This week’s guests are Betty and Colleen McCluskey. Betty is a Licensed Professional Counselor in the State of Wisconsin with a special interest in Autistic Spectrum Disorders. Colleen McCluskey is a graduate student with Asperger’s Syndrome attending the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (UWEC) and pursuing an English Master’s Degree. They join Brett to talk about autism in females, living with autism, and where research on Autism Spectrum Disorder currently stands.

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Transcript

Brett: [00:00:00] [00:00:00]My guests this week are Betty and Colleen McCluskey. Betty, you were on the show back in 2017 and we talked about autism and autism spectrum disorder. And since that time autism has become part of my life. A loved one in my life is going through the we’re learning a lot about ASD right now.

[00:00:27]So I definitely wanted to have you back and you brought your daughter Colleen with you. So I’m going to let you guys do your own intros buddy first just who you are and what you do.

[00:00:40] Betty: [00:00:40] Betty McCloskey. And I’m a clinician in private practice in Tomahawk, Wisconsin. I have a master’s. Degree in guidance and counseling and a licensed professional counselor in the state of Wisconsin since 1992, I think my journey into autism is personal and has turned professional. My husband, who is a [00:01:00] Rutgers PhD in earth, science was diagnosed with autism and our lovely daughter who’s joining us today.

[00:01:06] Colleen is also diagnosed in third grade with autism. I’m sure my cat has autism. So self-defense first off, got me really into the autism community. And the more I learned about this amazing group of people, the more I spend more time in there, I’m a member of the board of directors, of the state of Wisconsin autism society.

[00:01:30] I work with Wisconsin facets for mediated. IEP is for children who are underserved in public schools. I do all kinds of volunteer work in the community, but my passion is autism because the people I’m passionate about live there.

[00:01:45]Colleen: [00:01:45] Okay. So my name is Kelly McCluskey and I’m actually just graduating from the university of Wisconsin, Eau Claire with an English master’s degree, specifically in literary analysis and textual interpretation. That sounds like a mouthful, but [00:02:00] basically it’s a. I get paid to read about comic books.

[00:02:03] So that’s fun. No, but currently I have a BA in English from the university of Wisconsin, green Bay and associates in ethnic studies from the university of Wisconsin marathon County. I also have a teaching license earned through UWA green Bay. And like Betty said, I am autistic. I was diagnosed in third grade with Asperger’s syndrome, but as of the DSM-V Asperger’s syndrome has kind of been folded into the rest of the autistic diagnostic criteria.

[00:02:28] So I feel a little bit more comfortable just saying autism now. I consider myself a really strong advocate for people on the spectrum and people with Like sort of sister diagnoses ADHD and add tend to manifest with autism other instances of socio communicative disorders, which are basically higher than normal difficulty with neuro-typical social conventions which can be caused by just about anything, honestly.

[00:02:52]That’s very similar to so during my advocacy stuff I’ve presented at a lot of different conferences most [00:03:00] notably IWC, which is international writing center association. And that I believe was about two years ago. And I presented on how you might talk about autism in the college writing center.

[00:03:10]One of my big things is again, I’m an English major, but I also have a background in forensics and theater speaking forensics, not the crime kind. But. I think that being able to talk openly about autism and to acknowledge its existence along with any other mental health struggles, it’s like if we can acknowledge that it exists and kind of talk about it, frankly, then we’re one step closer to not just autism awareness, but autism acceptance.

[00:03:38]I’ve also presented at ASG w autism society of greater Wisconsin conference. Gosh, it’s, I think I’ve done it like probably close to five times now. Maybe more. I can’t remember. But we go every year. It’s very cool. It’s also awesome to see all of the new research and stuff that people have to talk about because it kind of keeps you on the ball with stuff like that.

[00:03:58]But yeah, that’s mostly [00:04:00] me. Apart from that, I’m really into like, drawing making art in general hiking. And my academic interests are, you are like comic books and experimental storytelling specifically, like with hypertext and stuff.

[00:04:12]Brett: [00:04:12] So, I’m curious about where autism research has gone in recent years. I’ve got a good kind of history I guess a rough background of what ASD is and how it was diagnosed, but I’m really curious about what’s fresh and new for autism research.

[00:04:29]Betty: [00:04:29] There’s not a lot, you know, there, there is a lot, there’s always something that’s new, but a lot of what we think of as new is repackaged old. And there are a lot of a lot of the newer things are based on ABA, which has been since the 1960s. Love us, L O V a S introduced us to applied behavioral analysis and it’s kind of a touchstone.

[00:04:54]There’s a lot of controversy surrounding it. And I re I was introduced to it in graduate school, of [00:05:00] course, in the early nineties. And we had what we had the, we called it the toast and jelly video because it was a little girl and they were showing us how to do applied behavioral analysis treatment.

[00:05:13] And the third, I would say, would you like some toast and jelly? And the little girl had echolalia, can we say, just repeat what they hear? And she would say, would you like some toast and jelly and therapists would be holding the toast with jelly and say, no, like some toast and jelly. And she would say, no, would you like some toast and jelly?

[00:05:32] So until she would say, I would like some toast and jelly, she couldn’t have her toast in jail. So think about Pavlov’s dogs and training them and to the bell and the food and the saliva. That’s kind of how ABA works. And while it’s very good in theory BF Skinner influenced love us to start this program.

[00:05:53] And if you remember BF Skinner with a Skinner box where he had the rats that pushed the little [00:06:00] levers, some people don’t know that BF Skinner also raised his daughter in a BF Skinner box until the age of about two and a half. Isn’t that frightening. And there are pictures. If you choose to look online, you will find BF Skinner’s daughter who spoke about it later as an adult.

[00:06:15]But let’s not go there. So what ABA does is it reinforces behavior through presence in treats and positive interaction. And there’s a lot of controversy surrounding that. So it’s morphed because we need a kinder, gentler way because ever...

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260: Autism and Women with Betty and Colleen McCluskey