I'm going to discuss Amy Wetherby's talk last month at the Atlanta Autism Consortium. But before I do, I need to touch on the subject of female genital mutilation.
Specifically female circumcision.
Female circumcision is the removal of a girl's (and I say "girl" because it is usually performed on children) outer sexual organs including, but not limited to, the clitoris. This procedure is performed primarily in certain Islamic and African societies. By removing the primary source of physical sexual pleasure, the parents and religious leaders who engage in and sanction this practice hope that the girl will have less incentive to follow their physical desires and engage in sexual activity which would bring shame to their families. Of course this is an issue that that can be looked at from many angles but for the purposes of what is to follow let's understand the essence of what female circumcision is. It is parents, in collusion with enabling authority, and justified by ideology, attempting to suppress the natural inclinations of a child so that that child will be more likely to behave in a culturally prescribed manner. The child, for her own good, cannot be left to lure of her own essential nature.
Now, hold that thought.
Amy Wetherby is on the faculty of Florida State University where she is associated with something called the First Words Project, which is, as the name might suggest, another attempt to push the "diagnosis" of autism to a still ever-younger age. What Wetherby is currently working on is a test that would allow a "diagnosis" of autism straight down to the toddler level.
Starting off her talk, Wetherby put on an impressive demonstration of her own compete intellectual mediocrity. Coming off as particularly overly-needy, she spent the first few minutes all but begging for someone to collaborate with her on some future project. Finally, we got down to why she was here: detecting autism is in the very young. To that end, the First Words Project has developed a questionnaire for parents, sample questions of which were presented in her power point presentation. Such as: Is the child interested in objects? Does he collect things? Blah, blah, blah.
Now this would be the point where, if I had decided to pursue my usual line of questioning, I would have popped in. One slide on the power point listed autism as consisting of entirely negative traits. One single graph used the word "deficit" at least seven times. No autistic- like trait could pass without the words "warning" or "red flag." Children who didn't get the diagnosis of autism "passed" the test.
But, it turns out, according to Wetherby, that "diagnosing" autism at 18 months is "way harder than you can imagine." To be honest, Amy Weatherby, during her talk, came across as, at least to me, borderline stupid. So I actually would have no problem imagining that almost any project that would involve a moderate level of intellectual rigor might indeed be "way hard" for someone of Ms. Wetherby's intellectual caliber.
Wetherby then proceeded to show a series of short videos of very young children seated with their mothers in clinical settings and asked the AAC audience to play, in essence, Find the Autism. As she showed each video, she would ask the audience questions like "Is there something different about this child?" and "Are we worried?" The audience, which was, to the best of my memory, about half filled with ABA and PBS clinicians, responded like they were sitting in for a taping of Oprah. Little gasps or soft cries of "He's not looking at his mother!" were elicited with each new video.
Now among the "red flags" that the spectators of these cherry-picked mini-movies were supposed to look for was, of course, meeting eye gaze, but also things like whether the child was "overly focused."
"Overly focused?"
After the meeting I asked her about this. She told me this would include a child doing the same thing over and over in an hour period of play. So, I asked if the child playing with blocks for a full hour would count as overly focused. Her reply: It depends. If the child is working on building one thing then the answer would be yes. If the same child instead spent no more then ten minutes on any individual block construction then the answer would be no. So, I guess, "over-focused" really means "focused."
One video moment that particularly stands out: a toddler sits at a table with his mother. A "researcher" (or whatever the woman in the video purports herself to be) puts a little wind-up spring-loaded toy in front of the child to walk across the table. The child reacts with delight. Next video: It's six months later. Same kid. The SAME toy is put in front of him. Rather than react with the same wonder to yesterday's news, the kid picks up the toy and brings it close to his face, seeming to, at least to my eyes, closely examine the toy's locomotion mechanism. Little gasps of horror from the audience.
At this point Gregory Abowd, sitting directly in front of me, turned back to me and noted that this kid had the makings of a future engineer. His comments happened to precisely mirror my own take on the matter. In fact, for perhaps the first time, our thinking seemed to be precisely in sync.
The two of us proceeded to push back on the interpretation that a child's display of precocious intellectual curiosity should be viewed as a "red flag" for anything. Wetherby's defense was to simply state that this sort of behavior is outside the normal "baseline" for a child in this age group.
Barbara Dunbar at this point chimed in to agree with Wetherby. The behavior displayed by the child in the video was not in accord with what a child in that age group should be doing.
Now the Floortime Atlanta website describes Barbara Dunbar as a "licensed psychologist... (who) specializes in assessment and treatment of young children with developmental and learning disorders. Her focus is on working with children with autistic spectrum disorders and their families" so I guess she knows what she's talking about.
"So," I asked her, gesturing to the child in the video, "what is he doing?"
Dunbar could only shrug that she didn't know.
She doesn't know what he's doing.
But she knows he shouldn't be doing it.
Then again, maybe, just maybe, Ms. Dunbar doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about after all.
And so it went. Wetherby noted that they tried to gauge whether the child was engaging in repetitive behavior, another "red flag." Behavior was not counted as repetitive unless they saw it three times in a row. Well, that's simply not the definition of "repetitive," an everyday word that everyday people understand. If I write a paragraph about ABA and mention "ABA" in three successive sentences that is not necessarily repetitive. If I were to thrice-use a phrase like "primal reckoning," that most certainly would be. If there's a hard yardstick for measuring an easily understood but subjectively defined word like "repetitive" I sure would like to see it. Adding an arbitrary parameter (Why three? Why not two? Or four?) in and of itself doesn't accomplish anything. In her own talk, Wetherby used the words "red flag" so many times I gave up counting and on three completely separate occasions compared autism with cancer for the purposes of making exactly the same point. Whatever else you might say about her talk, it certainly was repetitive. That doesn't make her autistic. It just demonstrates that she's a meandering and uninteresting speaker.
According to the FSU site, one of Ms. Wetherby's area of interests is "Diagnosis of language disorders." Perhaps this faculty member of the School of Communication Science and Disorders might consider seeking a grant to study tapes of her own sub-par power point presentation skills. It might be all around win-win for all concerned.
And it just kept going. If the toddler shows interest in the wobbling of a spinning plate, look out, that's a danger sign! Now I'm no child expert like Barbara Dunbar but I would argue that a wobbling spinning plate is inherently interesting. It's a process that has a beginning, a middle, and an end with myriad variations that all stay within some very confined physical parameters. And it may be the perfect introduction for a youngster to unstable systems. A toddler repeatedly spinning a plate and observing the simultaneously chaotic and systematic way that it comes to rest is probably absorbing all manner of information about how the physics of the world he finds himself in works.
Personally, I'd rather watch an hour of spinning plates wobble to their respective stops than listen to another five minutes of Wetherby's red flag bigotry. From what I gather from her presentation, it would seem that one of the primary symptoms of autistic "regression," which must be guarded against at all costs is simple intellectual curiosity about how things work. Well, it's easy to see how Amy Wetherby could engage in such a pathologicalization since, as demonstrated by the parade of speakers to come through the AAC, curiosity is clearly outside the "baseline" of the average behaviorist and their assorted allies.
In the end, Amy Wetherby does what she can, for a buck, to suppress the natural inclinations of the child so that he or she will be more likely to behave in a more culturally prescribed manner. For their own good, Amy Wetherby and her kind cannot leave these children to the lure of their own essential nature.
One may argue about exactly how slicing a young girl's clitoris off morally compares with the targeting and deliberate squashing of a young's boy's budding intellectual focus and natural curiosity about how the world works. But I think its fair say that those engaged in either practice are engaged in variations of the same tyrannical theme.
Simply put, they are both monsters.
Walt Guthrie
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