One of the key players in the autism world is the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC). The IACC is a federal advisory committee that advises the government on autism policies and priorities. It has been in the news twice this year. The first time was after its new membership was announced on January 28th. The second was after it released a draft of its latest Strategic Plan on July…
Since the Telepathy Tapes came onto the scene at the end of 2024, we at facilitatedcommunication.org have periodically received emails from proponents and critics alike asking our opinion about the claims that nonspeaking individuals with profound autism have telepathic abilities. Since these (purported) telepathically gifted individuals also happen to be subjected to FC/S2C/RPM, we have thoughts.…
This isn’t the first time Autism Spectrum News (ASN) has platformed FC. Back in December, 2024, it published a piece about a non-speaker who “found her voice” through Spelling to Communicate (S2C) . But this is the first time that ASN has platformed multiple pro-FC pieces: multiple, as in over two dozen. The occasion was a special summer issue entitled Giving Voice to Nonspeakers: Communication,…
In today’s blog post, I want to highlight a 2024 article titled “ Interrogating Neurotypical Bias in Facilitated Communication, Rapid Prompting Method, and Spelling 2 Communicate Through a Humanistic Lens .” As always, I encourage people to read the article in full. RPM “inventor,” Soma Mukhopadhyay, with a student who is staring at the ceiling. She controls access to the letter stencil and to the…
News Roundup Part II, January-July 2026: news analyses and commentaries In my last post, I went through the various news reports that appeared since the start of the year; in this one, I focus on the various analyses and commentaries. Some of them were occasioned by RFK Jr’s appointment of facilitated non-speakers and FC-supporters to the new Inter Autism Agency Coordinating Committee , and others…
Today’s blog post is a follow-up from last week’s article by Tatyana Elleseff titled “ Beyond the Buzzwords: How SLPs Can Evaluate Clinical Trends, Pseudoscience, and Evidence-Based Claims .” Tatyana offered to adapt her Beyond the Buzzwords Evidence-Appraisal Handout Packet (mentioned in the last blog post) to specifically address the topic of FC/S2C/RPM and gave us permission to publish the…
Most of the many FC/RPM/S2C news stories published since my last news roundup in January are the usual fare: miraculous stories of individuals originally considered cognitively disabled, but whose parents always knew they were smart, not getting far with evidence-based therapies and communication tools because of some form of “ apraxia ,” only to have literacy skills unlocked by some form of…
Abstract: In speech-language pathology, unsupported clinical claims often appear credible because they are attached to emotional testimonials, neuroscience language, parent urgency, professional trainings, or popular social media trends. This article provides a structured way to examine those claims without dismissing families, clinicians, or innovation. It reviews common red flags in…
This is the fourth and final blog post in a series analyzing a Facilitated Communication Digest article dated May 1993 and published by Syracuse University’s Institute on Community and Inclusion (ICI) (formerly the Facilitated Communication Institute but currently known as Inclusion and Communication Initiatives). I’ve put links to the previous blog posts in this series below. FC founder Rosemary…
From a 1993 story in the LA Times . It works for some people. Bernard Rimland may have been the first autism expert to say this, but he wasn’t the last. And while it might seem like a big improvement over “It works for everyone” (what the quacks say), “It works for some people” is still bad news for those subjected to facilitated communication (FC) and its variants (Rapid Prompting Method/RPM;…
Today’s blog post is the third in a series exploring when the FC leadership became aware of the significant (and fatal) flaws in their technique (e.g., facilitator cueing and control over letter selection). I’ve been using a May 1993 newsletter article published by Syracuse University’s Institute on Communication and Inclusion titled “Issues of Influence: Some Concerns and Suggestions” as a…
Last spring someone who has been involved in the Telepathy Tapes podcast reached out to me, and we had a phone call primarily centered on the role of cueing in facilitated communication. We spoke, in particular, about Akhil, one of the non-speaking participants in the podcast. My interlocutor felt that Akhil’s typing was so rapid that it could not have been influenced by any cues that his mother…
This is the second in a series exploring the question of when the leaders in the Facilitated Communication (FC) movement knew about the fatal flaw in their technique (e.g., that facilitators, not their clients, were controlling letter selection through physical, visual, and auditory cueing). This series is inspired by a 1993 newsletter I found in my files that was published by Syracuse…
I had a boring 9-to-5 desk job and always wondered whether there are miracles out there in the universe. Naturally, the viral podcast The Telepathy Tapes grabbed my attention—so much so that I wanted to vet its claims for myself and advocate for spelling. Even if just 1% of what the No. 1 podcast in the U.S. presented was true, it was worth exploring. Ky Dickens discussing The Telepathy Tapes on…
Barry Prizant was a no-show at a forum that I mentioned in my last post : a forum at the Boston Higashi School on a variety of Facilitated Communication (FC) known as Spelling to Communicate (S2C). A vociferous group of Higashi parents wanted the school to adopt S2C, and so Howard Shane , Bill Ahearn , and myself were invited to address S2C’s lack of validity. Even in Prizant’s absence, we…
The other day, I was listening to a podcast featuring two Speech/Language Pathologists (SLPs) discussing their concerns about the Telepathy Tapes and Spelling to Communicate (S2C). I enjoyed their discussion and their refreshing willingness to question the claims being made by FC/S2C proponents. At one point in their discussion, they pointed out that studies older than 10-15 years often contain…
There is a new novel out this week that is already all the buzz. It is titled Upward Bound , and it is ostensibly written by a 28-year-old profoundly autistic nonverbal man, Woody Brown. This screenshot from 4/1/26 shows The Today Show host uncritically reviewing a book credited to Woody Brown but written via a form of Facilitated Communication called “Rapid Prompting Method” with “support” from…
Few topics in disability and communication have generated as much controversy as assisted communication methods such as Facilitated Communication and related approaches including Rapid Prompting Method and Spelling to Communicate. At the center of the debate lies a fundamental question: Who is actually authoring the messages? A young man extends a hand toward a letter board held in the air by his…
In a recent podcast (“Uniquely Human”), Dr. Prizant suggested that my work on empty reviews is inconsistent: that one cannot draw conclusions in the absence of evidence, yet I discourage the use of RPM/S2C, for which there is currently no evidence. This essay addresses that claim and clarifies how empty reviews should be interpreted in the context of facilitator-dependent techniques. Image by…
Barry Prizant has gotten back about having Howard Shane and me on the Uniquely Human Podcast—an overture I made on my last blog post . He won’t have us. As he explained on his Facebook page , where I posted a link to that blog post, his show “is designed to lift up the voices of neurodivergent people in respectful ways, based upon lived experience, which is a pillar of evidence based practice,…