This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, September 01, 2005

UD SALUTES…

... the Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health for fighting the good fight against charlatans in the field of psychology.


UD has argued on this blog that of all academic fields, psychology is probably the most intellectually precarious, and that to read through the course listings in many psych departments is to encounter a salad of plausible and poopoo.

Under the poopoo lies a legitimate empirical field, and respectable psychologists spend a good deal of time trying to, er, disaggregate.


Along these lines, UD is particularly impressed by CSMMH’s expression of


disappointment and dismay at Syracuse University's [recent] appointment of Dr. Douglas Biklen as Dean of its School of Education. Dr. Biklen has long been the world's foremost proponent of facilitated communication (FC), a thoroughly discredited technique … The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Association on Mental Retardation, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Association for Behavior Analysis, American Academy of Pediatrics, and the New York State Department of Health have all issued policy statements advising against the use of FC for autism….

Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence against FC, Dr. Biklen has continued to promote it widely and uncritically in numerous venues. In addition, he has continued to dismiss the substantial body of negative findings regarding FC from controlled studies. Disturbingly, FC has been associated with numerous uncorroborated allegations of sexual and physical abuse against the family members of children with autism, some of which have resulted in the separation of parents from their children. Moreover, by first raising and then dashing the hopes of thousands of parents of children with autism, Dr. Biklen and other proponents of FC may have done grave harm to mental health clients and to the reputation of clinical practitioners.

Dr. Biklen's efforts are particularly troubling given the availability of applied behavior analysis and related treatment approaches that have demonstrated promise in controlled studies for ameliorating the cognitive and emotional difficulties of individuals with autism….

By placing Dr. Biklen in charge of a major school of education at a prestigious institution of higher learning, Syracuse University is undermining the nationwide movement to place the fields of education and educational psychology on firmer scientific footing. Whether intended or not, Syracuse University is also sending a clear signal that it is not firmly committed to embracing evidence-based approaches to understanding and treating cognitive and emotional disorders. Their appointment of Dr. Biklen as Dean is a major step backward in the vitally important effort to promote science and combat pseudoscience in mental health care.



A Frontline documentary about all of this was damning. Critics wondered at the “sophisticated output” at the typewriter of five year old children with autism. Many of these children “produced perfectly spelled sentences. Where had they learned to read and write?” But “desperate” parents and “passionate” speech pathologists and its popularizer at Syracuse defended the procedure like mad, despite double blind tests all of which showed its worthlessness. “The messages,” one scientist concludes, “were being absolutely, totally directed and authored by the facilitator.”

The PBS narrator concludes: “Syracuse University is now in the position of having an institute dedicated to researching, teaching and promoting a technique that all the scientific evidence says is not real. The University even has seven students doing research theses on facilitated communication.”




Biklen is hopping mad, calling his critics bullies and intimidators, defending his stable of writers, and dismissing all the botheration about method: “So it almost doesn't matter how many instances of failed studies we have. What we need with any one individual are instances where the person succeeded.”




Syracuse comes out of this looking bad. By way of defending Biklen, who has been a fixture at the school for decades, people there praise the “inclusiveness” of his research, as if it's commendable to open the doors of your lab to crapola. Biklen explains to the SU newspaper that FC is “part of a whole array of things" that he does, adding that “he teaches students many techniques and lets them decide which they prefer.”


--------------------------------------------------

UPDATE, September 3, 2005: For a comprehensive look at various bogus approaches to autism, go here.
Posted at: 9/01/2005 06:33:00 AM