Facilitated Communication Disabilities

Tasks, like taking a bath or brushing your teeth, are commonplace for those who live a fairly mainstream life. Those who have disabilities, however, live in a decidedly different reality. Everyday responsibilities for life become a strenuous burden on those who live with disabilities, even borderline impossible in some situations. A common illustration would be vocalizing; while the average person can easily verbalize feelings or emotions, someone with a communicative disability is silenced, sometimes even for life. While there are various safe techniques used today to aid people with communication disabilities, there are also dangerous ones; a popular, yet controversial, method used today is facilitated communication. Facilitated communication is a
The most notable experiment that centered around facilitated communication was conducted with forty college volunteers at Harvard. After the volunteers were taught how to correctly administer facilitated communication, they then went through a series of trails that recorded their interactions with a disabled volunteer. Once the research was completed, scientists were amazed to see that a majority of the messages produced from the sessions were subconsciously influenced by the college volunteers; facilitated messages seemed no more than just an "ouija board phenomenon” (Calculator). In spite of this, the experiment's findings were excellent proof in proving why in some instances a supposedly bilingual patient would only facilitate Spanish messages with a Spanish facilitator and English messages with an American facilitator (Simpson). If the bilingual patient truly was facilitating his own messages, it would not have mattered if he was facilitating Spanish messages to the American facilitator or vice