Facilitated Communication and Autism: What We Need To Know | Janyce L. Boynton
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- Опубліковано 8 лип 2024
- Dive into this insider-outsider look at the Facilitated Communication movement-how it works, who really benefits, why critical reviews have not stopped its progress, and what we can do about it. Facilitated communication attempts to aid communication by people with autism or other communication disabilities who are non-verbal.
Janyce is an artist, educator, and advocate for evidence-based practices in the field of communication sciences and disorders.
As a speech/language clinician in the early 1990s, she became involved with facilitated communication. An overview of her experiences with FC can be found in Stuart Vyse's "An Artist With a Science-Based Mission," published in Skeptical Inquirer (November 2018). Her 2012 article, "Facilitated Communication: What Harm it Can Do - Confessions of a Former Facilitator," published in the journal Evidence-Based Communication and Intervention, was the first of its kind. To date, she is one of the few facilitators world-wide to publicly acknowledge her role in producing FC messages and speak out against its use.
Join CFI and find out how we are protecting critical thought and science by visiting: centerforinquiry.org
This talk took place at the CSICon 2019 in Las Vegas on October 19, 2019
Watch more from CSICon 2019.
Thank you Ms. Boynton for sharing your experience and ongoing efforts to expose FC for the dangerous method it is.
Professor Why are you using Randi’s picture?
I have been involved in the developmental disabilities field in Canada as a behavioural psychologist for 40 years and have first hand experience with FC . It was proven to be facilitator bias from early on and I witnessed this personally with my clients. I had no idea people were still hanging on to this false hope! Desperate parents at best blinded by hope, at worst being hood winked. FC no more works than water runs uphill. To use it is totally unethical and at times verges on the criminal. Great presentation.
That's why it's so important that professionals like you step in to take them down easy. I think people don't realize that we aren't doing kids a favor making up things that are simply not true.
I was lecturing last night and my students explained that their last prof had promoted FC. This is in Calgary, in February, 2023. I was slayed. I was a doc student at UW Madison in 1988 when Rosemary Crossley came to Madison at the behest of Anne Donnellan so I too have followed FC all this time, I thought the Wheeler study to this to bed but clearly it did not. I'm gobsmacked.
This is a wonderful and truthful history. She's great.
Thank you for speaking out about this!!
Thank you for your courage and public advocacy, Janyce. How can the science-minded community further support former "facilitators" who want to blow the whistle on Facilitated Communication (FC), the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) and kindred techniques, but who are being pressured NO TO by employers with vested interests in maintaining the FC/RPM/etc pseudo-scientific deception? Caroline Bowen PhD
@Whizper2me And neither of FC or RPM work. Get over it.
we all want and would love FC to be true, but it isn't. Look at the incentive structure here
Fascinating!!!
the answer to desperation is not selfishness.
Thankyou mam
I disagree with Janyce on the last case. Based on information available in 2022, it seems that Jonathan Bryan is using partner-assisted scanning rather than FC. There is footage from the BBC showing him not having physical contact while communicating, different people holding the board (some were his classmates) and his story does not fit the typical "miracle" FC user as well.
My brother has severe autism, my parents & grandparents are caught up in this nonsense. It’s hard to watch
look up Prisoners of Silence (Frontline) from 1993. It's online, It's 58 minutes and will tell them what they need to hear but it starts out for the first half being pro FC so they may be willing to watch it.
Just wondering what your theory is as to why when typing commences, meltdowns, assaults and crying spells cease? My guy has been ‘behaviour’ free since he started typing seven years ago.
It’s because you’ve given him a way to express himself. Imagine not being able to communicate the simplest things? Completely frustrating. My son’s behavior changed too
Correlation does not equal causation
@@pardonmyfrench4760 Your perception is
based on very limited information. Your thinking black and white and reasoning lacking. You should keep quiet on such an important issue so as not to impose muteness on people who are able to communicate, or prevent others from having their lives transformed by commmunication. My guy can respond correctly to questions posed to him in his parents native Farsi, when I (his communication partner) dont know a word of the language. How do you explain this??
He has since progressed to needing no
physical contact at all when typing. How do you explain
this??
I see people like you as committing acts almost as heinous as Hitlers, regardless of intention.
I have been observing 24/7 for 18 years. I have special (legally recognised) insight.
Your simplistic conclusions are devoid of consideration of the complexity of the human brain with its 86 billion neurons.
I was chatting online to a typer once who went quiet when I asked him a short question. He couldn’t respond and after a while typed ‘can you not ask me questions
in short sentences, when people ask me questions in short sentences I get confused
and don’t no what to say.’ Was this sort of possible deficiency accounted for
with all the repeated research
that failed to prove authorship?
It wasn’t, and therefore the research is flawed and SB null and void.
@@shareneturner4737 no, I'm the guy that thinks scientifically, rationally, and objectively. You must be the other guy. You must be so mixed up and blinded by your emotions that you fail to see that facilitated communication is a hoax. You should keep quiet, since science has already disproved your snake oil pseudoscience. It must really be hard knowing this method you put so much faith in is complete and utter bull. Go back to the kids table, the grown ups are talking here.
@@pardonmyfrench4760 well check out the science that proves authorship.
Claiming "the client" is typing, while same client swivels their head back and forth, sometimes with eyes closed, simply blows my mind.
Edit: FC sounds more like a grooming tool (for whatever purpose), than anything to benefit the client. Early in my nursing career, I worked for a year in a group home for the "profundly retarded"-a term in use at that time-and I couldn't understand how some of the assistants in the house claimed that a client preferred them, so THEY had to be with the client-usually a smaller person, someone NOT prone to vomiting or biting...unreal! Others had biblical beliefs they superimposed upon the clients...the social service system and the people who own these homes rewarded such behaviors...as these behaviors allowed for the client's ability to show preference or bond with these staffer's and allowed the client to have autonomy of choice, in this case, preference for certain staffers...there was much that I appreciated, but there was also a lot that was low--level horrifying. I was happy to leave that environment, when I did.
Although I don't have an opinion on facilitated communication, I have significant problems with some of the things said in this video, which makes me question the validity of the entire lecture. Like most people, I lack any of the scientific experience that would qualify me to talk about the research side of this video, but I do have significant difficulties in communicating and can comment about some of the false assumptions made from an experience standpoint.
At the very beginning of this lecture she talks about how people with difficulties comprehending and expressing language are suddenly able to express themselves competently. I'm unsure how she intended it but way it's worded makes it seem like fc is exclusively used with people who have significant difficulties in expressing and understanding language, but fc is often intended for people who have difficulties with expressive language but are able to understand it. If she meant it as there sometimes being cases where someone who can't understand language can suddenly speak it, that also seems like a strange assumption as it's very hard to definitively determine if someone who lacks expressive communication skills isn't able to understand language, as they may not have a way to communicate their competence in understanding language with others. All in all it's very confusing proof to me.
At 4:38 she talks about people who were unable to write cohesive sentences quickly being able to write complicated things. For reasons unknown to me, I often have trouble making grammatically understandable sentences when speaking, despite knowing exactly what I want to say down to the word, but am able to type it. (I don't use any form of fc just so we're extra clear.) Because of this I have no problem believing that someone can quickly become fluent when given the right communication method, and it's concerning to me that she, as an expert, doesn't acknowledge this phenomenon.
At 9:34 she talks about a man using a letter board without looking at it. I often type by keyboard with my index finger, without looking at it, because I understand where the letters are in a spacial sense. Maybe her intention was to show that he wasn't focusing on the task? In that case I have trouble controlling my head so I often do tasks that most people do by sight, at least partially by feeling.
I have more problems with things said in this video, but I think I've spent enough time picking this video apart, so I'll stop there. Again this isn't a stance on fc, but me pointing out why I'm highly skeptical about this lecture in general.
I don’t think your criticisms are valid, and here is why.
1. Often times there is no evidence outside of facilitated communication that a person can understand language. FC is usually used with severely autistic and/or intellectually disabled people who previously scored very low on tests of receptive language. That is the point she was making, that people who show no apparent receptive language skills (which can be tested independent of expressive language believe it or not) suddenly have in tact receptive language skills when subjected to FC (which has been thoroughly discredited through controlled studies).
2. Everyone knows that some people are better at typing than writing. Her point again was that people subjected to FC could not communicate through typing independently but all the sudden displayed very advanced and often poetic communication with facilitator assistance (even when they have not even been taught academic skills like reading and writing) That is not a real phenomenon. Again, it has been proven that communication through FC is coming from the facilitator, not the disabled person, this is simply a red flag that FC is a fraud.
3. No one, not even professional typists, can type correctly using the hunt-and-peck style typing without looking at the keyboard. When using more fingers and the “home row” and such you can type by knowing where the letters are in relation to each other, but not by just pointing with your index finger.
@@Quiteage If she was specifically talking about people who have receptive language disorders she should have clarified this. The way that she says this without clarification in my opinion heavily implies that she believes everyone who uses fc has a receptive language disorder.
I would like to know about these receptive language tests you are referring to, because the only ones that I know require someone who at least has the communication skills to be able to give a yes or no response, or else these tests can come to the false conclusion of a lack of understanding.
Different studies have come to different conclusions on the validity of fc, but I really don't know enough about them, or enough about studies in general to say which of these are valid.
As far as "sudden" literacy goes, it's very hard to know how much reading and writing a non speaking person knows. Just because someone hasn't been taught literacy in a school environment doesn't mean that they haven't learned it elsewhere, like by looking at captions or by looking at a book as someone reads to them, or they may not have acquired literacy but have at least been exposed to enough of it in their adult life that they are able to learn it much faster than someone like a child. I'm catering to both the situation of someone immediately knowing how to write and being able to learn how to write relatively quickly as she doesn't really clarify which one she's talking about. It should also be noted that some autistic people can learn certain things remarkably faster than non autistic people, though I'm unsure how common this is in non speaking autistics. For example, I learn most sign language signs after seeing them once. This means that in order to learn sign languages all I need is to see a conversation in a sign language with an English translation, and I can learn the language very quickly. I don't have quite this dramatic of an ability when it comes to spoken and written language, but I'm still significantly faster at learning these things than the average person. An example of this sort of phenomena that you can somewhat observe is Daniel Tammet, an autistic man who is famous for his math, memory, and language learning abilities.
I'm going to have to strongly disagree with your last point, mostly based on the fact that I can do this. I'm not going to link the video as UA-cam sometimes deletes comments with links, but I would like to direct you to a UA-cam video titled "Autistic woman types one-fingered without looking" by silentmiaow. It's hard to tell exactly what she's doing but if you watch it slowly enough you can see that she is pressing the right keys while tying.
Lol...I stopped reading when you mentioned "validity" and continued with your biased opinion for RPM and FC
@@pardonmyfrench4760 Everyone has some level of bias when discussing anything. You calling me biased with no clarification does not seem to be helpful for discussion. I also find you criticizing my use of the word "validity" with no explanation to be unhelpful.
@roundleafmallow I agree. So then why do so many people look at testimonials and think FC is a miracle? Testimonials are not scientific, anybody can say anything for attention or money. Want to know what is less biased? Science. Shane & Kearns, 1994, when the subject was shown one card, and the facilitator shown a different card, then asked to help prompt the subject to label the card, the facilitator prompted the subject to spell HIS card, not what was shown to the subject. Without a doubt, shows that these are the thoughts of the facilitator, not the individual. FURTHERMORE, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association stated that FC and RPM are "a discredited technique that should not be used. There is no scientific evidence of the validity of FC, and there is extensive scientific evidence-produced over several decades and across several countries-that messages are authored by the "facilitator" rather than the person with a disability. Furthermore, there is extensive evidence of harms related to the use of FC. Information obtained through the use of FC should not be considered as the communication of the person with a disability". Pulled directly from their website. And that's only the stuff off the top of my head. I know your stance isn't for FC, but the objective evidence is definitely stacked against it.
E
The people who promote "Facilitated Communication" belong in prison, then sent back to Hell where they came from.
It's a bit exaggerated to send people to prison for promoting a pseudoscience.
It should be made against ethical rules to promote among members of professional associations and it definitely not be allowed to be used as evidence in criminal investigations.
Are you the "GRAVITY!" guy?
@@Newtonip ; Thank you. I am autistic, so my outrage tends to be biased. FC has been debunked for over 25 years, yet "facilitators" do not care--- as the presenter in this video noted, FC proponents specifically avoid valid testing, which suggests they know the technique is bullshit. And yes, *GRAVITY!*