Announcing a new page at FacilitatedCommunication.org: Organizations Supporting FC
While churning out our Wednesday blog posts, we’ve also added a couple of new pages to the website. Today I’ll be talking about one of them: the Organizations Supporting FC page.
This page lists schools, clinics, and advocacy organizations that peddle, advocate for, or otherwise platform facilitated communication (FC), Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), S2C (Spelling to Communicate, a rebranding of RPM), and/or the Spellers Method (a rebranding of S2C). Many of the organizations listed there are organizations that our readers and other colleagues have alerted us to. (Thank you! And please keep on keeping us informed!).
Unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, the page is quite long, so we’ve divided it into five sections:
Clinics and schools dedicated to FC/S2C/RPM (A total of 49)
Clinics, schools, and other organizations that include FC/S2C/RPM training or services as part of their programming (A total of 42)
Organizations with a primary purpose of promoting FC/S2C/RPM (A total of 21)
Organizations that have platformed FC/RPM/S2C promoters or promotional material (A total of 41)
Partners with the pro-FC group Communication4All. (A total of 16).
All these numbers, we should note, are tentative. Every few weeks a new organization comes to our attention, so the list keeps growing. Dominating the most recent additions are S2C and Spellers Method-focused organizations—a reflection of the tremendous influence of the S2C-promoting book of 2021, Underestimated: An Autism Miracle, and the S2C and Spellers Method-promoting documentary of 2023, Spellers.
In this post, I’m going to focus on the first two sections: organizations that provide FC/RPM/S2C and Spellers Method services. The length of this list is our most direct evidence of the extent of the demand for such services by those who’ve been sold on a story about how one or another variant of FC can, purportedly, unlock their loved ones’ language and literacy skills. And it should give anyone pause who thinks that FC mostly went away since it was debunked in the 1990s.
Here we find 13 FC-providing organizations, 19 RPM-providing organizations, 61 S2C-providing organizations, and 5 Spellers Method providing organizations (some organizations include multiple variants of FC). Most of these date to 2014 or later, and the newer clinics tend towards S2C and Spellers Method. While they are predominately U.S.-based, they also span (moving from west to east) Canada, Ireland, the UK, India, and Australia. Within the U.S., we find hot spots in several parts of the country. (Not all clinics provide addresses, however, and some provide remote services and so aren’t location-specific).
Moving from west to east, those hot spots are: Hawaii, Portland, South-Central Arizona, Twin Cities area, Chicago area, Cleveland area, greater Atlanta, Central Florida, Northern Virginia, Eastern Pennsylvania, Northern New Jersey, and greater New York City. Presumably, some of this reflects not just population density, but the randomness of the residencies of the specific opportunists who stumble upon this particular autism grift.
Might there be a clinic near you?
Readers who are aware of additional FC/RPM/S2C/Spellers Method service-providing organizations are encouraged to report them to us.
