“That was all the marketing I did for the next 10 years or so,” Granpeesheh says. Her third clinic opened in San Jose, California, not long afterward, in response to a request from a group of parents with autistic children on an online forum. Families in New York who had read Let Me Hear Your Voice, a book about a child who recovered from autism that mentions Granpeesheh by name, asked her to open a clinic in New York in 1994. Her autism treatment empire grew organically from the start. “She would recruit staff from, like, Starbucks … and she taught all of us to take care of each other, so that we could do the best we could for our patients,” says Henry Moore, who worked at CARD from 1995 through the end of 2022 as a therapist and then director of compliance. neighborhood of Encino, hired additional therapists, then trained some of those therapists to be managers many of them stayed with the company for decades. She rented about 700 square feet in an office building in the L.A. Using money saved from treating her clients, Granpeesheh opened a clinic, “one hundred percent self-funded,” she says. When Granpeesheh graduated from UCLA with her doctorate in psychology in 1990, she kept working privately with families that had aged out of the UCLA clinic. Lovaas’ research-to which Granpeesheh contributed-showed that ABA, especially when done early on and intensively, up to 40 hours a week, could effectively teach an autistic child skills and behaviors that led them to lessen the severity of or lose their autism diagnosis.īut Lovaas, who died in 2010, was also often quoted saying people with autism are not “people in the psychological sense” and was criticized for using painful punishments to shape behavior of autistic children, says Monique Botha, an autism researcher at the University of Stirling in Scotland who is also autistic.
He’s known as the “father of applied behavior analysis therapy,” or ABA, a treatment alternative at a time when autistic people were frequently institutionalized. She took a class called “Behavior Modification” with well-known but controversial psychology professor Ivar Lovaas. Granpeesheh’s interest in autism took root during her time as a student at UCLA. To support herself through school, she worked 36 hours a week as a donut maker, balloon seller and receptionist to pay her tuition ($208 per quarter) and rent ($200 per month), she says. She didn’t hear from them for three years. She says they were “high up” in the regime of Iran’s leader at the time, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and had gone into hiding amid the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty. Still, she recalls feeling alone and “very lost” when college started, because she’d lost contact with-and financial support from-her parents. School wasn’t hard for her she did the 11th and 12th grades in one year and was accepted into the University of California, Los Angeles, where she enrolled in the fall of 1979, at age 17. Her parents decided to enroll her in a boarding school in California where she’d be safe. By the time she was set to return home, tensions in Iran were rising. In 1978, when Granpeesheh was 16, she left her birth city of Tehran, Iran, to visit her cousins in Los Angeles in the summer.
Granpeesheh’s own journey is as dramatic as her company’s. “It’s sad to hear there are still so many critics,” Granpeesheh says. In addition to CARD’s lack of funds, she’ll face hurdles both old and new, including difficulty in recruiting and retaining therapists and responding to criticism that the type of intense therapy CARD deploys-which reinforces certain behaviors and tries to eliminate others-can make some kids feel miserable and can correlate with lower self-image when they’re adults. Granpeesheh, who is one of America’s richest self-made women, worth an estimated $350 million, says she’s up to the task-and that if she wins the bid, she will attempt to “turn CARD around” using some of the proceeds she pocketed when she sold the company.
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