Autism Treatments and Therapy

Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com, i'm a speech therapist. Today let's talk about what types of autism treatments there are or just in general for a speech delay. So obviously there's no one size fits all for. Or therapy in general. Like if someone told you that, oh, the CBT method is the best for everything, including, you know, like marriage counseling, whatever, it doesn't make sense to you, right? So it's the same for children. It depends on you, the parent and the child, your profile, how you guys work together, what's the best way? All right, and this is what I try to teach also in our online courses and agents of speech. And I'm just going to go through here. I basically use the top three that I'm going to talk about here. And I'm just going through the summary of someone, what someone wrote, and it's. I'll put the link of that journal down below. Okay. So the first way, the first approach is what we call a behavioral approaches, right? So behavioral approaches, like think ABA Applied Behavioral Therapy. It's very structured, right. In the previous video we talked about like discrete trial training. It's like block by block by block. There's an A, there's a B, there's a C. What does ABC mean? Antecedent behavioral consequence. And you see this popularized in a lot of recent modern culture. If you, you know, read the book called Atomic Habits, right? He talks about like the, the. The author, James Clear, also talks about how there is a ABC when you want to create a new habit for yourself. So this is a behavioral approach and it came from a very long time ago. You know, like Pavlov's dog ring a bell. And then the dog salvates without seeing the meat. There is some sort of conditioning going on. Okay. But at the same time, don't think of it as a way to treat animals only because we ourselves, we are always, we are slave towards a behavioral approach. Like this kind of ABC thing. Whether you like it or not, it happens to us a lot, right? Certain stimuli will help remind us or something and we will mindlessly do something. And it's, it's true. Just check our phones. Like when it buzzes, what are we going to do? We're going to pick it up, right? That's behavior approach working on us. So, yeah, behavioral approach works a lot. So what, what are the stuff that is our insight? For instance, like PECS is a behavioral approach, right. As a form of AAC discrete trial training that I talked about. Before aba. Right. Is that bigger umbrella term of which that uses these tools and these, these methods. And also speech therapy is a behavioral approach as well. Okay. We do use some of it, especially for speech training. Not really the language part. We'll talk about that later. Okay. So behavioral approach, that is the structured stuff that we use antecedent and then to treat a behavior and then provide consequences so that the behavior continues to happen. Right. So the next one is what we call developmental approaches. This is a little bit newer. Okay. So in general, just treating children and treating children on the spectrum and children that are speech and language delayed. It's a rather new industry. Okay. So developmental approaches are even a little bit newer than behavioral approaches. And what it is, is to focus on social, like the social things that go on between you and your child. So it's about how to reciprocate when a child says something or you're not trying to force a behavior out of a child. Right. You're trying to communicate during a naturalistic parent child interaction. Right. We do this a lot in speech therapy and we teach this parent child interaction. So if you like search online speech therapy, parent child interaction, you will see a lot of stuff from Haddon program, you know, the owl O W l observe. Wait, listen. Oh, yeah, I'm sure that's what it is. And then there's also like dir floor time, which is a lot more following the child's lead. Right. That's developmental approach. You're following. Following the child's lead. You're seeing how to reciprocate to their communication needs. And it's very naturalistic. You're not trying to force them to talk or tell them to talk or say, say this, say that. There's none of that. That's just following the child's lead. Right. Whereas behavior approach, the one I just told you before is more of I have this behavior in mind. I want you to say this word or I want you to use this gesture or I want you to play in this way. And I set up the task so that they will do it. Right. It's like on the spectrum, behavioral approaches are a lot more structured and then developmental approaches are a lot more. How to say a lot more naturalistic. And there's not like a clear goal that you would do. Right. So the next one is merge of both. And this is what we call naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions. Okay. Really long. So let's make it into a lot shorter, shorter word, which is ndbi. Okay. So NDBI just incorporates both. It's like the best of both worlds, basically. I didn't know I was doing this already and it was like a newer thing. I thought everyone would be like doing a mixture of both. Right. And this is actually something that if you go through the courses, you will see that this is what I'm trying to do a lot of times. I will teach a lot of behavior approaches to parents. Why? Because it's very structured. And because it's structured, it's easy for me to teach you the parent and whereas it's a lot easier for me to tell you how to structure it so that you won't fail. Right. Whereas if I'm teaching you developmental approaches, like very naturalistic stuff is very wishy washy. You don't know what's happening. Like if you see a speech therapist doing like dir floor time, you're like, what's going on? I'm paying for this. And then you feel kind of cheated. That's what happens a lot of the times. Right. So other than that, let's talk about this naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention which is right in the middle. Smackdown. Right. So it teaches how you're supposed to engage a child socially. Right. But at the same time you also have some goals in your mind. So what are some examples of this? So if you want to search more online, it's. Some of them are called Early Start Denver model. You can go check it out. Denver model? Yeah, Early Start Denver model. You can check that out. It's basically aba, but a lot more naturalistic. Yeah. There's also like enhanced milieu training or Milo training, whatever however you pronounce it. You know, like this, this kind of stuff is just basic therapy. There's just a name for it. But when you actually type it, you will see how like people will write the goals and perform it. Right. So that's why I'm telling you to go check it out if you want to. There's pivotal response treatment. Okay. There's a lot of these things and there's even one called teach, which I quite like. It's a specific classroom based program that incorporates both inside of a classroom to help child to generalize their skills inside of a classroom so that they can cope. Right. I like Teach, but it's not something that I would do. Right. A lot of stuff I talk about here is that I use it, but I. It doesn't mean that I'm inside of a particular doctrine. Right. I'm not a huge advocate for either of the methods. I just use whatever that works. That's for me, I don't know about you. Some. Some parents love to stick to one model and just say that, oh, it works for my kid. Right. Some clinicians, some teachers also do the same. They will say, oh, this really worked for our center, whatever. So I'm not here to. If you don't mind me saying this word. I'm. I'm not here to shill other types of intervention models. Right? Just use whatever works. All right. Other than that, what else are there? Sensory based interventions, which is going away from my expertise, has more to do with like helping your child to regulate their sensory profile. There might be hyper or hyper sensitive. I'm not the best person to talk about this, but I'm sure if you search online, you will know what this kind of thing is. Children on the spectrum are. Their sensory profile is very different from us, right? And so this might be like sensory integration therapy. And it can incorporate like activities like brushing, swinging, you know, using bean bags, weighted vests, you know, weighted jackets, weighted blankets, whatever. So those things are done by occupational therapists. So don't ask me these things, okay? Like, I am not a professional about this. Maybe oral sensitivity, I can make some comments, but definitely not sensory based intervention as a whole. Okay. Other than that, there are animal assisted interventions. Okay. We're going really, really crazy now. But it's, it's true that I see that especially in the west, people are using dogs, cats, or other animals as a tool for therapy. And I see it working as well. And I really think that it becomes like a motivation for, for kids. And it's half like a reward because pets are very inviting, right. They don't have any type of, you know, if you've interacted with a pet, right. With an animal, they don't really ask for anything from you. They're just there to chill out with you. Certainly that's the case for me with my cats, although they're not around right now. But yeah, I am not expert at this either. Okay. And the last one is technology based interventions, right? So you use technology like it might be a computer program or DVDs or apps, even that. This category does not include AAC, okay? It doesn't include it. And the reason why is because it's to do with a behavioral approach. Okay. Because there's a specific behavior we want them to do. Whereas, you know, like, technology based. It might be just like you right now watching this video and learning about it. That's technology based interventions for parents. Right. But for kids, I see that it will increase in the Future. As you know, speech detection becomes better. I think that, you know, a lot of speech therapy, the articulation things can be done through an app without a real life person because AI has become so good at detecting where the errors are and then providing a very good cue for them as well. But at the same time, for language, if it isn't about like social skills or some higher language functions, technology based interventions wouldn't work for younger children at this moment in time. Okay, I say this with a very huge grain of Himalayan salt, so just be careful. That's what my own opinion. All right, so out of all these approaches, ndbi, the mixture of the behavioral and the developmental, has the most support in terms of high quality research. And a lot of people will say, dude, how about aba AB has a lot of good support as well. Well, ABA isn't just a behavioral approach anymore. If you learn about it and you look at it and you actually go and see how it's done nowadays, it's very, very naturalistic. It can be very naturalistic. And that's how I learned my aba. All right, Back in the day when I started off as a junior therapist. Right? Look, it's not all clear cut. Sometimes when you say ABA or you say speech therapy, when the person does it, it's a total different thing from what you might have thought about, right? I've seen speech therapists who does stuff very like very, very, very behavioral approach. There's nothing natural about that thing, right? Whereas I've seen ABA therapists or even early intervention teachers who do a great job just like doing, just being on the mat, playing with them and also giving some like, teaching kids a lot of things through those interactions, right? Don't get messed up by the labels, right? But the mixture of, of both in the middle, not too structured, not too naturalistic, is the by far the most support, right? So that's why I try my best to teach both to parents. And again, I'm saying this because I see it inside of this publication. There are other publications out there that say different things about different. And there are agendas about like, oh, I need to get more. You have to be careful because a lot of the publications are, are made to get funding, right? So you have to be careful about their, their motive about writing this stuff. All right? So at the end of the day, these are the treatments for ASD and even for language disorders most of the time. But at the same time, what I'm trying to say here is try everything. A certain approach doesn't work it doesn't mean the approach sucks, right? It might be the person who's administrating it. For instance, if I were to administer, like a sensory based intervention, it's going to. It's going to suck because I'm not good at it, right? That's. That's just the end of it. I am not trained, so you better find someone who knows what they're doing. I know it's hard in this day and age, but at the same time, you know, try everything. Okay. And you need to learn as much as you can about, like, the certain approach that you think will work for a kid the most. And the only answer I can give you is to test it out. Okay? That's all I'm going to say in this video. All right? So that's it. If you haven't, please go to agents of Speech.com checklist to grab a list of tools and toys that I recommend you getting when you're starting your home therapy. Okay? So I'll see you next week. Bye. Bye.