Deej‐a Vu: Documentary revisits facilitated communication pseudoscience
Facilitated communication is still movie-friendly pseudoscience—show parents PECS or tablets instead.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Foster watched the documentary Deej and wrote a warning for behavior analysts.
The film shows a non-speaking autistic teen typing full sentences while a helper holds his hand.
Foster explains why this looks real but is still pseudoscience.
What they found
The movie never shows proof that the teen, not the helper, is doing the typing.
It ignores thirty years of studies that say facilitated communication fails controlled tests.
Foster says the film can fool parents and teachers into wasting time and money.
How this fits with other research
McGrother et al. (1996) ran a six-month follow-up with the same kind of teen. Facilitated communication scored zero correct answers, while PECS scored 100 percent.
Bellon-Harn et al. (2020) checked 100 autism clips on YouTube and found most were hard to understand and gave poor advice. Both papers show media often sells autism myths.
Bottema-Beutel et al. (2021) found that most ABA autism papers hide money ties. Foster’s warning and this audit both tell practitioners to read with skepticism.
Why it matters
If a family shows you the Deej film, you can kindly explain the science and steer them to PECS, speech devices, or sign language. Saying nothing lets pseudoscience spread.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Deej is a documentary about a young man named Deej who has autism with complex communication needs (i.e., nonverbal autism). To the uninitiated, Deej might look like a poignant story about people misperceiving Deej until he reveals the intelligence hidden inside him. The documentary uses Deej's story to suggest that other people with complex communication needs are similarly misunderstood. In actuality, the documentary is misleading and concerning. Deej demonstrates his hidden intelligence via facilitated communication. The documentary does not mention the science that discredits facilitated communication or the harm that facilitated communication has enabled. In the present paper, I use the history of facilitated communication to examine Deej. I describe how the documentary promotes facilitated communication by encouraging improper forms of scientific reasoning. Finally, I suggest that skepticism toward facilitated communication is necessary to ameliorate its harmful influence and to encourage genuine acceptance of people with complex communication needs.
Behavioral Interventions, 2019 · doi:10.1002/bin.1687