Facilitated Communication

Facilitated communication training (FCT) is a strategy for teaching individuals with severe communication impairments to use communication aids with their hands.

Practices very much like facilitated communication had emerged from time to time around the world with particular people (e.g., Oppenheim 1973), but its development as a technique of general application dates from its rediscovery in Australia in 1975 by Rosemary Crossley and Anne McDonald and its adoption in the United States by Douglas Biklen. Crossley and Biklen also suggested that the high proportion of people previously regarded as intellectually impaired who had been enabled to communicate through facilitation cast considerable doubt on traditional views on the nature of the condition.

From the outset, FCT was surrounded by controversy. Many people continued to assert that the communications said to be coming from the person with communication impairment were in fact simply unconscious projections by the facilitator. An extensive bibliography deals with the conflicting studies on the validation of these communications. Two books of essays dealing with the controversy are Shane (1994) and Biklen and Cardinal (1997). Arguments became particularly pointed in the 1990s when many allegations of sexual abuse were made though facilitated communication. The method was condemned by the American Psychological Association in 1994 as a “controversial and unproved communicative procedure” and was described by one critic as “an unacceptable challenge to professional belief systems” (Shane 1993). Evidence of clients successfully achieving communication was condemned as anecdotal.

[Page 704]The debate continues, but differing epistemologies and presuppositions make it unlikely that any professional consensus will emerge. FCT continues to be used by a number of people around the world, assisted by the emerging evidence of increasing numbers of facilitated communication users who have graduated to independence. In the section on facilitated communication in the 1998 edition of their widely used textbook on augmentative and alternative communication, for example, Beukelman and Mirenda describe one long-term user: