Status Updates From Kids These Days: Understand...

Some parts are interesting and may use a line or two for an upcoming assignment paper, use for a reference on autism.

Scholarly material so far.

"Sometimes, change can be stimulated using simple, well-known remedies such as focusing on improving diet, sleep, social interaction and exercise". This is exactly what therapists do, and as therapists themselves it should not be something they keep ignoring. Perhaps it's not in bad faith, but this insistence on presenting "well-known remedies" as opposed to "therapeutic interventions" is a disservice to the book.

"Mental health professionals have looked at humans from the neck up and catalogued what is wrong with them in books like the DSM". This insidious tendency to refer to MHP, rather than differentiating between what psychiatrists (doctors who specialise in psychiatry) and therapists (experts in human behaviour who specialise in intervention) do, is getting on my nerves. Therapists DO NOT DIAGNOSE OR MEDICATE ANYONE.

While we're on it, I'd love to know exactly what the authors' work MO is if they really despise behaviourism this much, and do not perform functional analyses. How do they pinpoint what seems to be the consultant's difficulty? How do they decide whether X or W or U are appropriate interventions? Do they bother telling them what they think the issue is and how they mean to address it?

"Are there moments the disruptive student in the classroom is sitting still? Don't let those be incidental." AKA, provide positive reinforcement to strengthen this behavioural contingency. THIS IS BEHAVIOURISM, FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

"We are not very fond of the cognitive-behavioural tsunami. Our approach aims to consider the whole human, not ignoring their diet, sleep, exercise, social life, emotional world..."

One, behaviourism is NOT the same as CB. Two, exactly what do you think is what behaviourism does? It is an intrinsically holistic approach that considers ALL of these variables case by case.

"Many youth we work with are outward-looking and blame external circumstances for their condition. As we've learned (...), change must come from within." While I agree that change needs to be intrinsically motivated, I think that this paragraph misses the chance to have an actual look at the topics or instances that call for outward-looking perspectives and where to draw the line to avoid a lack of accountability.

"Asking someone to take their body out of rest and have an unpleasant experience for the health benefit is going against their evolutionary instinct." What. Just WHAT. As the authors themselves point out earlier in the book, human beings experience a basic need for physical activity that has been philogenetically pased down to us throught the ages. This claim is simply false.