The Psychobabble BCBAs

We spent the last several episodes talking about the RBT workforce. 

Now we've got receipts.

It's journal club time. We read it so you don't have to.

Erica and Lauryn dig into Nastasi et al.'s qualitative study of RBT burnout and turnover and what happened when researchers simply sat down with RBTs and asked "What is this job actually like?"

The answers weren't particularly comfortable.

We're talking wildly inconsistent training and supervision, limited feedback, taxing working conditions, missed breaks, unpredictable income, unclear career pathways, burnout, and a workforce s...

RBT working conditions aren't just a workforce issue. They're a clinical issue.
In this episode in our series The RBT Uprising, Erica sits down with Alex Raymond, BCBA, of the ABA Workers Union to talk about what organizing actually looks like inside ABA and why the conversation goes far beyond wages.
They discuss direct-join and pre-majority unions, RBT turnover, staffing ratios, PPE, sick leave, supervision, reimbursement structures, and what happens when organizations repeatedly train new technicians only to lose them.
Alex also turns the conversation toward something behavior analysts should find very familiar: contingencies. If organizations...

In the third episode of The RBT Uprising, Erica and Lauryn sit down with Collin Johnson, one of the lead negotiators for the Verbal Beginnings Union 639, to hear the story directly from someone who helped organize the first RBT strike in ABA history. Colin talks about his own experience entering the field, the working conditions that pushed him toward organizing, and what it was like to take the first steps toward unionization while facing uncertainty, intimidation, and union-busting efforts.

The conversation gets into the issues that brought workers to the picket line: stagnant wages, inconsistent communication, inadequate...

On July 20, 2026, RBTs in Rockville, Maryland made history by becoming the first ABA workers in the United States to go on strike. But the strike didn't come out of nowhere. After 437 days of bargaining without a first contract, workers were demanding guaranteed wage increases, more predictable hours, safer staffing conditions, and basic workplace protections.

In this episode, Erica and Lauryn take a closer look at what led to the strike and why this story is much bigger than one clinic. They trace the short history of the RBT credential, examine the explosive growth of the ABA workforce...

What happened when psychology and behavior analysis got divorced? 

According to Erica and Lauryn, both sides lose something and the field of ABA is still living with the consequences.

In this inaugural episode, Erica and Lauryn introduce themselves, their backgrounds in psychology and behavior analysis, and the reason they created Psychobabble BCBAs. They talk about their shared history, their complicated relationship with ABA, and their mission to bring more psychological foundations, humanity, and critical thinking into behavior-analytic practice.

This podcast isn't about blindly defending ABA or tearing it down. It's about being pro-science, p...

What do you get when you put two school psychology-trained BCBAs, several graduate degrees, and one shared Google Doc together? Apparently, a podcast.

Welcome to Psychobabble BCBAs, a podcast about behavior analysis, psychology, and all the things we think our field needs to talk about.

Hosted by Erica Ranade and Dr. Lauryn Toby, two BCBAs with roots in school psychology and more than a decade each in the field, Psychobabble BCBAs is built around a simple idea: you can deeply care about behavior analysis while examining it with a critical lens.

This isn't...