Time Magazine and “Facilitated Communication” are Frauds

Time magazine has a cover story this week on autism, and the story highlights a completely fraudulent method of communication with children suffering from extreme autism called “facilitated communication.” The method is not only fraudulent, but it is cruel and should be criminalized, and the practitioners jailed.

This is how this scam works: An idiot with a college degree claims that with their help, they can miraculously help severely autistic children finally be able to communicate with their loving, hopeful parents. The idiot with the college degree pretends to work with the child for a matter of weeks, and then invites in the parents to claim that they are near to a breakthrough. The idiot with the college degree will take hold of the autistic child’s hands and use those hands to type out or poke at signals or signs to convey some meaningful phrase to the parents. The parents, fooled into thinking that there is a major breakthrough in their child’s development, cry, jump for joy and give lots of cash to the idiot with the college degree.

From Time’s cover story here:

The road to Hannah’s mind opened a few days before her 13th birthday.

Her parents, therapists, nutritionists and teachers had spent years preparing the way. They had moved mountains to improve her sense of balance, her sensory perception and her overall health. They sent in truckloads of occupational and physical therapy and emotional support. But it wasn’t until the fall of 2005 that traffic finally began to flow in the other direction. Hannah, whose speech was limited to snatches of songs, echoed dialogue and unintelligible utterances, is profoundly autistic, and doctors thought she was most likely retarded. But on that October day, after she was introduced to the use of a specialized computer keyboard, Hannah proved them wrong. “Is there anything you’d like to say, Hannah?” asked Marilyn Chadwick, director of training at the Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse University.

With Chadwick helping to stabilize her right wrist and her mother watching, a girl thought to be incapable of learning to read or write slowly typed, “I love Mom.”

A year and a half later, Hannah sits with her tutor at a small computer desk in her suburban home outside New York City. Facilitated communication is controversial (critics complain that it’s often the facilitator who is really communicating), but it has clearly turned Hannah’s life around. Since her breakthrough, she no longer spends much of her day watching Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. Instead, she is working her way through high school biology, algebra and ancient history. “It became obvious fairly quickly that she already knew a lot besides how to read,” says her tutor, Tonette Jacob.

She has become painfully aware of her own autism. Of this, she (Hannah) writes, “Reality hurts.”

This is complete bullshit. The “facilitators” wrote these things, not Hannah. Tonette Jacob, a failing off-broadway actress, is babysitting a completely hopeless child, and instead of letting the child watch TV, Tonette is faking it to make it look like the child is breezing through math problems. Never mind that the child cannot communicate at all without one of these “facilitators” around.

Marilyn Chadwick of the so-called “Facilitated Communication Institute” at Syracuse has even admitted that there is no scientific foundation for facilitated communication!

At Syracuse University, where Facilitated Communication was born, a study was done to determine its authenticity. A study was performed by the Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disability in New York State. Results are here:

Very simply, some trials included the presentation of two different pictures at the same time, one to the student and one to the facilitator. If the name of the facilitator’s picture was typed out, then one had proof of facilitator control over the typing. At the time, no one gave serious thought to this part of the research. It was assumed that FC was real, at least for some people, some of the time.

It took three months to finish the study, running hundreds of trials with 12 students and 9 facilitators. The results were completely unexpected, and emotionally devastating. There was not one single correct response (responses were rated by a team of 4 independent judges and, additionally, each facilitator). There was overwhelming evidence for unconscious, ongoing facilitator influence.

What was the result of the use of this fakery? I couldnt believe it when I found out. Practitioners of this fraud had used faked communications from autistic children to put fathers in jail for alleged sexual assault (which supposedly caused the autism), and children were placed in foster care due to other allegations.

Correspondence and telephone calls from all over the world began to pour in, nearly all of it extremely supportive and much of it very heart wrenching. Calls were received from families that had been torn apart due to allegations of sexual abuse directed at one or both parents, supposedly coming from their son or daughter through FC. Calls were received from fathers in jail, and from mothers whose children had been placed in foster care, again due to abuse allegations obtained through FC.

Scientific American has more on this story here. They say:

…the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and other organizations have characterized FC as undemonstrated, and either rejected it or refused to endorse it.

It is extremely irresponsible for Time Magazine to publish that a cure of autism can come from such a fraudulent source. They may as well have said that pyramids, magnets and snake oil were the cure. Why didnt they claim that Alien energy from UFO’s were the cure? How about faith healing? Why not use a psychic channeller? It is cruel to give parents of autistic children false hope that this fraudulent practice could offer a breakthrough. Its heartbreaking and should be illegal to prey on these vulnerable parents.

Thanks to Penn Jillette’s Radio program for getting me fired up about this.