leader might declare that what we’ve been told to do is “God’s will”: End of discussion.

Moreover — and it took me awhile to catch on to this — behaviorists often use “EBP” just as a shorthand for the practices they like, in contrast to the (progressive or humanistic) approaches they revile. It doesn’t matter if the evidence is actually weak or ambiguous or even if it points in the other direction. They’ll always come up with some reason to dismiss those inconvenient findings because their method is “evidence-based” by definition. (On social media and elsewhere, you can get a glimpse of how modern behaviorism resembles a religious cult, with adherents circling the wagons, trading ad hominem attacks on their critics, and testing out defensive strategies to employ when, for example, people with autism speak out about how ABA has harmed them. Or when scholarship shows just how weak the empirical case for ABA really is.)