During the crisis of the early 1980s, aid workers discovered that unemployment caused them as many problems as anyone else. In the mid-1980s, the Dutch government ran into its first budget deficit and began austerity measures. The first major cut was in assisted living. That was a great opportunity to reorganize the education system.

In the early nineties I did a propaedeutic phase of a counseling study. The Social Academy was a kind of polytechnic study that was founded in the late 1960s with the goal of investigating whether it was possible to treat disabled people better than by dumping them in large boarding schools and leaving them to their own devices, as had been customary since 1890. Over the course of 20 years, the Social Academy has developed a methodology with which polytechnic students could conduct independent scientific research within their own field. But the education fell victim to budget cuts before they found this out themselves. In 1991/’92 I did a propaedeutic phase of Social Pedagogical Assistance with the Social Academy curriculum just before it fell victim to budget cuts. For the second year in part-time, you needed a part-time job, which I didn’t have, so I quit. In 2001 I started again and did SPA for two months.

There were major differences between the two courses. Part-time students from the Social Academy were in their twenties, worked in social services and wanted to be able to help their clients better. The part-time students of SPA were 18 and before they even started the training they had already decided that they wanted to earn one hundred thousand guilders a year within ten years. Social academy gave lectures and a lot of initiative was expected from students. SPA was organized in an adolescent way, the presentation of theses was more important than the content.

Caregivers no longer help their clients solve problems

But it took a few years before it became clear to me that there was a much more important difference. Social academy students were taught to teach clients the skills they needed to solve their own problems. So that clients could live independently, without constant supervision by care providers. Students of SPA are taught to guide clients through their problems, but never to solve those problems. So that clients will remain dependent on care providers for the rest of their lives.

This philosophy appears to play a very important role in autism, in particular.

A few years ago, the downstairs neighbor of my previous flat started making annoying noises at night and I urgently started looking for another house. Thanks to the mention of my disability benefit I was able to get a house in a senior citizen complex, although I was not quite at the minimum age of 55 yet. To prevent my autism from causing problems, (after all I had only lived on my own for 35 years), the housing association demanded that I accept a roof/care contract with a year of guidance. During the first meeting, the supervisor immediately suggested that I start a cleaning schedule.

That’s weird. Not only are most people terribly bad at making and maintaining schedules. But schedules only make sense when you work with a group of people. There are three situations in which a schedule makes sense: Distributing a number of tasks fairly among a group of people (alternating shifts), having to perform time critical tasks with a group (dispensing medicines on time in a hospital) or the situation in which the tasks of a group of people take up all available time in total (education, one lesson that runs late is at the expense of the next). There are no situations where it is beneficial to use a schedule on your own. The only effect of using a schedule in this situation is that a simple task is made a lot more complicated.

Nowadays, care providers give clients extra problems

I’ve tried the schedule for a few months. Not only was it unsuccessful, but it was also completely unnecessary. My Roomba vacuums twice a week, so there is virtually no dust in my home. What’s the use of wiping a cloth over the table twice a week if no dust is visible at all?

I still regularly hear horror stories about schedules from autistic acquaintances. Stories that make it clear that the main purpose of counseling is to give the counselor a job for life.

Ninety percent of the people who attended the Social Academy had a background in social care themselves. So care providers themselves had experience with the problems they helped their clients with. But for a study psychologist and to be able to do SPA, having a background in counseling is a contraindication. This makes autistic and other people with problems impossible the knowledge they need to investigate their own problems.

The GGZ and SPA tell us this is because former clients may project their own problems onto their current clients. That is true, that is indeed possible. But people without a counseling background also face the death of relatives, prejudice and other problems that they could project onto clients. Psychologists and SPA students always work in a team. Among other things, to prevent these kinds of problems.

Mental health organizations do everything it can to prevent autists from getting the knowledge they need to research their own problems problemen

The first skill SPA students should learn is to ask open-ended questions. Kanner autists are not capable of this. They have a photographic memory. So to the question “Did you experience anything fun during your holiday?” They remember the entire holiday. It is impossible to make a summary that is shorter than five minutes. The question “Have you been to a zoo?” limits the subject. This makes it possible for the Kanner autist to tell a short story. So Kanner autists naturally learn to always ask closed questions.

It turns out that it is possible for autistic people to learn to ask open questions. But only if they are familiar with the conversational skills and the differences between autists and neurotypicals.