Articles tagged with "facilitator"

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).

Since the explosion in popularity of the podcast The Telepathy Tapes soon after it was released, creator Ky Dickens appears to have quickly realised that her intention to have a break between seasons was not going to be in the best interests of maintaining the attention of the many listeners she had attracted in a very short amount of time. And so, at the end of Season 1 after 10 weeks of weekly releases, Ky announced that she would be releasing bi-weekly interviews, called The Telepathy Tapes Talk Tracks, to bridge the gap to Season 2.

The Telepathy Tapes is a 10+ episode podcast series that was released in September 2024. Created and hosted by Ky Dickens, Season 1 is described as daring to… “explore the profound abilities of non-speakers with autism - individuals who have long been misunderstood and underestimated”. Dickens has a varied directing career in advertising and film. Her film work is predominantly documentary projects, where she usually serves as the writer, producer, and director. Issues around health equity have been her main output since 2017, so the topic of autism is not entirely out of left field for Dickens. However, the profound abilities that Dickens' refers to in this podcast are not the conventional tropes of Autistic savants or prodigies in the fields of mathematics or art. Instead, Dickens contemplates whether her subjects have paranormal gifts. Specifically (as the podcast name indicates) telepathy, but also astral projection (see episode 3), mediumship (see episode 2), talking to god (see episode 7), and pronosticating (see episodes 5 and 7).

This article is a brief introduction to facilitated communication (FC) - what it is, and what harm it can do for a person being facilitated. I will also give some guidance on what you can do to help.

The last time I wrote about Highden Temple, I noted that Bruce Lyon had been able to escape public and media scrutiny despite Highden's association with the controversial International School of the Temple Arts (ISTA) organisation.