Pseudoscience isn't just incorrect—it can also be incredibly dangerous. This story is shocking and disturbing. The new @Netflix documentary "Tell Them You Love Me" unveils the bizarre case of Anna Stubblefield, a disabilities professor who deluded herself into believing in "facilitated communication" (FC), a long-discredited method of communication. In 2015, Stubblefield was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison for the aggravated sexual assault of Derrick Johnson, a 33-year-old severely mentally disabled black man with cerebral palsy who is unable to speak. How did this happen? In 2009, Stubblefield convinced Derrick's parents to let her use FC to potentially unlock Derrick's ability to communicate. This method involves a "facilitator" holding the hand or arm of a non-speaking person to help them type out their thoughts on a keyboard. Using FC, Stubblefield believed that Derrick was not only capable of communication but also quite brilliant. With her assistance, Derrick was supposedly composing poetry and writing essays for university courses. Furthermore, she convinced herself that Derrick loved her and was seducing her. And she loved him too. This culminated in Stubblefield raping Derrick, deluded into believing that he had consented through facilitated communication. Peer-reviewed studies using simple blinding techniques have unequivocally demonstrated that FC is pseudoscience. For instance, when both the non-speaking person and the facilitator were shown the same picture of a common object, such as a shoe, the facilitator would correctly type out "s-h-o-e." However, when shown different images, the typed word invariably matched what the facilitator, not the non-speaking person, had seen. Despite these devastating results, FC has not disappeared. Instead, similar methods have emerged under different names, such as the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) and Spelling to Communicate (S2C). Practitioners of these new "methods" have learned from FC's history and avoid subjecting their techniques to scientific scrutiny. These pseudoscientific communication methods are still widely used today, convincing emotionally vulnerable family members that their mentally disabled loved ones have functional minds trapped in dysfunctional bodies. As demonstrated by the Stubblefield case, this can lead to severe abuse of the disabled. Today, I am thrilled to have @stuartvyse, the world's leading voice dedicated to exposing facilitated communication pseudoscience, write about FC and its related forms for @RealLastStand. The link to the article is in the post below ⬇️