The most telling line in Ellenby's piece may be one in which she describes her son, having lost the pitched battle, sitting quietly in the auditorium. In these “precious moments,” she writes, he “is indistinguishable from his peers.” It is a direct echo of a notorious claim made by the psychologist credited with inventing applied behavior analysis (ABA), Ole Ivar Lovaas: in a 1987 article, he wrote that nearly half the children treated with his version of ABA became, according to their teachers, “indistinguishable from their normal friends.” … This is a terribly painful message to send to young people whose minds are different: that their very existence is a problem for others to solve, a disorder to cure, or at least to hide. Having a child who does not fit conventional definitions of normalcy, who is distinguishable from their peers, can be an extraordinary gift.

XREF: Connects to critical discourse on ABA therapy and the neurodiversity movement, similar to arguments in autistic self-advocacy literature. QUESTION: Worth investigating the empirical outcomes of ABA and whether the 'indistinguishable from peers' framing persists in modern therapy practice.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 655