Facilitated Communication and Autism Ranking:

Personal Accounts

This section provides details of personal accounts of the use of facilitated communication for autistic people.

Personal accounts can be useful sources of information about the intervention but are not as scientifically valid or reliable as research trials. This may be especially true where the accounts are published by an organisation which might gain a financial advantage from the take-up of the intervention.

Please note that the views expressed in these personal accounts do not necessarily represent our views.

The Institute on Communication and Inclusion website has published a number of positive personal accounts of facilitated communication for autistic people.

Boynton (2012), on the other hand, has provided an account of how, as a facilitator, she persuaded herself that Betsy, her aid user, was using facilitated communication to tell her that she had been sexually abused. She explains how the allegations of abuse were proved to be false and that she therefore had to accept that she had, however unwittingly, been creating those false allegations herself.

Updated

16 Jun 2022

Last Review

01 May 2017

Next Review

01 Aug 2023