Today’s episode offers a highly critical and unapologetic rebuttal to a 2025 ASHA publication regarding Gestalt Language Processing (GLP), which the author, Jaime Hoerricks, PhD, views as a harmful repetition of old, non-autistic analytic critiques. Dr. Hoerricks argues that this professional opposition is rooted in analytic supremacy, insisting that language must be broken into parts to be valid, thereby dismissing gestalt processing as an inferior or immature form of communication. She contends that the pushback is fundamentally driven by capitalist capture, as recognising GLP threatens the revenue structures and clinical labour models of traditional speech-language pathology interventions. Further, the critique is accused of using “proximity innocence”—citing work with autistic children without integrating their actual voices—to mask its institutional power and colonial language politics. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks declares that autistic people are finished trying to reform these existing structures, instead advocating for the necessary work of building a new, neurodivergent-led field centered on multimodal communication, where lived expertise is the gold standard of evidence.

Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/when-proximity-becomes-a-weapon-why

Let me know what you think.

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