[Editor's note: In August, the American Psychological Association passed a resolution on facilitated communication which stated, in part:

Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that facilitated communication is not a scientifically valid technique for individuals with autism or mental retardation. In particular, information obtained via facilitated communication should not be used to confirm or deny allegations of abuse or to make diagnostic or treatment decisions.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that APA adopts the position that facilitated communication is a controversial and unproved communicative procedure with no scientifically demonstrated support for its efficacy (APA, 1994).

The following two pieces were written at our request for the authors' reactions to the APA resolution.

Imagine, if you can, the following situation. You and I are two brown-eyed people, arguing about whether blue-eyed people can fly. I say that they can, at least some of them... you argue strongly that they can't. Suddenly, in the middle of our debate, a blue-eyed person flies through the open window. The argument, as currently constructed, is over. Now, you could quite reasonably change the terms of the argument. You could, for example, argue that the person that just flew in the window is the only blue-eyed person in the world who can fly. We could also argue about what it takes to teach a person with blue eyes to fly, etc. But, unless you want to postulate that the person's flying through the window was some sort of special effect, some slick illusion, you have to stop denying the validity of the "blue-eyed flying phenomenon".

The APA, or at least the band of psychologists that speak for the APA about FC, doesn't seem to understand that, negative studies notwithstanding, people labeled by members of their own organization as having autism and other related severe disabilities are using FC to communicate. It is clear that some studies have validated the communication abilities of people who are being physically assisted to communicate while other people have progressed from physical dependence to independent communication.

I believe that there's more to the psychologists' denunciation of FC than simply their concern that there are not enough validation studies. Where were the calls for caution when the developers of the SIBIS device (See note 1) were holding press conferences announcing that thousands of people with self-injurious behavior were in need of its' electronic wonder? Why doesn't the APA call for studies to question the validity of intelligence testing, the results of which, in the real world, are almost universally disregarded for any other purpose than to segregate and separate persons with intellectual handicaps?

While I understand that the APA has the right to issue resolutions, even misguided ones, like the one on FC, I do have suspicions about the motivations of at least some of the proponents of the FC condemnation. I believe that some of my behavior analysis colleagues are piqued that people outside the operant camp looked inside the "black box" (See Note 2) and found something important that we had missed for lo these many years. I think that many of them find it hard to accept that they have worked with these folks for 25 to 30 years and weren't able to accomplish, in fact didn't even try to accomplish, what a bunch of special educators have achieved. It must be very disconcerting to face the fact that at least some of the people with autism that we subjected to our simplistic "ignore and redirect programs" were smarter than many of us. At least some of them were behaving according to complicated, idiosyncratic rules they had invented rather than merely engaging in simple "escape" or "attention seeking" behavior.

It has always been hard for those of us raised on books such as Behavior of Organisms and Schedules of Reinforcement to acknowledge that phenomena as complicated as FC even exist and that it might be necessary to take into account the specific characteristics of the organism, and possibly even have to talk to it, to really understand its behavior. Many of us were taught that the way to measure behavior was to convert a key peck or bar press into an electrical pulse which was then used to move an ink pen on a cumulative recorder. Its obviously difficult to apply this type of analysis to FC. Its too bad they don't make really big Skinner Boxes. I just know if I could picture the person with the disability and the facilitator sitting in this large box with lights blinking on and off and reinforcers rolling down a chute, as the person communicates ... it would all make more sense. I just know it would.