Facilitated communication was promoted from the late 1980s as a technique letting non-verbal people, particularly some autistic and intellectually disabled individuals, communicate by pointing at letters on a keyboard or board while a facilitator physically supported their arm or hand. A wave of controlled studies through the 1990s and 2000s tested whether the resulting messages actually originated from the person being facilitated.
Facts
Debunked
Key FindingControlled studies, including blind conditions in which the facilitator and the person being facilitated were shown different pictures or questions, repeatedly found that typed messages matched what the facilitator, not the person being facilitated, could see or know; by 2005 more than fifty controlled studies had reached this conclusion, the mechanism identified as an unconscious ideomotor effect akin to a Ouija board, and the American Psychological Association stated in 1994 that there was no scientifically demonstrated support for the technique's efficacy. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
Why did facilitated communication persist for years after it was discredited?
Despite more than fifty controlled studies by 2005 showing facilitators, not the person being facilitated, controlled the typed messages, and the American Psychological Association stating in 1994 there was no scientifically demonstrated support for the technique, some practitioners and family members continued to use and defend it for years afterward. The sources consulted here do not settle how much of that persistence reflects genuine belief formed from specific favorable cases versus institutional and emotional investment that made abandoning the technique difficult.
What would resolve this A study of practitioner and family decision-making that traces why individual cases and institutions continued after the aggregate controlled evidence became clear, rather than only re-testing whether the technique itself produces authentic communication.
History and sociology of science, clinical psychologyWikipedia: Facilitated Communication
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