When Silence Speaks: The Harmful Pseudoscience of Facilitated Communication
The Stubblefield case in ‘Tell Them You Love Me’ highlights the wide array of potential victims who can be harmed by promoting pseudoscientific methods of communication.
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WARNING: This article contains spoilers.
About the Author
Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and author. He is a consulting editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, where he writes the “Behavior & Belief” column. He is also one of the founders of facilitatedcommunication.org, a website offering accurate information about FC, RPM, and S2C.
The new Netflix documentary Tell Them You Love Me represents a much-needed return to reality in a world largely inhabited by stories of miraculously discovered literacy among nonspeaking people. Early reviews have described the film as “bizarre,” “chilling,” and “painful”—appropriate reactions given its content. The documentary offers a rare look into the dangers of a long-discredited method of communication that, nonetheless, remains popular to this day. Interwoven with complex issues of race, power, and consent, at its core lies “facilitated communication,” a pseudoscientific practice that continues to shatter families and exploit disabled people.
At the center of the story is Anna Stubblefield, a former philosophy professor at Rutgers University-Newark. Stubblefield gained widespread publicity in 2015 when she was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison for the aggravated sexual assault of Derrick Johnson, a 33-year-old severely disabled man with cerebral palsy who is unable to speak. An appellate court later reversed Stubblefield’s conviction based on evidence she was barred from presenting at trial. After 18 months behind bars, Stubblefield was released and subsequently pleaded guilty to third-degree aggravated criminal sexual contact to avoid a retrial.
Despite her plea, Stubblefield insists she is innocent, maintaining that Johnson, through facilitated communication, seduced her and consented to sexual intercourse.
Articulate Typing
Facilitated communication (FC) was first introduced by the Australian disabilities advocate Rosemary Crossley. In the early 1990s, Douglas Biklen, a professor of education at Syracuse University, brought the technique to the United States and founded the Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse. The basic premise of FC posits that many nonspeaking people with cerebral palsy or severe autism have broken bodies but intact minds. Contrary to prior assessments, these people are believed to have sophisticated language abilities hindered by their physical limitations. However, if their hands or arms are supported by another person—a trained facilitator—nonspeaking individuals are able to type out messages on a keyboard.
The early results were astonishing. People who had never spoken a complete sentence were suddenly writing poetry and novels with the assistance of their facilitators, and FC began to spread like wildfire. However, the involvement of another person in the process—the facilitator—raised obvious questions about who was really typing. Peer-reviewed studies using simple blinding techniques began to emerge, and the results were devastating.
In a typical experiment, researchers placed the non-speaking individual and the facilitator at a table with a barrier between them so that each could be shown pictures of familiar objects, but they could not see each other’s pictures. When both saw the same picture, such as a shoe, all was fine, and “s-h-o-e” was typed. However, when shown different images, the typed word invariably matched what the facilitator, not the nonspeaking person, had seen. Across hundreds of trials, there were virtually no correct responses independently made by the nonspeaking individuals. People who had supposedly been writing sophisticated essays through FC could not identify everyday objects in controlled tests, revealing that the facilitators were the actual authors of the typed messages.
As shocking as these early studies were, their outcomes might have been anticipated. The promoters of FC had failed to adequately address two glaring questions. First, where did this literacy come from? How did they acquire their language skills without ever speaking or receiving the kind of formal education we all get? Second, how could these people manage to type using a hunt-and-peck method without even looking at the keyboard? Videos of FC sessions showed that while facilitators consistently watched the keyboard, the nonspeaking person was often looking elsewhere. How was this possible?
In a foreshadowing of the Stubblefield case, the controversy became intensified when accusations of sexual abuse were typed out on the keyboards of users. In several instances, accusations led to families being separated as accused parents were either jailed or ordered to leave their homes while court proceedings unfolded. It suddenly became essential to verify whether the communications genuinely originated from the nonspeaking person. Ultimately, these cases went unproven because the messages could not be validated, but not before families were torn apart and reputations damaged.
In 1992, the PBS series Frontline aired an episode titled “Prisoners of Silence” that reported on the rapid spread of the technique in the US, as well as the research that discredited it. Soon after, many professional organizations and advocacy groups including the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Autism Speaks, and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), issued policy statements against the use of FC. Currently, over thirty professional, educational, and advocacy groups worldwide have policies opposing the use of FC.
Floating Letter Boards
By the early 2000s, many professionals in the field of disabilities assumed FC had been quashed, and that it was safe to turn their attention to other things. But they were wrong.
For many parents of nonspeaking children, the promise of FC—an intelligent, articulate child—was just too great to give up. This continued use of FC was further encouraged by filmmakers and media outlets desperate for feel-good stories. In 2004, Academy Award winning director Gerardine Wurzburg released the documentary film Autism is a World, which profiled FC-user Sue Rubin, a woman with severe autism who, with the aid of her facilitator, went on to graduate with a BA in History from Whittier College. The film was nominated for an Academy Award and shown repeatedly on CNN. Douglas Biklen of the Syracuse University Facilitated Communication Institute co-produced the film. In 2010, Wurzburg released another documentary, Wretches & Jabberers, focusing on two other FC users, with Biklen again as a co-producer. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Syracuse University continued to host the Facilitated Communication Institute, and other universities also sponsored FC training. In 2010, the Syracuse center was renamed to the Institute on Communication and Inclusion but continued to promote FC and its variants.
Today, variants of facilitated communication, rather than FC itself, are more popular. The negative research findings of the 1990s and the critical statements from professional organizations contributed to the waning interest in FC, but this decline also provided an opportunity for similar methods to emerge in different shapes and with different names. Furthermore, if they did it properly this time, the new purveyors of pseudoscience could avoid the pitfalls of the past.
The first version of what would become the new dominant approach was the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), developed by Indian educator Soma Mukhopadhyay for use with her own son. In this method, the teacher is quite active in getting the pupil to point to a letter board, which the teacher holds suspended in the air. Because the typical user is nonspeaking, the teacher calls out the letters and words. Soma now works at the Helping Autism through Learning and Outreach (HALO) center in Austin, Texas, where she offers the SOMA®RPM method to individuals and provides training for practitioners of RPM.
The latest variation, which is spreading quickly in the US and abroad, is known as “spelling to communicate,” or “S2C.” Its primary promoter is Elizabeth Vosseller, a speech-language pathologist who operates a center in Herndon, Virginia. Her version resembles RPM but includes a variation where the nonspeaking individual uses a pencil to poke the letters of a stencil held in the air by the communication partner. Some students move on to use a keyboard like those used with FC, but the keyboard always floats in the air, held by someone else. Vosseller promotes spelling to communicate even though her professional organization officially opposes its use.
These letter board methods differ from FC in that no one touches the nonspeaking person, yet they retain a fundamental issue that raises suspicion: the involvement of a second person. Even after many years of practice, users of RPM and S2C still require someone to hold the board in the air. Videos of this method raise a number of questions: 1) Why can’t the letter board be placed on a table or an easel to allow the nonspeaking person to work independently? 2) Is the communication partner calling out the words and letters accurately? 3) Is the finger touching the board or the board touching the finger? The letter board is never entirely steady, and the communication partners often seem to influence the results through verbal cues and movements of the board. Finally, there is the same basic question that plagued FC: Where does this sudden fluency come from?
Learning the Lessons of the Past
The proponents of the new letter board methods appear to have taken lessons from both the successes and failures of the previous FC era. One of the successes of the past was the strategic use of the media to tell heartwarming stories of triumph over adversity. The genre of recovery-from-autism memoirs has a long history, and recently a number of autism recovery books about users of RPM or S2C have been published. Last year, the film Spellers was released, inspired in part by the book Underestimated: An Autism Miracle by J. B. Handley, a former manager of a venture capital firm who has a nonspeaking son with autism. The film, which is available on YouTube, profiles a number of people who were suddenly discovered to be remarkably literate when introduced to S2C, and features emotional interviews with their parents.
The news media continues to crave stories of miraculous success and frequently presents them without a hint of skepticism. Soma Mukhopadhyay was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes as early as 2003. In 2022, Elizabeth Bonker—a nonspeaking young woman with autism who began using FC and later became a speller, typing on a keyboard held in the air by her mother—delivered the valedictorian speech for her graduating class at Rollins College. She achieved a 4.0 GPA, and her speech—presumably typed with the assistance of a communication partner—was pre-recorded. The video of her address, articulated by a computerized voice while she stood silently at the podium, went viral and was credulously reported by NPR, CNN, USA Today, ABC News, and many other outlets.
Another lesson learned from past experiences appears to be that objective tests of authorship pose a threat to the purported miracle of the letter board. The FC controversy demonstrated that a simple blinded test could determine the true author of the typing. To date, proponents of RPM and spelling to communicate have assiduously avoided participating in these tests. Vaishniavi Sarathy, who holds a PhD in Chemistry, states in the movie Spellers, “When a child is communicating, we don’t need the science.” Sarathy, also the mother of Sid, a nonspeaking child featured in the film, says, “I don’t want the science. I want Sid to talk. I don’t care about the science. I know that Sid is talking.” This attitude is common among letter board users. As a result, these methods have been used for over two decades without any definitive evidence that the typing is actually controlled by the nonspeaking individual.
Are the Communication Partners Lying?
When the first tests of FC revealed that the messages were coming from the facilitators, observers wanted to know how this was possible. The facilitators appeared to be unaware that they were doing the typing. How could that be? Subsequent research has shown just how easy it is to produce this kind of unconscious control. Both FC and the letter board methods are a Ouija-like phenomenon. Those who have used a Ouija board know that, having two people involved—holding a planchette, holding hands over a keyboard, or working with a letter board in the air—leads to confusion over who is in charge. Ouija board players often claim, “I’m not doing it. You must be doing it!” Additionally, the ideomotor response is a well-documented phenomenon illustrating how, upon receiving a suggestion, a person acting alone can unconsciously perform movements in the desired direction. Ideomotor effects have been implicated in hypnosis, dowsing, automatic writing, and several other phenomena.
Finally, these unconscious actions are reinforced by the philosophy advocated by the FC/RPM/S2C community. Decades ago, Douglas Biklen coined the slogan “presume competence.” In an effort to show respect for people with disabilities, Biklen suggested that all people should be approached with the assumption that they are intelligent and literate. While this may sound like an admirable philosophy, this assumption introduces an explicit bias. Contrary to Biklen’s view, avoiding confirmation bias when assessing an individual’s capabilities requires maintaining objectivity and presuming neither competence nor incompetence. Of course, many of the people who are presuming competence—the parents of nonspeaking people and their family members—are deeply invested in affirming competence.
The Many Victims of the Anna Stubblefield Case
The events of the Stubblefield case transpired between 2009 and 2011, but the threat of shattered lives is still very real today. In 2018, a Miami man spent 35 days in jail and was barred from seeing his family for months based on false allegations obtained through FC that he sexually assaulted his 7-year-old son. The Stubblefield case is extreme in many respects, but it highlights the wide array of potential victims that can be harmed by promoting pseudoscientific methods of communication.
The main victim of this case is, of course, Derrick Johnson. He was not capable of consenting to sexual intercourse—nor was he capable of understanding the implications of such a decision—and, as a result, he was sexually abused by Anna Stubblefield. In addition, Stubblefield violated Derrick’s inherent dignity by shaping him into a contrived persona.
Derrick’s mother, Daisy, and his brother, John, were also profoundly violated. They brought a white university professor into their lives, entrusting Derrick to her care. In return, they were deceived with a fabricated story about their son and brother, leading them to endure a roller coaster ride of changing demands and expectations. Their trust was violated in dramatic fashion, and Derrick was left worse off than before he met Stubblefield. Throughout this ordeal, the family endured not-so-subtle racism and disrespect.
Stubblefield’s family are also victims. At the time of her arrest, she was married with two children. Whatever weaknesses there may have been in her marriage, she reported that separation was not under discussion before this incident. However, soon after her arrest, her marriage dissolved, and the children were denied access to their mother for extended periods. Two families were left permanently damaged.
Finally, while it’s difficult to extend sympathy to Stubblefield, the film portrays her in a sympathetic light—perhaps more so than she deserves. Much of the first half of Tell Them You Love Me is devoted to Stubblefield’s account of the story. Her face fills the screen, and she conveys the appearance of a thoughtful and caring person. That perception changes as the movie progresses.
I’m not in a position to look into Anna Stubblefield’s soul and make judgments about her moral character or mental health. In a victim impact statement read in court before her sentencing, Stubblefield’s ex-husband described her as a “pathological liar and a narcissist.” But as outsiders, it’s impossible for us to know.
The most generous evaluation of Anna Stubblefield might suggest that she too is a victim—not of the legal system or of public shaming, but of her own delusions. Stubblefield is guilty of ignoring obvious evidence of Derrick’s capabilities. As she recounts the beginning of her physical relationship with Derrick, the filmmakers intercut intimate scenes of Daisy Johnson spoon-feeding and bathing her son, casting doubt on the credibility of Stubblefield’s narrative. Moreover, she continued to believe in a communication technique that she must have known science had long since debunked.
Towards the end of the film, Dr. Howard Shane, the communication expert at Boston Children’s Hospital who evaluated Derrick before the trial, offers his assessment of Stubblefield: “I never thought she was a predator. She truly believed what she was doing was in Derrick’s best interest. She was an unfortunate victim of a methodology that is very problematic.”
The Wisdom of the Johnsons
The reviews of Tell Them You Love Me have generally focused on the unsettling and improbable scenario of a philosophy professor sexually abusing a severely disabled man, but there is no moral in that aspect of the story. As someone who has followed the FC/S2C saga for many years, I’m pleased that these events have finally been recounted so completely, a feat that could not have been achieved without the cooperation of the Johnson family: Derrick’s mother, Daisy, and his brother, John. If their motive was to expose the dangers of facilitated communication and help others avoid their fate, I believe they have succeeded.
But the Johnsons have something far more important to tell us: they love Derrick. They loved him before Anna Stubblefield entered their lives and continue to love him now that she is gone. Daisy and John Johnson know Derrick better than anyone, and they have found joy in the person he is. They are not fixated on some imagined version of Derrick; they love the real person they know.
In that bit of gracious wisdom, the Johnsons have a message for us all.
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“They are not fixated on some imagined version of Derrick; they love the real person they know.”
A former colleague was a school psychologist. Speaking about the parents of children with severe communicative problems, she lamented that many spend their lives looking for the child’s hidden superpower, “as if they were X-Men.”
Thank you for this wonderfully done essay. As a psychologist, I am always fascinated by people's ability to create delusions that are so impervious to disconfirming evidence... Thank you again. Sincerely, Frederick