Despite Critics, Autistic Youths Still Typing
Jan. 20 -- Autism is like a heavy curtain between its sufferers and the outside world, and when facilitated communication was introduced, it seemed like the curtain had lifted and autistic people were at last able to reveal themselves.
Facilitated communication is an attempt to help autistic children speak by using a "facilitator" to steady their hand as they type words and sentences into a keyboard, expressing their thoughts. The facilitator — or whomever is standing there — is able to read it aloud. It was 11 years ago when facilitated communication first started making waves in the autistic community.
When ABCNEWS' Diane Sawyer interviewed three teenagers about it back in 1991, they told her that facilitated communication had changed their lives. One 16-year-old autistic boy, Jeff, seemed overjoyed at being able to communicate.
"Yes, it has changed my life because now I can let people know that I am intelligent and I am good with words and I care about people," Jeff's facilitator said, reading what the teen had typed into the keyboard. "I love them."
But several leading experts in the field said they tested facilitated communication scientifically and found conclusively that it didn't work — at all — and that well meaning facilitators were unconsciously guiding fingers toward the keys. Still, the families of the three teens that ABCNEWS met, Lucy Harrison, Ben Lehr and Jeff Powell, say they have continued to use facilitated communication and when Good Morning America visited them again recently, each said it was still changing their lives.
'We Didn't Know She Was There'
Lucy Harrison, who was 15 at the time of the first interview, talked about autism when ABCNEWS first met her.
"I wish I was not autistic," Lucy Harrison said through facilitated communication. "I wish I could do all the things other kids do."
Nita Harrison, Lucy's mother, said her daughter's communication astounded the family.
"As she says, 'I am like everyone else inside my body,'" Nita Harrison said."And she is in there, two feet away from us, and we didn't know she was there."
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