Facilitated Communication and Its Legitimacy—Twenty-First Century Developments

Abstract

By 2001, Facilitated Communication (FC) had largely been empirically discredited as an effective intervention for previously uncommunicative persons with disabilities, especially those with autism and related disorders. Key empirical findings consistently showed that the facilitator and not the client initiated communication. I analyze the extant efficacy literature since 2001, noting that it reveals similar trends to past findings. However, the FC literature since 2001 also shows increasing acceptance of the technique, ignoring empirical findings to the contrary. Further, more recent pro-FC literature has moved beyond acknowledging that FC is “controversial” to a working assumption that it is an effective and legitimate intervention.