The Ghost In The Ouija Board – Facilitated Communication And Rom Houben

NPR -- Story Of Book-Writing Coma Patient Debunked

A few months ago, we reported on a man in Belgium named Rom Houben. He was said to be writing a book more than 20 years after doctors concluded that a car crash had left him in a vegetative state. He gained international fame for supposedly revealing his innermost thoughts through a technique called facilitated communication. Well, now it looks like those initial reports were wrong. Houben’s doctor says a scientific test has shown that his patient cannot answer even simple questions.

Regular listeners to the podcast I do interviews for, the Skeptic Zone, may have heard an old interview with James Randi about facilitated communication which featured on Episode #58 (starting at about 36:18mins in).

Back in 2008, his column on Swift suggested that a documentary, ‘Prisoners of Silence’ wouldn’t be made readily available as it should be -- due to YouTube’s occasional practice of taking down of copyrighted material.

However, Frontline still features the transcript of ‘Prisoners of Silence’ and (as you can see from the link!) a YouTube breakdown of it still features online. There’s a few libraries that still carry VHS copies, like my local – and as I said, it’s found in full online and could probably still be ordered via the site. Whilst facilitated communication has been thoroughly debunked, it’s still clearly has ghosts that haunt the public perception.

Back in my high-school years, we studied both a non-fiction book and a feature film called ‘Annie’s Coming Out’, by Rosemary Crossley and Annie McDonald. It led me to think that facilitated communication was real and it wasn’t until a great many years later that I questioned its validity.

I’ve even been led astray by research more recently, in a university text that was on the book list for students who do the post-graduate course in special education courses for early childhood, primary and secondary education. Called ‘Educating Children with Diverse Abilities‘, it suggests positive appraisals of a pair of poorly conceived and executed studies of facilitated communication.

In Cardinal, Hanson and Wakeham’s study (1996) of facilitated communication (FC), supposedly proficient facilitator/communicator pairs produced fewer than 10% correct answers. Guesses from the list of test words, a list helpfully supplied to the facilitators, outnumbered the correct answers. That result is more consistent with facilitators guessing the words from the list than independent communication on the part of the participants with autism. The fact that there were always observers present in the experimental room who knew the answers does not help the credibility of the authors’ conclusions that they had demonstrated any independent communication. The authors did not, of course, test for the possibility of facilitator control.

Tuzzi, Cemin and Castagna (2004) didn’t even try to validate anything. They analyzed the contents of transcripts of FC sessions selected and supplied to them by three different centers in Italy that used FC. Based their word-frequency counts and similar measures, they concluded, illogically, that the FC was authentic. (Actually, they assumed it all along.) All they showed was that the messages produced while the facilitators did FC differed in style and content from what the facilitators themselves produced when they were not doing FC.

To conclude that the relatively telegraphic typing done under FC, when the rate of output is limited to a few letters a minute, is “autistic writing” does not follow. The same logic led people to attribute the output of automatic writing to spirits or telepathy because the automatic writing was so different from what the writers ordinarily produced.

Ms. PITSAS: I know, for myself, I wanted so hard to believe that it was real, that I wasn’t able to listen to objective thinking about it, because it grabs you emotionally right here and once you’re hooked, I mean, you are hooked. It-- you just-- I don’t think I was capable of rationally thinking about it because I had clues even before we did our study, that there was facilitator influence taking place in other places. People had done studies in Australia and I said, “Oh, we-- that doesn’t happen here. We aren’t using the same-- we aren’t using it the same way. We aren’t holding letter boards in the air. We have them down on the table, so therefore that limits the influence that could be taking place.” Well, I was dead wrong. ‘Prisoners of Silence’, Frontline.

A while back, I received a comment on my blog, but I lost the details of who wrote it -- but because I forwarded it to a friend, I have half a copy of their experiences. I’d say it’s vital reading for reflection on what facilitated communication has meant in other cases than Houben’s:

However, despite the debunking, we in the States, at least, find [facilitated communication] alive and well.  It is still promoted at several universities, not just Syracuse, and there ongoing legal efforts to force it into schools as a legitimate form of assisted communication.  In the 18 months I have worked on four court cases involving FC, including one in which a Michigan couple was accused through FC of raping their daughter for six years.  The father spent 80 days in jail before the case was finally dropped, and the girl’s 13-year-old brother was subjected to an illegal police interrogation without any child protection or lawyers present.  (Among other things, he was falsely told by the police that they had video of him participating in the rapes.)  I know FC continues in Australia, although not being there, it is hard to gauge how widespread it is.  In another case, this one in Chicago about a year ago, a family received $1,000,000 in a medical malpractice claim against a hospital where FC was prescribed instead of a real treatment.

I agree with James Randi’s frustration at how unquestioning support of facilitated communication continues on well past the Frontline documentary being broadcast in the 1990s. I can certainly understand why concern was raised about patients being diagnosed as being in a vegetative state led to Schnakers, et al (2009) writing that ‘the systematic use of a sensitive standardized neurobehavioral assessment scale may help decrease diagnostic error and limit diagnostic uncertainty. Future studies should investigate other factors influencing diagnostic accuracy’. Investigating whether errors are being made certainly shouldn’t be dismissed, just because facilitated communication wasn’t of use.

Is it comforting to think that the media now links facilitated communication to games like oujia boards? That they promote the idea that a simple test can be applied? Well, I don’t really know if it’s going to be that easy a solution. I would have thought the Frontline documentary could have done that. But I’ll certainly keep this recent finding it in mind, if it comes up in discussions in the future.

Select References:

Cardinal DN, Hanson D, & Wakeham J (1996). Investigation of authorship in facilitated communication. Mental retardation, 34 (4), 231-42 PMID: 8828342

Crossley, R. and McDonald, A. (1980). Annie’s Coming Out. London: Penguin Books.

Tuzzi, A., Cemin, M., & Castagna, M. (2004). “Moved deeply I am” Autistic language in texts produced with
Facilitated Communication. Journees internationals d’Analyse statistique des Donnees Textuelles.

Schnakers, C., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Giacino, J., Ventura, M., Boly, M., Majerus, S., Moonen, G., & Laureys, S. (2009). Diagnostic accuracy of the vegetative and minimally conscious state: Clinical consensus versus standardized neurobehavioral assessment BMC Neurology, 9 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2377-9-35

Tagged as: facilitated communciation, James Randi, Links Elsewhere, news, NPR, ouija boards, podcast, Prisoners of Silence, research, Rom Houben, Science, skeptic zone, Skepticism, SWIFT, YouTube