HEALTH
AND MEDICINE EXPLAINED.
NOV.
12 2015 5:40 AM
Facilitated Communication
Is a Cult That Won’t Die
This discredited technique for communicating
with profoundly disabled people is being pushed into public schools.
[comment of Arthur Golden posted Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 11:58 PM Israel time]
After finally getting a new computer, I have right now
finished reading the article and the comments.
IDEOMOTOR EFFECT – I have read over 100 studies of Facilitated
Communication (actual experiments or reviews of experiments) over the past 10
years and although many claim there is the ideomotor effect, I do not remember
any studies that PROVE there is the ideomotor effect in the use of Facilitated
Communication. Please provide me the
citation for any studies that anyone here believes proves there is the
ideomotor effect with FC. I can be
reached by email at golden.arthur@gmail.com
To David Auerbach - Dr. Michael Weiss has a PhD in
Psychology but he is not a “behavioral” psychologist like Professor James
Todd. Did you read the nearly 20 year
old peer-reviewed article authored by Dr. Weiss et al validating Facilitated
Communication? I realize the 2001 review
of FC by Professor of Special Education Mark P. Mostert was negative about the
experiment of Dr. Weiss but I know Mostert is wrong (which I can explain but it
would take several pages to do so).
To The Cincinnati Squid – my son at his own
request at age 22 did a validation test with Dr. Howard Shane on May 3, 1994,
which he “failed.” BTW, in 1977 my then 5
year old son was the first child with nonverbal autism evaluated by Dr. Howard
Shane at Boston Children’s Hospital and in 1982 Dr. Shane designed an AAC
program for my son. Dr. Shane was
obviously an expert in autism for many years by 1994 and I later realized that
he designed a test of FC in the early 1990’s (as the expert witness to defend a
parent against sexual abuse charges) that my son could not pass because of his
autism. Privately, Dr. Shane admitted
that his test did not consider one possible variable and I immediately told him
that my son already told me that variable was relevant.
Overall, I am very concerned by the factual errors by many
of the commenters about Facilitated
Communication, which are too numerous for me to try to explain.
https://slate.com/technology/2015/11/facilitated-communication-pseudoscience-harms-people-with-disabilities.html
ReplyDelete“Facilitated Communication Is a Cult That Won’t Die” by David Auerbach
November 12, 2015
Portions mentioning the paranormal:
…
FC has been connected with everything from false sexual abuse allegations to telepathic messages to autistic reincarnations of biblical figures.
…
Claims of “stressful environments” and “confrontational testing” are very much akin to the excuses psychics like Uri Geller use when they cannot replicate their spoon-bending feats under controlled laboratory conditions. In the early 1990s, skeptic James Randi performed his own tests on FC users at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, obtaining predictable results like a facilitated message saying, “I don’t like this man from Florida. He is upsetting my facilitator. Send him home.” Randi still has an unclaimed $1 million prize for a successful demonstration of FC.
…
Facilitated communication has created a domain of surrealism for anyone entering it anew. I can’t say I’ve ever had conversations quite so strange as I did in investigating this story. Multiple FC proponents told me that there are a large number of people who believe that telepathy underpins FC. They said people are discouraged from talking about psychic powers for fear of being blacklisted by Biklen and his associates. When interviewing Mary Schuh of the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability, an FC advocate who promotes FC in public schools and consults on pro-FC films, I was left nonplussed after exchanges such as this:
...There are FC practitioners and advocates who believe telepathy plays a role in FC. Do you believe telepathy is a part of facilitated communication?
Schuh: Telepathy? I have no comment on that. I couldn’t say yes, I couldn’t say no. It’s not part of the practice of the method. It’s a hard place for me to go to."
...
Though scandals have dogged Facilitated Communication pretty much since its inception, it has not died out as most miracle cures tend to do. Its persistence in spite of both scientific opposition and scandals is a testament to FC’s skill at rewriting and erasing its history.
One early piece of embarrassing FC history involved facilitator Michael McSheehan, who trained in Facilitated Communication at Syracuse and joined the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability in 1993. McSheehan mediated remarkable messages from the beyond from an autistic girl named Adriana Rocha. The messages, delivered in 1991, told of her past lives, Jesus, angels, and a coming apocalypse. The facilitated communication was achieved not just through a keyboard, but through telepathy. Adriana’s mother, Kristi Jorde, was a major funder of FC through her Adriana Foundation. Jorde’s book, Child of Eternity was ostensibly co-written with Adriana through facilitated communication. As Jorde tells it:
Not long after Adri first began facilitating regularly with Michael, she began to demand that he share with us the telepathic messages he was receiving from her. While he was willing to do this for her, he wanted to make certain that their communications remained accurate. So, together, they worked out a form of telepathic facilitation. … She would type the first letter of a word, and if Michael understood the word telepathically, he’d say it aloud. Adri would then hit the space key to indicate that he was correct. Sometimes, oddly enough, as in the case of the word synergy, Michael understood the word telepathically but didn’t know the meaning of it so we had to stop our conversation and define it for him.
It’s an amazing experience to be part of a telepathic conversation. Michael and Adri modeled for us the incredible potential of human communication.
Because it was too long, I was unable to publish all of the paranormal mentioned in the article by David Auerbach. Here is the rest of it:
ReplyDeleteJorde’s book included long passages from Adriana, such as:
ADRI: MOST OF MY SKILLS ARE TELEPATHIC. I GET ALL PEOPLE’S IDEAS. I CAN SEE THROUGH HUMAN’S [sic] EYES. MOSTLY I “TUNE IN” TO FIND OUT INFORMATION ABOUT THE WORLD. I TALK WITH MY GUIDES TO SUMMARIZE PRECOGNITION…I CHOOSE TO BE AUTISTIC FOR MY SOUL.
Adriana reveals herself to be the reincarnation of Jesus’ disciple John and encourages Jorde to have past life regression. Working with Robin Casarjian, Jorde discovers that she herself was a soldier in Gethsemane who got bruised by Peter in order not to have to participate in the crucifixion. (McSheehan could not be reached for comment for this article.)
Biklen and Crossley cut off contact with both Jorde and the Adriana Foundation sometime around 1993, scrubbing the foundation’s name from their materials in what appears to be an attempt to distance themselves from the taint of the paranormal. Jorde was last seen practicing quantum healing hypnosis in Florida. Her daughter, FC success story Adriana Rocha, is a “Nonverbal Autistic Master” and “Wisdom Keeper of the New Earth” at the New Earth Academy.
Psychic facilitator McSheehan remains at New Hampshire’s publicly funded Institute on Disability, where he is a clinical assistant professor, despite possessing only a bachelor’s degree. He is peddling the same miracles on public money, only without the telepathy and the angels. …