Articles tagged with "silence"

The documentary Prisoners of Silence marked one of the first critical investigations of Facilitated Communication (FC) that aired on prime-time television in the United States. Because the mechanics of FC has changed very little since its inception, the documentary is still relevant today. Not only did Prisoners of Silence capture the religious-like fervor of proponents at FC conferences hosted at Syracuse University, the documentary also debunked the idea that individuals using a one-finger hunt-and-peck style of typing can accurately select letters to spell out words without looking at the board (they cannot…no one can). It also showed FC founder Rosemary Crossley “facilitating” with someone in a coma.

Someone asked me recently how I thought FC had changed since the early 1990s. My initial reaction: not a whole lot. If you're talking about the mechanics of the technique itself, very little has changed. That's why the reliably controlled studies to explore FC authorship conducted between 1990 and 2014 remain relevant. Facilitators still use physical, verbal, and auditory cues to influence and control letter selection. With some variants of FC, like Spelling to Communicate (S2C) and Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) the boards are generally held in the air, something critics of FC raised concerns about in the earliest studies of FC, but proponents chose/choose to ignore. In addition, facilitators (still) insist they can provide these cues to their clients without influencing or controlling letter selection. There was and still is no reliably controlled evidence to prove proponent claims that FC (in any of its forms) produces independent communication (e.g., communication that is free from facilitator control). And facilitators, still, prefer to market FC through popular media rather than face scrutiny under reliably controlled conditions (e.g., message passing tests that screen facilitators from test protocols).

After many months of radio silence, the odd Global Flourishing group that I wrote about last year briefly stirred before going quiet again. Rest assured, if anything comes of this, I'll be watching it closely and writing about it. Here are the messages that appeared on the group's Discord channel last week: