Today’s episode critiques the Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) industry, particularly in autism treatment, framing its current struggles as an inevitable collapse of a “control economy.” The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that ABA transformed into a profit-driven market focused on billable hours and compliance metrics, exemplified by the layoffs at Arizona Autism and the reclassification of workers as contractors, which is described as the “Uberisation of autism.” A key fault line highlighted is the use of ABA-Verbal Behaviour (ABA-VB) to bill for communication services without proper Speech-Language Pathologist credentials, a practice now under intense scrutiny by auditors, leading to funding cuts and corporate retrenchment. Ultimately, she suggests that this systemic failure is epistemic and moral, not just financial, clearing the way for relational, meaning-based forms of care that operate outside the market-driven “empire of metrics.”

Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/when-compliance-becomes-unsustainable

Let me know what you think.

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