Flutterby™! : Art of Stimming

In the Metafilter thread to a link to Dawn of Dianetics: L. Ron Hubbard, John W. Campbell, and the Origins of Scientology, an excerpt adapted from Alec Nevala-Lee’s book, Astounding, there was a comment:

This is what I can't get over here: Campbell was actually a trained physicist, (well, a BS degree, but they didn't just hand those out in the day), but he was capable of conceiving of this concoction of ad hoc speculation and uncontrolled amateur experiments as a "science of the mind", superior to the actually existing discipline of psychology?

I did not go off on a long rant about how at that point in history, psychology was still the domain of Freud and Jung ripping off high society ladies, how Skinner's admonitions against anthropomorphizing humans were still in the future, about how, hell, it took 'til what, the '90s, for the first extremely shakey evidence for CBT to start to show that psychology could actually have a positive effect, and even then it was scant.

Whereas those of us who've been through some of the experiences often passed off as "cults" sometimes point to those weekends (because, admittedly, for it not to be "a cult" it's one of those things you can experience and walk away from) as amazingly transformative, and cusps in our lives.

Anyway, it's with that in mind that I link to The Art of Stimming — Applied behavioral analysis has left a legacy of traumatized kids. Why is it still the standard of treatment?. In this case it's written by a parent of a kid with Down syndrome, but it applies equally well to autism.