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Facilitated Communication therapy began in Australia with Rosemary Crossley. The center for FC in the United States is Syracuse University, which houses the Facilitated Communication Institute (FCI) in their School of Education.

A very damaging, detailed criticism was presented on PBS's "Frontline", October 19, 1993. The program was repeated December 17, 1996, and added that since the first showing, Syracuse University has claimed to have done three studies which verify the reality and effectiveness of FC, while thirty other studies done elsewhere have concluded just the opposite.

Furthermore, FC clients routinely use a flat board or keyboard, over which the facilitator holds their pointing finger. Even the most expert typist could not routinely hit correct letters without some reference as a starting point.

Facilitators routinely look at the keyboard; clients do not. The messages' basic coherence indicates that they most probably are produced by someone who is looking at the keyboard.

Anyone familiar with Helen Keller, Stephen Hawking or Christy Brown knows that blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or physical or neurological disorders, do not necessarily affect the intellect. There is no necessary connection between a physical handicap and a mental handicap. We also know that such people often require an assistant to facilitate their communication. But what facilitators do to help the likes of a Hawking or a Brown is a far cry from what those in the facilitated communication business are doing.

But the vast majority of FC clients apparently are mentally retarded or autistic. Their facilitators appear to be reporting their own thoughts, not their patient's thoughts. Interestingly, the facilitators are genuinely shocked when they discover that they are not really communicating their patient's thoughts. Their reaction is similar to that of dowsers and others with "special powers" who, when tested under controlled conditions, find they don't have any special powers at all.

It is interesting that the parents and other loved ones who have been bonding with the patient for years are unable to be facilitators with their own children.

And when the kind strangers and their patients are put to the test, they generally fail. We are told that is because the conditions made them nervous. These ad hoc excuses sound familiar; they sound like the complaints of parapsychologists.

Skeptics think the evidence is in and FC is a delusion for the most part. It is also a dangerous delusion. Critics have noted a similarity between FC therapy and repressed memory therapy: patients are accusing their parents and others of having sexually abused them. Facilitators are taught that something like 13% of their clients have been sexually abused. This information may unconsciously influence their work.

Pervasive Developmental Disorders, including Autistic Disorder, Asperger Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder.

For autistic disorder, Fombonne says: The correlation between prevalence and year of publication was statistically significant and studies with prevalenceover 7/10,000 were all published since 1987. These findings point towards an increase in prevalence estimates in the last 15-20 years.

recent autism surveys have consistently identified smaller numbers of children with AS than those with autism within the same survey.

We therefore used for subsequent calculations an estimate of 6/10,000 for AS, recognizing the strong limitations of available data on AS.

How much lower is difficult to establish from existing data, but a ratio of 3 or 4 to 1 would appear an acceptable,

Eight studies provided data on childhood disintegrative disorder (CDD). Prevalence estimates ranged from 0 to 9.2/100,000.

Current evidence does not strongly support the hypothesis of a secular increase in the incidence of autism but power todetect time trends is seriously limited in existing datasets.

The upper-bound limit of the associated confidence interval (4.0/100,000) indicates that CDD is a very rare condition, with about 1 case to occur for every 103 cases of autistic disorder.

Whilst it is clear that prevalence estimates have gone up over time, this increase most likely represents changes in the concepts, definitions, service availability and awareness of autistic-spectrum disorders in both the lay and professional public.

The possibility that a true change in the underlying incidence has contributed to higher prevalence figures remains, however, to be adequately tested.