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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…. 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. |