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1:30am May 10, 2015
Anonymous asked: I was wondering, what is your opinion on the Rapid Prompting Method? There are many anecdotes that show it allowing non-verbal autistic people to communicate, but I have also read criticisms of it just being another kind of Facilitated Communication, and it is not really the autistic people communicating. Thank you for reading, and if you choose to answer this, thank you as well!

madeofpatterns:

withasmoothroundstone:

I think that like FC it has both great promise and great danger. I know that both FC and RPM can be life savers. I also know the potential for messed up things happening kids high in both. That is due to the collaborative nature of the communication, and can’t be gotten rid of, only worked around. Unfortunately most RPM and FC practitioners refuse to acknowledge the dangers and find ways to work around them as best they can. FC can be real and unreal and in between, so can RPM.

RPM people largely seem to believe that avoiding physical contact solves the problem. 

FC people largely seem to believe that fading the physical contact to a place other than the hand solves the problem.

Which seems to mean both groups think the problem is physically moving someone’s hand somewhere and pretending they did it. And that’s… really not the main problem.

(And, to the extent that that’s a problem, it’s *also* a problem in RPM, because RPM uses echopraxia to develop motor skills.)

I remember the last time I was spontaneously able to talk (it happens on rare occasions when I’m extremely ill, and robs me of literally all other cognitive resources and is not under my control) I wondered if I would stay like that. As in, stay fluctuating between speech and typing, rather than being only able to type, if that. But then speech disappeared as suddenly and unexpectedly as it came, and left only cuss words in its wake. And I felt a thousand times better when I woke up and speech was gone. For me, speech is an indicator of deep dysfunction somewhere in my brain.

What bothers me is that people believe you can be influenced in tiled communicating but not in speech. It’s much easier to manipulate my speech than my typing. And nobody gives a shit when that happens.

My friend (speaks but greatly struggles to do so and I’m one of the few who notices her struggle) was on a panel with two other auties at a conference.

One, Larry Bissonette, typed using FC but vocalize to confirm or deny what he really meant. I know Larry, he’s for real, and my friend could also see that instantly. She also felt he was"her type" of autistic person and therefore easy to read.

Everyone else in the room assumed the other guy in the panel was more like her because he could speak. The other guy was basically repeating what his mom taught him to repeat. The science saw him as a huge success story. My friend found it sad, he couldn’t answer simple questions without checking with his mother.

And yet it is Larry whose communication gets questioned all the time. And the robotic guy who could talk never gets his communicating questioned at all.

May have responded to the wrong post but was trying to get this of of my other blog.