Ms. Rinn:
Thank you for your frank and informative review of "Wretches and Jabberers," the latest installment in the facilitated communication (FC) pseudoscience propaganda juggernaut.
I have met and interacted on multiple occasions with several of the people in the movie, including the main characters. These experiences include having lunch sitting next to Larry Bissonnette, as well as many hours of FC "training" featuring Tracy Thresher, Harvey Lavoy (Thresher's facilitator), Larry Bissonnette, Pascal Cheng (Bissonnette's facilitator), Chammi Rajapatirana, and mother (also his facilitator).
My observations are consistent with your suspicions. I have seen nothing in anything they did to suggest that the typed communications are genuine. What I saw was facilitators controlling the typing. I don't think I just saw what I wanted to see--unless we are to believe that Mr. Rajapatirana, for instance, can type meaningfully while standing up, looking away from the keyboard, and trying to pull his wrist from his mother's grip. Tracy Thresher is perhaps more amazing, being able to type about a video on a screen not visible from his vantage point, but visible to his facilitator. Larry BIssonnette, for his part, seems a very nice man, and not without talents. But when his facilitator was absent, he answered every question with apparently random word repetitions and nodding assent, whether assent was called for or not. Of course, even though every one of these facilitators admits that facilitator control is a problem, none of them seems interested in subjecting their own extraordinary claims to objective testing. They been directly challenged. Apparently, facilitator control only happens to other people.
James Randi FC challenge: http://tinyurl.com/arkag
James Randi "Cruel Farce": http://tinyurl.com/yal738a
A question you might ask is why the Autism Society, which is supposedly in the business of promoting the well-being of people affected by autism, is advertising and profiting from a movie about the single most discredited intervention in the history of developmental disabilities. FC is a technique for which there is not yet, after 30 years, even one methodologically sound, peer-reviewed, objective demonstration of reliability. Dozens of published scientific studies show how and why FC fails. Facilitated Communication is a method which has, tragically, produced more imprisonments due to false accusations of rape than credible scientific demonstrations of effectiveness--the latter number being zero. Shouldn't the Autism Society know better? Shouldn't it be warning people? A note on Autism Society website may explain it all:
"Through the generosity of AMC and Wretches & Jabberers the Autism Society receives 10% of ticket sales."
http://tinyurl.com/3ntevj5
James T. Todd, Ph.D.
Eastern Michigan University
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Feel free to continue your miserable banter in the world of the black and white. The impact it has is inconsequential.
Regards,
Jason Travers, PhD., BCBA-D
University of Massachusetts Amherst