Today’s episode explores how clinical environments and behavioural therapies can force individuals to mask their true selves to meet institutional standards. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, describes mimicking expected behaviours and speech patterns solely to secure her release from a medical setting, rather than achieving genuine healing. This personal experience serves as a critique of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), which she views as a system designed to extinguish non-compliance in favor of societal norms. By prioritising standardised output over individual internal reality, these systems may inadvertently encourage a calculated performance of wellness. Ultimately, her article examines the tension between shaping behaviour for convenience and respecting the authentic autonomy of non-speaking or neurodivergent people.

Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/non-speaking-when-speech-is-coerced

Let me know what you think.

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