I’m sorry you had such a bad experience. ABA is just a science though, and it’s the way it’s applied that can be good or bad.

ABA should not be used to tell someone to not to like the transformers as a teenager. There are clear ethical guidelines about this. But supervision can fail, unfortunately. You could report your practitioners I suppose. But is that what actually happened? Why did they restrict you from transformer movies?

I have seen unethical practitioners that work with parents who say “this is age inappropriate, my teenager shouldn’t be watching Sesame Street anymore” and try to discourage it. But this is rare these days and the field discourages practitioners from doing this. However, depending on how old you are and where you live and just because shitty people exist this could very well be the case

But I’ll be real with you: I have seen people who are critical of ABA say things like what you said and it turns out they were not given access to their favorite movies because it was made contingent reinforcement. This is how ABA works, it is operant conditioning. But what these people are leaving out is that they were having major functional impairments that required some kind of enticement and there weren’t many things that motivated them to expend effort. They would only shower or brush their teeth once a week or less, they would not do homework ever to the point of failing classes, they would exhibit violent behavior that was dangerous to themselves or others, serious communication deficits, etc.

the way we would encourage the behaviors we needed to see more of and discourage the problematic behaviors was through reinforcement based systems. Of course, reinforcement can always feel like punishment when one fails because a true reinforcement system requires one to withhold reinforcement when necessary so the learner can conflate reinforcement with punishment pretty easily

And I would suggest maybe talking to someone about this, you’ve got a real chip on your shoulder about this. I merely asked you a sentence it and you went into a paragraph long diatribe assuming a great deal about my history. You don’t know me or my experience. You’ve clearly got some trauma, maybe it’s time to deal with that?

What do you think aba is?

This was probably all in the phrasing or maybe people just don’t understand the reality of the situation?

I worked for several years doing mobile therapy that included a significant amount of homeless outreach and crisis management. Everyone deserves to be housed, bottom line, but what it takes for that to happen is a complex situation

There’s the “xxx,xxx amount of homeless but xx,xxx,xxx amount of empty homes in america” statistic that people throw around. I forget the exact numbers but I’m pretty sure thats the scale, if not the take away is that you could literally give each homeless person a free house and still have millions of empty houses. But this would not solve homelessness, at least in the current system. The overwhelming majority would be back on the street fairly quickly. Even if you eliminate the need for mortgage there’s still the need for property taxation; if you eliminate that then communities start to get real shitty. Even if you eliminate that there’s still utility and food costs. Even if you eliminate that there’s still maintenance and not actively destroying the place.

Institutionalization isn’t necessarily the answer although in extreme cases it can be. We had supported rehabilitation programs that were pretty successful, basically apartments with staff that would keep tabs on you, help you budget, do resumes, help you get to drs appointments, make sure you took medications (but didn’t force you to unless there was a court order/probation situation and even then it wasn’t like a “force” situation although there was inherent coercion as not taking meds would be reported to po/court), apply for section 8, etc. you would stay there for a year or two and then move to a more independent placement once supports were in place.

There were also longer term programs for people who genuinely struggled and just couldn’t get that step down to work. These were similar but had less focus on connecting to services and were more akin to nursing homes with more psychiatric care

But then there were also more intensive residential programs we referred to for people with more serious mental illness or addiction issues

The issue, of course, was funding. We had like 32 beds in the short term and 11 in the long term. Funding was like 50% state funding, 20% grants, 30% donations and fundraising and the budgets were tight. Meanwhile the town probably had 30-50 actively homeless at any given point on top of whoever wasn’t in the program and another 50-100 with insecure housing. Even the intense programs, which generally had more secure state funding, still had an overall lack of beds and would have very long wait lists. Sad stuff.

That was about a decade ago now, I feel like it has to be worse now post Covid and trump. I can only imagine what the next 4 years will do to their funding