A bit over two months ago, a man named Ole Ivar Lovaas died. Many in the skeptical community will not recognize the name. Many in the gay community won't, either. Even in the autism parent community, many reacted to this news with confusion. They didn't know who Lovaas was.
This state of affairs is to be expected. It's not like his is a name which should live on in infamy for generations to come.
It's not like he had anything to do with the attention that has been paid of late to another well-known researcher, George Alan Rekers and his tireless dedication to the treatment of gender disturbances in children, aimed at promoting normal gender roles and preventing the most severe gender disturbance of them all: homosexuality.
Just about every one of the people covering Rekers and his efforts at raising awareness and understanding of healthy gender identity, however, have also looked into Lovaas. They've even connected Lovaas to the history of his treatment logic... which is very strange, when you think about it.
It's not like Lovaas was Rekers's mentor, or like Rekers simply copied over the methods that Lovaas had developed for use in autistic children – including the treatment logic, justifications, and goals. No, Rekers developed his methods entirely independently.
Lovaas certainly never experimented on children with disabilities by dosing them with LSD. He never locked autistic children in a room whose floor was covered by metal strips so that he could run an electric current through them whenever the children did something he didn't like. He never slapped or abused a child, never tried to "condition" a child to like people by shocking them until they approached an adult, and never described autistic children as "not people in the psychological sense" or as raw materials to be used in "constructing a person" via behavior modification in an interview with a major popular psychology magazine.
Indeed, Lovaas's work was completely beyond ethical criticism due to its steadfastly upright nature. It's not like his work needs to be defended by cult-like groups of often disingenuously-named followers who will rabidly attack and defame anyone who has the audacity to criticize him – after all, the idea of someone abusing a science based on the idea of prospective control over another's actions is completely absurd; and the idea leads to no ethical dilemmas anyway. His few critics never truly need people to defend them, but these defenses, when they occur anyway, get overblown attention in the media. His most famous study was very well-designed and his presentation of his data was unquestionably honest, without the slightest hint of deception whatsoever.
Moreover, his work was dedicated to a population which was utterly doomed without his help. The studies were clear on this, and there's no way that the poor prognosis they indicated was even partly due to iatrogenic harm. After all, the mental institutions at which the subjects of those studies had been abandoned were famously cheerful, loving places for a child to grow up, where harmful and abusive treatments were – and are – completely unheard of.
In short, Ole Ivar Lovaas was an upstanding pillar of the clinical community and one of the most under-appreciated figures of his time. Lovaas's death was met with an endless outpouring of grief from those he dedicated his life to protecting. While his work may never touch the lives of those he strove to help, his unwavering integrity in the face of unending media and parental hostility will prove a shining beacon for generations to come.
And so, Ivar Lovaas, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your endless dedication and devotion to helping different, ostracized, and abused children. May you receive the rewards in Heaven that you never did in life.
Stephen Sarcasm has no experience in clinical work and is using his real name because he has no reason tofear reprisal from Lovaas's few and highly non-influential supporters for an article which praises a man who they emphatically have not turned into something resembling a religious icon.