Facilitated Communication: up close and personal

Time for my promised close, critical look at specific instances of facilitated communication—FC for short.

But first, a preliminary note.  In being critical in what is an extremely sensitive area, I don’t want to reveal names of kids and parents. I’ll provide links to material that’s been made publicly available–stuff posted on the Internet, mostly by or in collaboration with family members. But in what I write here, I’ll be avoiding names or abbreviating them.

Why is Facilitated Communication making a comeback? (Part II–a very bleak post)

It’s now time, in this series on autism, neurodiversity, and language learning, to return to two key criteria for autism in the most recent DSM (the DSM V), each of them tapping into deficits in what’s called Joint Attention:

• Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions.
• Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, ranging, for example, from poorly integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures; to a total lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication.