Applied parental ideals?

I found Tannice Pendegrass's talk on autism treatments, at Skeptics on the Fringe yesterday, very sketchy and full of gaps.

Yes she did some important good by itemising the serious harm that can be done by hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) treatment, chelation and names of 4 kids apparently killed by heart failiure or lack of substances resulting from treatments that come from speculative theories of autism's causes that there is no proven evidence for. But when she mentioned the MMR issue she said no more than, this should not be mentioned in an autism talk at all, and moved on - Then in her summing up at the end told folks to help by passing on the news that there is no MMR autism issue as if they had heard actual evidence on it! Several other times with proposed physical causes of autism she just declared they are wrong without going into any details of why.

This approach seems completely wrong for a talk on evidence based scepticism! It seemed to say that the folks she was talking about had an obligation to support their statements with evidence but she had not. But this was likely to go down well with a Skeptics on the Fringe audience and slip by totally unnoticed by them: because, as I and another Elas member have both noticed, this is exactly the same approach as they take towards the paranormal all the time.

Skeptics on the Fringe is a now annual season by the local humanists, held to broadcast their opposition to religion and the paranormal. It sounds quite odd for a talk on autism to feature in that at all. The reason was to show how broad a reach the principle of scepticism has, by featuring scepticism towards quack cures. It is certainly a good message that the evidence for all proposed treatments should be questioned with a presupposition of scepticism, the onus put on the treaters to prove their case. That they not be taken on trust as experts will be familiar to all survivors of arrogance from child psychiatry.

But this whole scene of hardline opponents of religion and the paranormal is a scene with a big ego investment in pushing its own predetermined view, a doctrine, hence exactly like religion would do. If you attend much of Skeptics on the Fringe with a genuinely 2-way open mind, or if you scrutinise the frantic biased rantings in Carl Sagan's later writings, including his shocking wriggle "There are no authorities, only experts," or if you consider whether Richard Dawkins's call for everyone who has seen a ghost to be "gently pointed towards the nearest psychiatrist" is compatible with civil liberty over religion: you can easily notice their sceptical approach is one-sided. They do not apply it even handedly nor believe they need to. Folks who hold the beliefs they oppose, they hold responsible to jump through every possible hoop of evidence and proof, while too often any voice on the disbelieving side they generously and keenly accept on trust as expert, then actually cite their expert opinion as an argument! No surprise then, when the same one-sided accepting as expert with little scrutiny what a voice in sympathy with them says, happens in an entirely secular topic of medicine too. It happened at Pendegrass's talk.

She is a defender of Applied Behaviour Analysis, and she sanitised it by saying it is used with small kids and with more severe deficits of functioning - implying it is only used with them, and only used to find ways out of actual inabilities to function. She did not all discuss it getting used to change behaviours and social choices, to say stop doing this do that instead, in kids who certainly can function.

I got a question in at the end, on the objections I have heard raised from experience, to ABA, for being used for social control like this with older and more functionally able youth, even adults. I have come across such very credible objections, that match all we know of child psychiatry's own behaviour, in the online community. I asked Pendegrass what safeguards there are or there should be, to prevent ABA being used to force a patient into an ideal normal personality decided for them, to take away their own lifestyle choices.

I did not get a straight answer, not any answer about safeguards at all. All the answer given was, it's not about taking away folks' character, oh I have never come across it being used to make all folk's choices for them, and that in the Analysis part of it there is a 2 way discussion of the results a behaviour has, to work out whether they are good or bad. But all that is just defensive talk keeping it sounding right, relying on an appeal for trust, it is not actual safeguards. She said something else that quite gave the game away and points against giving ABA that trust: she said it is about "helping them not to end up ostracising themselves."

All ostracising is a hate crime and instrument of group tyranny over personal lifestyle choices, it is there to be resisted and defied. The entire idea of "ostracising yourself" is about blaming the victim. It is the worst of all ways of saying, conform and be normal or else suffer oppression in society. It is a way of saying the oppression is the victim's fault because they have not chosen to avert it by bowing to the crushing communism of peer groups and giving up all their own distinctive personality. Everyone who belongs to one of the many minorities with histories of unpopularity and persecution will spot a mile off that doctors can tell you, stop being what you are and become what the tabloid mob tell you or else you are "ostracising yourself". The entire idea "ostracising yourself" is a blank cheque invitation for that crushing level of control, for ordering you to make choices that don't work for you, e.g. to obey dress norms that are physically wrong for your body's sensitivities, with the added misery of seeing anyone else succeed in not obeying them.

I put this point of unpopular minorities and the wrongness of forced norms straight back to her, and all she did then was revert to taking about severely affected small kids who were not the point of my question: she said surely it can't be wrong to help a kid who just suits staring at a light all day to function more effectively than that. This was dodging the question. But at this point another of the audience threw in a point on her side, said all parents and folks working with kids are trying to bring them up in a certain way, which means directing their characters, and Pendegrass grabbed this gratefully, said "That's a really good point".

Then, as too often happens under the time pressure of such events, that was the end of the time slot for this question. No chance to come back and challenge the oppression these 2 folks were both defending, and for that to go unchellenged is particularly striking in the setting of Skeptics on the Fringe. ABA was blatantly not given the same level of questioning as as the more physically medical quack cures were. Oddly that is even though Pendegrass admitted ABA is often offered at rip-off prices of several thousand pounds, and when one of her pieces of moral shock info against the quack cures had been the costs they are sold at.

On bringing up kids in character directed ways: the whole point of sceptics and humanists is they are supposed to expose that as the evil oppression and life destruction it is, because often the controlling ideals of parents or teachers come from religion and are about making the kid follow that religion. We have in Elas a member done a lot of life damage to in exactly that way by a too fervently Christian parent. Are the sceptics and humanists going to defend that type of parenting? It would startle all their supporters if they did, it would contradict their fight against religion in schools, a fight that liberally religious folks like me agree with totally. But otherwise, they should have challenged that audience speaker who favoured controlling agendas towards kids, and they have a duty of scepticism towards ABA until they obtain a satisfaction on that point that was was not obtained at that talk yesterday.

Maurice Frank