Facilitated Communication Denies People With Disabilities Their Voice

Abstract

Facilitated Communication (FC) has been rebranded as "supported typing" and repackaged as rapid prompting method, but remains a disproven intervention for people with disabilities. Despite the absence of supportive evidence and abundant evidence that facilitators always author the messages, FC has experienced resurgence in popularity among families, professionals, and advocacy groups. Strategic marketing, confirmation bias, pseudoscience, anti-science, and fallacy explain this troubling renewal. We briefly discuss each of these and contrast the method with authentic augmentative and alternative communication to illustrate differences in values and practices. Our intention is to persuade readers to resist or abandon FC in favor of validated methods and to encourage advocacy organizations to advance agendas that emphasize genuine self-expression by people with disabilities.

Semantic feature dissociation: A new hypothesis concerning autism

“…Hacking, 2009;van Goidsenhoven, 2017) To assemble the corpus, I used google search to obtain a preliminary list of candidate texts. I then excluded texts obtained using facilitated communication, since it is widely argued that some of these are generated by the unconscious influence of the facilitator, rather by the ostensible author (Travers et. al., 2014).…”

Towards an Understanding of Spirituality in the Context of Nonverbal Autism: A Scoping Review

“…Originally initiated in Australia in the 1970's by health provider Rosemary Crossley (Travers, Tincani, & Lang, 2014), globally facilitated communication is still viewed with some suspicion. The use of a second person (the facilitator) to facilitate the process for people who lack the bodily stability to type unassisted (Schlosser et al, 2014) is viewed by some as suspect.…”

“…The use of a second person (the facilitator) to facilitate the process for people who lack the bodily stability to type unassisted (Schlosser et al, 2014) is viewed by some as suspect. Ongoing research continues to debate the authenticity of facilitated communication, with evidence which both supports (e.g., Cardinal & Falvey, 2014;Rosetti, Ashby, Arndt, Chadwick, & Kasahara, 2008) and discounts the credibility of the method (e.g., Schlosser et al, 2014;Travers et al, 2014). Even so, the use of various types of these innovations is gaining wider respect within academic and medical communities (Cardinal & Falvey, 2014).…”

Evidence does not support the use of Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) as an intervention for students with autism spectrum disorder and further primary research is not justified

“…It is not known whether these findings can be generalized to the current use of RPM by parents of children with ASD. Parents who are considering providing informed consent for the participation of their children in research on RPM need to be aware that (a) the Chen et al (2012) study is seriously methodologically flawed but suggests that RPM may create the illusion of communication and result in indefinite prompt dependency (Lang et al, 2014), and (b) RPM has been compared to FC (see Tostanoski et al, 2014;Travers, Tincani, & Lang, 2014). As there are no studies validating authorship using RPM, there is a possibility that messages delivered by RPM could be intentionally or subconsciously authored by the facilitator holding the letter board (Tostanoski et al, 2014).…”