Dr Naomi Fisher looks into incredible claims in a popular podcast, and more…
07 November 2025
Earlier this year, along with millions of others, I was intrigued by a new podcast about autism. The Telepathy Tapes was, for a few weeks, Spotify's top-rating podcast. Everyone was talking about it. The presenter, Ky Dickens, promised to explore the voices of nonspeaking autistic people and the origins of consciousness. The incredible claim was that nonspeaking autistic people could read minds.
The story told was that nonspeaking autistic people could meet telepathically with other nonspeakers at a place called 'The Hill'. The podcast 'proved' this through a series of demonstrations where parents were given information not available to the nonspeaking person, who then communicated that information back. The parent might be shown a picture or a number, and the nonspeaking person would say what it was without being shown.
On the podcast, this all sounded pretty convincing. We were told that those who questioned it were underestimating nonspeaking autistic people and that we should 'presume competence'. We were told that nonbelievers were 'blocked in the dark' and that neurotypicals could not understand the autistic world.
Many were convinced – I saw thread after thread on social media about it. This raised a few questions for me, as a psychologist who works with autistic people, and so I investigated.
It turned out that all the nonspeakers featured in the Telepathy Tapes were using some variation of facilitated communication, although this is never named. Facilitated communication (FC), first developed by Rosemary Crossley in the 1970s, is a method whereby a nonspeaking person spells out messages on a letterboard or typewriter, supported by a facilitator. That support can involve holding their hand, holding the letter board, touching their arm or another part of their body, or simply being in the room with them. There are many videos of people doing this on YouTube. It looks highly convincing. They spell out elaborate messages letter by letter, often talking of the torture of spending years in silence and of how they are now unlocked by spelling.
FC seems like a miracle. These are people who typically have been assessed as having severe learning disabilities and who require round-the-clock supervision and care. FC appears to show that they are in fact intellectually capable, often using language which exceeds expectations for their age. Parents weep when they tell of the amazing moment where their child first spelled out a message and of how life-changing it has been. Non-speaking people have graduated from collegeusing FC. They have become advisors for governments and executive directors of charitable organisations. They have hosted chat shows and written books. The nonspeaking woman Elizabeth Bonker gave the valediction speech at her college graduation, having apparently spelled it out using FC and then typed it into a text-to-speech programme.
Unfortunately, FC has also been completely discredited. In order to test the validity of FC, researchers carried out simple blinded studies. They showed the nonspeaking person one picture and showed their facilitator a different picture. They then asked what was on the picture, using FC. When the facilitator did not know the answer, the nonspeaker could not give a correct answer 100% of the time. When the facilitator and the nonspeaking person were shown the same picture, the FC-generated answer was correct. The conclusion was inescapable; the facilitator had to know the answer to the question in order for the right answer to be generated using FC. Communication generated by FC came from the facilitator, not the nonspeaking person.
The original form of FC involved physical touch between the nonspeaking person and their facilitator, but other forms have been developed since with new names like
Spelling To Communicate (S2C) and Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). They are also sometimes called 'letter-boarding', 'supported typing' or just 'spelling'. In all of them, a nonspeaking person types out messages using a single finger, and the presence of a facilitator is essential. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association recommends strongly against them, suggesting that they have the potential to cause serious harm. A recent review suggests that facilitated communication violates the communication rights of vulnerable people and raises significant safeguarding issues.
There isn't a lot of research going on right now into the different forms of facilitated communication, because the results were so conclusive and so consistent. FC does not unlock the voices of nonspeaking autistic people. It has not been demonstrated scientifically that the messages are authored by the disabled people themselves.
Viewed from this perspective, the 'telepathy' on the Telepathy Tapes was unsurprising. Facilitators were given information, and then they used FC to generate answers about that information. The answers apparently came from the nonspeaking person but in reality were influenced by the facilitators. It would have been more surprising if they couldn'tgive the right answers.
But the story doesn't end there. The strange thing is, it doesn't seem like FC is a scam. There is, for the most part, no intention to mislead. On the Telepathy Tapes, the presenter appears to really believe. The families are utterly convinced. It appears that in majority of cases, those who use FC truly believe in FC. The facilitators are not consciously influencing anyone. To them, it feels like the messages come from the nonspeaking individual.
This belief has had devastating consequences. In 2015, a philosophy professor called Anna Stubblefield was sentenced to 12 years in prison (later reduced on appeal) for sexually assaulting a nonspeaking man, Derrick Johnson. She had taught him how to use FC, believed that they had fallen in love and that he consented to a sexual relationship. In court, it was judged that he did not have the capacity to consent. Stubblefield told the judge before sentencing, "I was deeply in love… I believed that he and I were intellectual equals, and that our romantic relationship was consensual and mutually loving. I intended no harm, and I had nothing to gain."
This isn't the only time that FC has ended up in court. Fathers have been sent to prison and educators have lost their careers when nonspeaking children apparently made claims of sexual abuse via FC. These allegations are often taken at face value at first, and then on further investigation it has become clear that there is no evidence that the FC-generated text was authored by the nonspeaking person. In one highly publicised case, sexual abuse allegations were apparently made by Betsy Wheaton, a nonspeaking young woman, via FC. When blinded testing was carried out, it became clear that Wheaton had not authored the messages; they were influenced by her facilitator, Janyce Boynton. As a result, Boynton's belief in FC was shattered – she said 'Despite my reticence to give up my belief in FC, I could no longer ignore the scientific studies that replicated my own personal experiences with the purported technique.' Boynton has since become a passionate advocate for evidence-based approaches to communication for nonspeaking people.
So what is going on? Research indicates that in FC, nonspeaking people respond to physical and verbal cues given (usually inadvertently) by the facilitator. These can involve moving the letter board, leaning forward and making subtle noises as well as physical touch. This is called the ideomotor effect, and it is behind apparently supernatural techniques like the Ouija board. The facilitator cues the nonspeaking person, who learns over many hours of practice to respond by touching letters on a board with a single finger. Over time, many learn to do this without being touched and with increasingly subtle cues.
But they cannot reproduce it without the facilitator present. This is what makes FC different to the assistive communication used by someone like Stephen Hawking, whose progressive motor neurone disease made it impossible for him to talk and who used a communication device he controlled with a single muscle in his cheek. It also makes it different to the assistive and augmentative communication used by many autistic and nonspeaking people, such as PECS or Makaton. These emphasise independence, while users of FC remain dependent.
Even when FC users apparently learn to type independently (meaning without touch), they still need their facilitator present and they continue to use single finger pointing. Documentaries show that nonspeaking individuals frequently do not look at the letter-board when spelling, meaning that they cannot be choosing which letter to point to. Their facilitators, on the other hand, watch the letter-board intently.
Facilitated communication is an example of a belief system around which people have organised their thinking. The scientific evidence against it is compelling, but so is the desire to believe. Recently there has been something of a resurgence of interest in FC, of which The Telepathy Tapes is only one example. Academic articles have argued that the scientific research into FC is ableist and outdated and should be redone in collaboration with FC-users – who of course, would have to make their views known using FC. In a new book published by Routledge, Voices of Neurodiversity, nonspeaking autistic people are represented by Ben Breaux, whose contributions are generated via a letter-board. Billed as an 'inclusive encyclopaedia' and a 'definitive resource', the book does not include any other voices of those with learning disabilities. It makes no mention of the controversy surrounding letter-boarding and other forms of FC, nor of the potential for harm and the safeguarding issues raised.
The use of FC like this has serious implications for representation, because when the views of nonspeaking people are only represented by facilitated messages, the evidence indicates that nonspeaking people are not represented at all.
Amy Lutz is a sociologist and the mother of a man with severe autism who writes about disability history and bioethics. She argues that much of the history of autism has been one of 'chasing the intact mind'. By this she means that the idea that inside a severely disabled autistic person is an intellectually capable mind, just waiting to be 'unlocked'. Early parent memoirs use metaphors of laying siege to their child's autism, or breaking down the 'walls' in order to 'liberate' the child within. Lutz argues that this focus on the 'intact mind' has led researchers and society to ignore the real and pressing needs of people like her son who have significant cognitive disabilities.
FC appears to reveal that 'intact mind' – philosophical musings and higher-level academic skills, all in people who have had no formal education. An article attributed to Sabrina Guerra, a nonspeaking 10-year-old, begins "Wisdom doesn't flourish impeded by people's egocentrism. Supremacy reigns unless we fight diligently to educate. Question all that you've ingested on a human's worth." My own children are significantly older than ten, but I would be very surprised if they were writing articles like this.
FC has also affected the broader way that many of us think about nonspeaking autism and autistic experience, because it's often not easy to tell whether a text was written independently or whether it was facilitated. The Reason I Jump is a bestselling book that is apparently authored by a nonspeaking Japanese 13-year-old. It purports to explain the internal life of an autistic person and was made into a popular film. The first pages address the question of how a nonspeaking person can write a book, and the authorial voice explains that he uses an 'alphabet grid' invented by his mother. He points to letters. It's not possible to tell from this description whether this is FC, but it sounds very likely.
FC gives hope to many parents, and may seem like a harmless thing. Media representations like The Telepathy Tapes promise so much, and they frame any scepticism as being against nonspeaking autistic people and due to closed mindedness. Books like Voices of Neurodiversity frame the inclusion of FC-generated contributions as 'inclusivity'. FC seems like a miracle. But it really is too good to be true, and there are significant risks to the technique.
FC advocates conceptualise autism as a 'brain-body disconnect'. They explain that autism is really a motor apraxia, and nonspeaking people are not in control of their bodies. Their bodies do not cooperate with what their brains want to do. This, they say, is why they need support to type and why they do not speak fluently. It's also why they might get up and walk off, or why they might say 'No' or 'Stop' when being 'supported' to communicate via FC.
The FC belief system says that the behaviour and words produced by autistic people are not authentic communication. Only what they say via FC is 'real'. And herein lies another danger of FC. If a person gets up and walks away, or refuses to cooperate, this is understood as their apraxia (meaning that their brain is not controlling their body). If they say, as a young woman does in this video 'No More, No More', it is ignored. The spelled text is seen as a genuine communication, while her speech is not. The belief system tells us to 'presume competence', and that nonspeaking autistic people can have 'total apraxia' meaning they have no control over their body at all. This belief removes agency from people. Nothing that they do will be seen as truly coming from them, except text generated by FC – which is highly likely to be influenced by the facilitator.
The reframing of autism as a motor apraxia raises all sorts of issues, not least of which is whether this only applies to those who are nonspeaking or whether all forms of autism should be understand as a motor, rather than a social and communication disability. This would involve completely rethinking how autism is understood – and there is no evidence that speaking autistic people suffer from a brain-body disconnect or have no control over their movements.
'Presuming competence' sounds benign but it can pose significant risks. When we presume competence that is not present, we may miss the vulnerable person before us. We may not offer them the protection they need. When we presume competence, we may not help people learn the skills that they need, because we assume that they already possess them. To be inclusive we should presume the capacity to learn and meet the person where they are. Assuming that they are already competent does not do this.
There are significant dangers to ignoring the words that people say and the way that they move their bodies, because of a belief system that says that these movements are out of their control. FC takes power away from nonspeaking people by discounting the ways that they independently communicate. It means that they may go unrepresented in the conversations that matter most in their lives.
When a technique poses risks to vulnerable people, the evidence base is particularly important. If we aspire to evidence-based practice, it's not enough to presume. We must demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt and scrutinise our assumptions.
This hasn't happened in facilitated communication. Something that purports to empower vulnerable people can become a way to silence their voices. Presume competence with care.
15 July 2019
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