May, 2024
A May, 9th article on the Fox 23 News website entitled “Bixby senior diagnosed with autism graduating with straight A's.”
The senior in question, whose potential was unlocked by S2C, “is getting ready to start college.” The article claims that S2C is “also helping others with autism find their voice and passion.”
The article cites his mother as saying:
It’s a whole new world for him. He was in Special Ed with no future. We had no idea what we were going to do for him as an adult. Now he’s going to college, he’s planning a career, doing everything any normal 19-year-old would be doing.
Through S2C generated messages, the senior told reporter Scott Martin that “he’s excited to start college and his path of becoming a neuropsychologist.” When Martin asked him what made him decide to be a neuropsychologist, he purportedly spelled out on his letterboard “I want to help people with trauma like me.”
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.
June, 2024
A June 12th article in a local Long Island Newspaper entitled “Riverhead program helps people with nonverbal autism learn and communicate”
This article reports on the founding of a local Rapid Prompting Method center. While acknowledging that RPM and S2C are controversial, it reduces the controversy to concerns that “they have not been scientifically validated.”
No mention of concerns about facilitator control of messages or of message-passing tests.
A June 17th article in The Holland Sentinel, a regional Michigan newspaper entitled “Christian community for individuals with disabilities planned in Holland township.
The article features a young non-verbal autistic adult who is “ready to live on his own” and “who communicates using the rapid prompting method and a letter board.”
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for RPM or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it
A June 17th article on WBIR.com, an NBC affiliate in Knoxville entitled 'Spelling to Communicate' gives Knoxville man a voice.
The article cites the man’s S2C coach, an occupational therapist by the name of Kelly Howe, as saying that for people like her client, “difficulty speaking stems from a brain-body disconnect” and that the goal of S2C is “to develop his motor skills because… pointing is proving to be more reliable than speaking.” Howe adds: "With 26 letters you have infinite possibilities.”
The article does acknowledge critics who “question whether it’s the voice of the person pointing, or that of the person holding the board” and mentions the warnings by the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA) against its use. But it returns to, and concludes with, the family’s perspective:
I think to myself, 'They clearly have never held the board.' Because for me, that was it. I did not know what letters he was going to poke. I didn’t know his answers," said Jodie [the man’s mother].
A June 24th article in The Comet, a local British newspaper, entitled “Stevenage cyclists help non-speaking people to communicate.”
This article reports on how a group of cyclist raised more than £10,000 for a U.S.-based S2C charity. As it explains:
They were inspired by a non-speaking autistic family member, Thomas Watson, who found his voice through the charity's programme, learning to “talk” at the age of 24 by using a method called Spelling to Communicate, which transformed his life.
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it
July, 2024
A July 14th article in Business Insider entitled “A pointing technique could help nonverbal autistic people communicate.”
The article opens with a description of a 25-year-old woman who has been subjected to S2C since 2020. While it acknowledges the concerns of S2C skeptics, it ultimately appears to side with S2C, citing an infamous 2020 eye-tracking study as validating S2C. (The article also mistakenly claims that the study was published in the highly reputable journal Nature; it was actually published in a much less reputable, pay-to-publish journal, Scientific Reports, one of many owned by the umbrella organization Nature.com).
Furthermore, the article suggests that the messages attributed to the 25-year-old S2Ced woman are truly hers, recounting how she accurately typed out, while her mother held up the letter board, "I have pain in the back of my mouth" and how it turned out that she needed to have her wisdom teeth removed. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that she could have made the source of her discomfort clear through body language, and that her mother could have picked up on that—however subconsciously—and—however subconsciously—cued the message that she attributed--to her daughter.
A July 18th article in Forbes entitled “Inside The Spellers Method’s Work To Get People Listening To Non-Speakers Everywhere.”
This article, which Janyce blogged about here, essentially functions as an infomercial for an offshoot of Spelling to Communicate known as The Spellers Method.
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C and its variants or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it
September, 2024
A September 9th Op-Ed in the San Diego Onion by Speller’s Method co-founder Dawnmarie Gaivin.
Gaivin’s opinion piece is mostly about the neurodiversity acceptance, but the second paragraph is essentially an infomercial for the Speller’s Method (a rebranding of S2C), hyperlinks included:
As co-founder of the Spellers Method alongside Dana Johnson, I have dedicated my life to helping nonspeakers with autism, Down syndrome and apraxia learn to spell and type to communicate. Our work has been showcased in the award-winning documentary “SPELLERS,” as well as the series “Underestimated TV,” both of which highlight the intelligence and untapped potential of nonspeakers once given reliable communication tools.
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C and its variants or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it
A September 19th article in a online news source for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania entitled “‘Opened a new world’: Autistic North Allegheny student breaks through with help of innovation.”
This article recounts how a North Allegheny high school student was opened up via Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) after his mother met a RPM practitioner who had previously used RPM with her own son. High school staff, initially skeptical, have “gone so far as to create two full-time paraprofessional positions to spell with Nick throughout his day, so that he can start getting an appropriate education.”
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for RPM or for any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it
October, 2024
An October 5th BBC news article entitled: Tool promised to help non-verbal people - but did it manipulate them instead?
This article, refreshingly, is broadly critical of FC, citing Janyce and her experience, two prominent FC-critics (Dr. Howard Shane and Dr. James Todd), and the Anna Stubblefield Case. However, when discussing long-time FC user Tim Chan, the article falls into the all-too-common trap of assuming that FCed testimony about the virtues of FC is, in fact, first-person testimony, as opposed to testimony authored by the facilitator:
For Tim Chan, who is unable to speak, facilitated communication is “a lifeline” that allows him to do things he once thought impossible, such as socialising, or studying for his PhD.
“I was presumed incompetent, and ignored or dismissed,” the 29-year-old, who was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, says using a text-to-voice tool in his home in Melbourne.
An October 6th segment on CBS news picks up KQED’s story of the boy with the symphony in his head, which I wrote about last spring.
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for the letterboarding method used by the boy and its variants (a variant of RPM or s2c) or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.
November, 2024
A November 1st article in the Vermont weekly newspaper Seven Days.
It reports on the death of Mark Utter, a nonverbal man with autism who was subjected to facilitated communication starting at age 30:
Throughout his childhood, Utter was labeled "mentally retarded" and treated as though he understood little, if anything, about the world around him. Years later, Utter would astound family members and friends by demonstrating that, in fact, he knew all along what people were saying about him and was capable of deeply creative and complex thoughts.
Purportedly inspired by the pro-FC film Wretches and Jabberers, he purportedly wrote a film called I am In Here: A View of My Daily Life With Good Suggestions for Improvement.
According to his friend and facilitator:
Utter was deeply intuitive and attuned to other people's emotions… For example, he could always sense, without being told, when she had undergone an acupuncture treatment and would remark on its positive effects on her.
The question of whether this purported social intuition is actually a symptom of facilitator cueing goes unasked—and unanswered.
December, 2024
A December 26th article in a local Irish news website (Boyle Today) on the “Annual 5k Fun Run/Walk in aid of children and teenagers with Autism.”
It informs us that “All money raised will goes to RPM [Rapid Prompting Method] which pays for individual or group sessions with a practitioner.”
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for RPM or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.
A December 27th article in a local Tennessee newspaper (the Crossville Chronicle), entitled “FINDING HIS VOICE: Fairfield Glade man with nonverbal autism reveals tremendous verbiage through spelling to communicate program.
It reports on a “cutting-edge therapy,” later revealed to be S2C (Spelling to Communicate), has allowed a man who “does a limited amount of speaking and struggles to express simple thoughts” to be “eloquent and thoughtful in his writing.”
The article claims that there is “research pointing to a disconnect between the brain and body for individuals with autism” (there isn’t) and that “Spelling to Communicate addresses this disconnect by building the purposeful motor skills needed to point to letters, spell words, and ultimately express thoughts and ideas” (it doesn’t)
While his spoken language is limited to “short and often repetitive phrases” that communicate “ wants and needs,” the written language extracted from him via S2C contains “deep thoughts, demonstrate strong social skills. (Yes, according to the body-disconnect version of autism favored by S2C proponents, autism isn’t the social disorder it has been defined as being for the last 8 decades).
Beyond this, anticipating another development in autism news this year (see our last entry, below), one of his messages is this:
Time is showing that nonspeakers have capabilities of intellect created by a hand by a creator somewhere beyond this world. The life nonspeakers live is the miracle of spirituality existing on a tiny scale.
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.
A December 28th article in the Ohio news website Cleveland.com entitled “‘I’m free’: New communication method finally gives people with autism a voice.”
It describes how, for the first two decades, a young woman named Talia Zimmerman wasn’t able to communicate using more than a single word or two, and only for basic wants and needs: words like “water” and “ice cream.” But then her mother read the S2C-promoting book Underestimated and met a local boy who had purportedly been unlocked by it, so they did, too, at the rate of $85 an hour.
The article notes the evidence against “a related program, called Facilitated Communication,” and also acknowledges that S2C also has its detractors, including the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA). It even quotes ASHA as saying that S2C “strips people of their human right to independent communication because the technique relies on an aide for prompting;” and Diane Paul, ASHA’s senior director of clinical issues for ASHA, as asking “why the letter board (or keyboard) needs to be held by the facilitator, and not placed on a table or easel.”
But then the article turns back to the mother, who is convinced it works: “This is the only thing that has worked,” she said. “You watch these young adults spelling – I don’t know what else people need.” It also happily attributes S2C-generated words to Talia, with no appreciation for the questions raised by the ASHA statement about whether they are really hers:
[W]hen asked recently how she felt the first time someone spoke to her as an adult, Talia… replied: “I felt a sense of relief. Someone finally believes in me. I’m free.”
The article proceeds to provide a description of how S2C works, noting that “autistic individuals typically have poor motor skills, which makes pointing at letters or using a keyboard very challenging,” but not the pointing at the larger letters of letterboards. (In fact, there is no evidence of motor-based inability to point in autism). It also claims that pointing to letterboards “pointing to a letter board uses gross motor skills, powered by large muscles” [it isn’t], and not fine motor skills, which are typically significantly impaired by autism.” (in fact, some individuals with autism have fine motor difficulties, some have gross motor difficulties, some have both, and some have neither).
Regardless Talia Zimmerman, has “progress[ed] to a keyboard, using a single finger to type words into a computer.”
The local S2C practitioners who work with Talia insist that they “are absolutely not prompting their clients.” One of them stated, as “the biggest proof” of this “is when they tell us something we don’t know.” She also notes that “The goal for every client… is independent communication, initiated by the client.” She makes no mention, however, of ever conducting a simple facilitator-blinded message-passing test.
Tellingly, the article notes that “Talia, as well as most participants in the program, are far more proficient at spelling when they’re working with their professional partners than with parents, siblings and others.”
The article also notes that it’s unclear “where Talia.. learned how to spell and acquired so much knowledge,” quoting her mother as saying “She’s never picked up a book, never surfed the internet that I’m aware of,” said Lisa. Her father speculates that “perhaps she learned about the Mona Lisa while watching a TV program with him on Italy.”
“She picks up information in ways that other people don’t,” he said. “I think her brain absorbs information at a greater depth than other people.”
The possibility that the information attributed to Talia through S2C is actually knowledge held by her facilitators, and not by her, goes unmentioned.
A December 30th article in Spectrum News entitled Nina: A Nonspeaker Who Found Her Voice.
A re-publication of author Debra Brause’s S2C-promoting piece in Psychology Today, which I blogged about earlier.
No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.
Last but not least…
Commencing September 3rd and still going, a podcast that assumes that RPM/S2C are valid and reanalyzes facilitator influence as telepathic communication.
It has ascended the ratings on Spotify to become one of the most popular podcasts in the U.S.
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