Facilitated communication and Rom Houben

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By Sandra L Hubscher
Article ID: 1347

Editor’s note: The author submitted this article with the following private message. It’s important enough that, with the author’s permission, I’m posting it here:

“I enjoyed writing this article in that I enjoy writing, but other than that, really I hated it. The subject is so irredeemably sad, and filled with anguish for so many, that I wouldn’t want to write something like this again anytime soon. It’s hard to imagine facing these parents and telling them these things. I know they’ve probably all heard it before and none of them will likely take the time to read this, but even if they’ve been slapped a hundred times before by this information, the 101st isn’t much lessened.”

Update 03/02/2010:

Months after the sensational news of Rom Houben’s ‘awakening’ via facilitated communication (FC) from a decades-long, traumatic brain injury-induced silence, there has come a retraction from his physician, Steven Laureys. After rigorous testing involving a number of facilitators and their clients, including Mr. Houben and his facilitator Linda Wouters, Dr. Laureys has declared:

“We did not have all the facts before. To me, it’s enough to say that this method [FC] doesn’t work.”

Three facilitators and their clients were involved in the testing, which was carried out by Dr. Laureys and others, including a Belgian skeptics group. In Mr. Houben’s case, he was shown or heard a list of 15 objects without his facilitator being present. When the facilitator was readmitted and Mr. Houben was asked to list the objects, there was not a single success.

It is important to note, as Belgian Skeptics pointed out, that this was not a test of Mr. Houben, but rather of the method of communication others have imposed on him. Mr. Houben’s brain scans reveal activity very much like that of an uninjured brain and many, including Dr. Laureys, continue to have hope that they will find a method for him to reach out and ‘speak’ to the world.

In November of 2009, a sensational story appeared out of Belgium: Rom Houben, a man who as a result of a catastrophic car accident had been in a persistent vegetative state for more than twenty years, was re-diagnosed as being fully conscious, indeed conscious for the whole twenty-plus years! Furthermore, he was now communicating to the world by typing on a large touch screen, giving words to the years of imprisonment in his own body.

The story twinges our imagination wonderfully and terrifyingly – entrapment in plain sight, helplessness, rescue and reunion – hope to all of those in dire circumstances. Immediate to the story’s release, another narrative developed among skeptics – unwitting deceit and good intentions gone awry. While the diagnosis by Steven Laureys, Houben’s neurologist, is best left to fellow neurologists, the technique of facilitated communication, the method used on Houben to bring his ‘words’ out of him by typing, is a well-studied and understood phenomenon,  and is, unfortunately, a fraud.

Facilitated communication, first developed in Australia in the 1970’s, has now spread worldwide and purportedly allows those with disorders like cerebral palsy, severe mental retardation, autism and others, to undertake the otherwise impossible task of communication.

How does this work? A facilitator holds the hand or arm of the impaired person or client, supposedly giving the strength and steadiness necessary for the client to type with a single finger, one letter at a time. A video of Houben, including his facilitated communication, can be seen here:

While it is possible that Houben’s facilitator is willfully perpetrating a heartless con, it is more likely in this case, and in all uses of facilitated communication, that the facilitator’s actions are attributable to the ideomotor effect. Familiar to anyone who’s seen a Ouija board in action, the ideomotor effect is defined as purposeful movement by a person not consciously aware of his movement. That is to say, when a person wishes a given outcome (a ‘yes’ answer on a Ouija board, for example), that person’s hand will move to produce that answer, without the person feeling any conscious movement.

Scientific testing of facilitated communication has disrobed the technique’s mystique and, unsurprisingly, double-blinded experiment has produced embarrassing failures among the facilitators. Information given to the client, with the facilitator blinded or absent, could not be later reproduced by the facilitator helping the client. Apologists to the technique claim that factors such as the duress imposed by doubters, who indirectly threaten to remove rights gained only by the impaired person’s communication, wreck the client’s performance and strain the special bond between facilitator and client. Skeptics reply that this is a common complaint of paranormalists who find they have failed under laboratory conditions and that, furthermore, impaired people who have attended college and given public speeches, all thanks to facilitated communication, should be already acclimatized to whatever stresses may be produced by testing.

Take the many professional associations such the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the Association for Behavior Analysis International, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, and, most notably, the American Psychological Association. All have denounced facilitated communication, saying, for example, “facilitated communication is not a scientifically valid technique¹” and that “its use is unwarranted and unethical.²”

There are astonishing and inspiring cases, however, of individuals communicating with great difficulty and only with much assistance. Helen Keller, when first developing her communications skills, relied heavily on Annie Sullivan. One of the greatest living physicists of our time, Stephen Hawking, communicates through a computerized keyboard. Examples such as these are many, and clearly valid, but facilitated communication, unfortunately, is not valid.

Rom Houben’s case is a profoundly tragic one, whatever the outcome, and it is right and natural to sympathize with his family and understand their wish to have him returned to them, even if what’s returned is only his mind. But, good wishes do not make reality. Houben, whatever his mental state, is not communicating to the world – his helper is. Many parents have clung to this technique because it is the only thing that –supposedly – brings their children back to them. It may be tempting to retreat and keep silent, because the only outcome of skepticism is to, once again, take away these people’s loved ones by putting the muted fog of silence back over them.

Facilitated communication not only twists the real work that medical professionals must do to truly help impaired people, but it puts words into the mouths of those who, in other circumstances, would vociferously resent having an identity superimposed onto their own.

References

1. American Psychological Association. Council Policy Manual: M. Scientific Affairs. Part VI, Facilitated Communication.

2. Association for Behavior Analysis International. Statement on Facilitated Communication, 1995.

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