Ben, who is a board member of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, taps repeatedly on the board while Emma’s mother reads out letters (which may or may not correspond with Ben’s tapping, as it struck me that there were more taps than letters read) which spell out that his civil rights were denied when he was in special education. Emma’s mother is shown holding a letterboard and prompting the two young adults to answer questions about Argentine history. Higashida, the uncritical embrace of facilitated communication was most evident in the portrayal of two friends in the U.S., Ben McGann and Emma Budway, and an interview with Elizabeth Vassoler, founder of Spelling to Communicate. It sells autism as a type of locked-in syndrome or large-scale apraxia, a wishful-thinking assertion that flies in the face of logic and decades worth of evidence.Īside from the absent Mr. It insinuates that parents who fail to “presume competence” are somehow oppressive and failing their disabled children.
But the film also celebrates debunked and discredited facilitated communication, recently enjoying something of a spiritual revival under labels such as Spelling to Communicate or RPM. We are fortunate, for example, to meet an exceptionally talented young artist from India named Amrit who creates colorful, joyous tableaus of people, drawn with a tightly controlled expressiveness. Now, it goes without saying that spreading the gospel of autism acceptance and lauding achievements of people with autism are unequivocally Good Things. And in this battle for a transcendent neurodiversity, actual evidence hardly matters. If only we ignored patent impairments and presumed normal cognition! If only we taught our kids to point to letterboards to spell out complex thoughts! Then we would stop systematically suppressing our children’s inner genius, the film suggests. This leap of faith required of the viewers is foundational to the fim’s mission: to convince you that despite what you see on the surface, you must suspend your disbelief and see nonverbal autism as a sensory-motor deficit masking fairly normal cognition. This struck me as absurd until I realized the film was not in reality a documentary adhering to any norms of journalistic standards but instead an act of heartfelt propaganda. We also meet the book’s English language co-translator and popularizer, the acclaimed British novelist David Mitchell, who is the father of a boy with autism, as well as five young adults with autism whose stories the filmmakers loosely weave into the book’s narrative about a hypersensitive, secretly talented and processing-disorganized inner life with autism.Īlong this journey we are asked to simply take it on faith that Higashida (and not, say, his parent or facilitator) authored the book. Instead we have an adorable young actor with autism who runs and squints and explores as a narrator reads passages from the book. The protagonist, about whom there remains much controversy, was conspicuously missing from the film. So I was relieved to learn of this new documentary because finally, I thought, we would have the chance to see the author typing or letterboarding his poetic words.īut no. Autism experts also strongly questioned the validity of the authorship (see Fein and Kamio 2014). I say ostensibly because at the time it was published in English I searched for evidence that the book was indeed written by the autistic teen, but came up empty. The new film The Reason I Jump, due for release on January 8, is a multifaceted adaptation of a best-selling book ostensibly written by Naoki Higashida, a 13 year-old Japanese boy with autism.
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