RC again

I was discussing re-evaluation co-counseling again, and came up with a number of points which I thought were weaknesses.

 

1) Close-doors

 

There is no way of telling how successful it is apart from its own internally generated publicity. This is something I have also found with the Son-Rise programme for autism, and I think the comparison is a pertinent one. The efficacy of the Son-rise programme has no outside and checkable benchmarks, so that while the publicity says that it will help - or even cure - autism. But as the National Autistic Society points out:

 

Apart from the costs of the Program, a major criticism of Son-Rise is that the Options Institute has never allowed or carried out any formal research on the effectiveness of it. It argues that it does not have the resources to carry out any large scale evaluation of the success rate (Kaufman, R. 2002), but it is said to have also turned down external researchers' requests as well. Jordan (1993) points out that the informal, successful reports there have been of the Program have been with young children and there are no reports on older children (Jordan 1993). It is possible that the Program works better for some children than others, with Jordan suggesting that it may depend on a 'certain level of intellectual potential' (Jordan 1993 and Williams and Wishart 1999).

Co-counseling (from their website) also comments on autism:

 

In August of l996, Patty Wipfler told me the following about my son, O- , who is autistic: "His autism and retardation are patterns, and he will be able to discharge lots about them in order to fully recover his humanness."

 

(The parent involved then became involved with the Son-Rise Option Insitute)

 

How successful is co-counseling in dealing with, for instance, clinical depression (rather than just everyday depression), schizophenia, and other kinds of major problems? Indeed, the above anecdote ends on a positive note ("He seems older, and I see glimpses of his intelligence. Maybe he is not "retarded" at all! All this is such a unique happening, such a dream, a miracle!")  but how successful is co-counseling with autism?

 

As with the Son-Rise programme, the lack of engagement with the public domain means that there is no way of telling, which makes it hard to recommend to anyone who has a serious problem and who might perhaps be better with another approach.

 

 

2. Lack of engagement with outsiders

 

I am aware that co-counselling can look critically at some of its own concepts, but its decision to avoid engagement with the public domain - by which I do not mean "Sun" readers, but serious thinkers, may well mean that it can be to inward looking. I have been told that it must not be over "intellectualised", but surely if that is a way to block out all critical reflection, then it has issues with serious philosophical analysis.

 

For instance, consider this:

 

In August of l996, Patty Wipfler told me the following about my son, O- , who is autistic: "His autism and retardation are patterns, and he will be able to discharge lots about them in order to fully recover his humanness."

 

This seems to me that autism is being treated as a matter of learned behaviour ("patterns") rather than something innate. Is that correct? I don't think so, and there is a large body of evidence that autism has a strong genetic component.

 

But consider this - in the early days of RC, homosexuality was seen as a "distress pattern" to be overcome, but now it is seen as an acceptable way in which some human beings happen to be. In other words, it was treated as a learned (and faulty behavious) before being seen as something innate. But what if autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder (clinical depression) are also - as would seem to be the case - largely innate? In that case, treating people with autism etc as having "patterns" will be wholly inappropriate.

 

There seems to be a failure to step back, and look at this kind of matter, which is problematic even within the framework of RC, and I will return to that in a later blog.