Assisted Communication: Another Perspective
If you do a search for Assisted Communication of Facilitated Communication, you will find mainly negative comments. I did a Google search and the first article after the Wikipedia article was one which offered evidence that this was not actually autistic people communicating.
If you are not familiar with Assisted or Facilitated Communication, it is when the presence of another person, including possibly a light touch, allows a nonverbal person to type complex thoughts.
The current professional consensus is that it is not only ineffective, it is actually fake, with the facilitators doing the communication.
I am not an expert in this, although I have two nonverbal children and am at least familiar with the challenges of communication.
One podcast I was recently listening to took a strong stand against this type of communication. Aside from the difficulties of proving the method in controlled research environments, the “expert” had a different issue.
She was skeptical that such nonspeakers have an inner intellectual life that was just waiting to be discovered. She doubted that the nonspeakers who presented as “low functioning” could put together these complex thoughts, earning degrees and writing books.
I can say from my experience that my son does have this inner intellectual life, even if people on the outside do not see it. While most of our communication is limited, during the pandemic we communicated by email. For the first time, he was able to speak to me in sentences. We have other evidence that this is his experience.
Again, I am not an expert in assisted communication and I make no claims about this specific method. But I do know that there is a pushback by some professionals and some nonspeakers who have found assisted communication to be life changing.
Autism Spectrum News recently had an issue that focused on this topic. You can read it here. I share this, not to convince anyone, but to provide another perspective.
I understand that some of this will not matter to certain people. “It has already been proven false.” And yet lived experience is also a kind of evidence and needs to be taken into account.
