Publications by authors named "Ava Gurba"

Background: Controversy regarding the neurodiversity movement (NDM), the social and medical models of disability, autism intervention goals, and causal attributions of disability contributes to divides in the autistic and autism communities. The present study investigates the views of autistic and non-autistic autistic and autism community members on these topics. We explored whether these views are shaped by having close relationships to autistic people with intellectual disabilities (ID) and nonspeaking autistic (NSA) people.

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Some people support the neurodiversity movement and other people criticize it. They often disagree about what the neurodiversity movement means. Confusion about what the neurodiversity movement is makes it hard for people to agree about how best to support autistic or disabled people.

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Most support programmes for Autistic children are available only after they are diagnosed. Research suggests that parenting supports may be helpful for parents and their infants, when provided in the first 2 years of life - before a formal diagnosis is given, but when information suggests an infant is more likely to be Autistic. However, we do not know how acceptable these types of supports might be to the Autistic and autism communities.

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Autistic people may experience high emotion and sensory sensitivities and a slow return to baseline emotional state. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) was developed to address reactivity, impulsivity, and mood dysregulation in individuals with mood and personality disorders. DBT may be therapeutically beneficial to autistic individuals struggling with these or similar emotional and sensory challenges.

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Despite being targets of intervention practice and research for over 60 years, autistic people have been left out of the conversation. Until recently, nearly no research or implementation work has sought the input of autistic people in regard to the design of interventions and, more importantly, how the goals for such interventions are prioritized and determined. This reframe has profound implications for autism-focused interventions and research, most of which have aimed to reduce or eliminate autism symptoms, with variable empirical support (Bottema-Beutel, 2023).

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