Distorting DEEJ: Deconstructing A Misinformed Literature Review

Production photo of David Jame Savarese (Deej) a thin white male with short,
cropped hair and glasses, wearing a light blue polo shirt and beige slacks, seated
 at a table facing his girlfriend who is seated in a power chair back to us, facing him.
  A man holding a camera is standing to their left and caught in the act of filming them.
©DEEJ movie https://www.deejmovie.com/press

"A distinguishing feature of scientific thinking is the search for falsifying as well as confirming evidence. However, many times in the history of science, scientists have resisted new discoveries by selectively interpreting or ignoring unfavorable data." Wikipedia on Confirmation Bias

I understand that professionals who aren't familiar with autism and autistic lived experience may carry biases about non-speaking autistic people. I don't accept it, but I understand it. We're human and all of us have biases. When bias becomes a problem is when academic work begins with the conclusion that non-speaking autistic people must be presumed incompetent. I get seriously disturbed when scientists who know better lay out academic work to support a bias. It is personal to me, and so hurtful that I felt the need to write why.

I am an African American woman. What that means is that I and everyone who shares my race continue to be targets of something called scientific racism. Scientific racism, at its core, is misusing scientific structure and scientific reasoning to support false claims of racial superiority in general and was one way of oppressing Black people in particular—which makes me more alert to this kind of bias when I see it used against other marginalized groups.

I am also very outspoken about the unjust treatment of autistics like my son. Full disclosure, my son is non-speaking and uses an iPad with the appTouchChat HD as his primary communication support, as part of his multi-modal communication system. He does not use FC (Facilitated Communication) or RPM (Rapid Prompting Method). But for anyone who doesn’t know any better and is watching an AAC (Adaptive and Augmentative Communication) user in a documentary, my son and someone who used those communication methods would look similar.

Representation of true non-speakers in the media is usually limited to inspiration trash or objectification to gain funding. That is why it was gratifying to see DEEJ, an award-winning documentary about DJ “Deej” Savarese, an AAC using non-speaking autistic adult with complex support needs. This kind of representation—outside of stereotyping in media for us people of color—also began with movies, television series, and groundbreaking documentaries. There is no acceptance in a society where groups of people are not represented as three-dimensional human beings. I watched DEEJ and came away feeling it had earned its awards.

So when Social psychologist Craig Foster's article, "Deej-a Vu: Documentary revisits facilitated communication pseudoscience" was published in Behavioral Interventions in August of this year, I read the title and flinched. Not looking forward to doing so at all, I acquired and read the review. This is what I learned.

Foster's background is not in the diagnosis, care, or treatment of autism. He does not have a background in speech pathology or Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). Foster's focus seems limited to skepticism and concussion non-disclosure research. I wonder why he chose this topic? He could have simply done his review on the history of Facilitated Communication (FC). Instead, his deliberate targeting of Savarese by compiling any negative literature on FC he could find comes off as a reductive approach to the documentary DEEJ, as well as one that aims to erase the film’s actual message of inclusion and representation.

Perhaps Foster is uninformed about the catastrophic role psychologists have played in the history of autism. From Asperger’s Nazi collaboration to the debacle and destroyed lives of Bruno Bettleheim’s expansion of Kanner’s “refrigerator moms” view of autism, to Ivar Lovaas and his conversion therapy cruelties, psychology has continued to destroy autistic lives. I’d like to say this has changed, but autistic children are still being given electric shock punishments at the Judge Rotenberg Center “for their own good.” With this kind of track record, the task before these professionals should be to regain the trust of their non-speaking autistic clients and their families. But here, Foster singles out a non-speaking autistic and his family to push the regressive idea that we must be skeptical of any non-speaking person's claim to competence.

Foster's review tries to rebrand the DEEJ documentary on inclusion as some sort of infomercial for FC. He claims he was filtering and inserting FC as a topic, so skepticism could be placed in the minds of those evaluating the film. I find this unnecessary. If the viewer doesn't know what FC is, what they would see is someone using pads, laptops, and in some cases, pen and ruled notebook pads as AAC support. When I viewed the film, I simply accepted the equipment as AAC support because the film made no effort to explain otherwise. FC was not the focus of the film, so it was neither emphasized nor discussed.

Foster's review cherry-picked only the scenes from the documentary showing the use of supported typing. He speculated about Deej's intelligence and competence to produce speech through AAC devices without having met, assessed, or researched anything about Deej, including how Deej communicates with support staff when they have not trained as FC facilitators or even how the Dynavox narrations were achieved in the documentary. Instead, Foster uses select scenes to conclude that Deej communicates entirely via FC, therefore, he must be presumed incompetent. There’s no mention of whether Foster followed up with anyone to verify his conjectures about the nature of Deej’s education, interactions with support staff, communication methods, or achievements.

I decided to do what Foster hadn't done. I reached out to the Savarese family. I learned from Deej himself that he has had 52 teachers, 22 professors, 18 school support assistants/facilitators, 15 after-school assistants, 5 speech therapists, 4 occupational therapists, and 6 principals in 2 different school districts over 18 years. To my knowledge, Foster did not interview any of them. Foster commenting on Deej's diagnosis and the scope of his intelligence was a misuse of scientific reasoning.

To prove his point about FC, Foster also ignored scenes that complicated his thesis, like the scenes in which Deej toured Washington D.C. with his cousin. Deej's mother leaves a notepad of scripts with printed words so that the cousins can communicate by having Deej point to responses to any query by his cousin. Meaning Deej toured DC without a facilitator and communicated without FC. When Deej begins his pioneering tenure at Oberlin, he has support staff who are not trained in FC who help him transition. Yet Deej is seen making transitions and participating in activities that indicate competence. His efforts to self-regulate in response to his parents' requests for him to try and self-calm show receptive language acuity—he clearly understands what people are saying to him—and the cognitive competence to overcome moments of anxiety that might normally end in autistic meltdown or shutdown.

If Foster's literature review was stripped down to his analysis of Deej's competence based upon his viewing of a 72-minute documentary, Behavioral Intervention would have received intensive backlash for violation of section 7 in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Principles of Medical Ethics, otherwise known as the Goldwater Rule. The Goldwater Rule was put in place to keep mental health professionals from conjecturing a diagnosis of a public figure's competence without proper in-person examination and assessment. I believe that targeting the documentary, then using negative and sensationalized literature on FC as a weaponized tool to justify this sort of armchair diagnosis, is a violation of the Goldwater Rule by proxy.

Filtering and presenting this film as if its entire purpose was to promote FC is inaccurate at best. By forcing academic focus away from the documentary's themes of interdependence, inclusion, and the presumption of competence, Foster does harm not only to the FC community but to people like my son who continue to suffer maltreatment because of the same scientific ableism that produced Foster's review.

As we have no accurate way of measuring intelligence without language proficiency, and literacy is often denied to non-speaking individuals without AAC support of some kind, can any psychiatric professional generalize the latent intelligence of non-speaking people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (ID/DD)? Yet this is exactly what Foster does when he posits,"Other aspects of the documentary suggest that FC's purported ability to reveal hidden intelligence is once again illusory. When a speaker calls Deej's name for a National Honor Society ceremony, Deej's mother needs to prompt Deej to walk to the stage. "

I confess I paused here and burst out laughing. Foster obviously doesn't know anything about autistic processing delays, or what event crowds, camera/cellphones flashing, and the roar of applause does to someone autistic in public spaces regardless of their degree of disability. Deej's disorientation during this event is unremarkable. He's autistic! His response was a completely natural reaction for any autistic adult. In fact, this is why his father’s surprised reaction and verbal exchange between his parents ended in their rushing to provide support. Just because an autistic person wants to try to get through a high-stress event on their own doesn't mean support persons shouldn't be there in case things go wrong. Foster's mistaken analysis of this scene does not support his thesis. It simply verifies that David James Savarese is an autistic adult who reacts as any autistic adult would in a similar situation.

Foster plowed ahead with his thesis: "When Deej and his mother pack to move to Oberlin, Deej's mother explains to Deej that some clothes are too small—he keeps them for sentimental reasons. Moments like these are easy to miss, perhaps because it is easy to forget the expectations that the documentary sets for Deej. These moments might seem compatible with a young man who has autism with complex communication needs, but they do not seem compatible with a young man who has earned his enrollment in Oberlin College."

Again Foster's lack of experience with autistic people and literature about autistic life experiences is evident in this paragraph. Just last month, a mother went through great lengths and succeeded in getting a larger size of the only dress her autistic daughter would wear. Presenting a common autistic behavior—intense attachment to meaningful objects—that is typical regardless of communication or support needs as evidence of incompetence doesn't really stand up to scrutiny.

Even if we remove Deej's disability from his desire to keep clothes he's outgrown, Foster would still be off the mark in his conjecture. Many of my high school classmates left home for college with stuffed animals, dolls, favorite clothing they had outgrown, even baby blankets that held special memories for them. No one claimed this proved they were not competent to earn their places at their universities.

I have questions about Foster's superimposing negative FC literature on the mention of sexual abuse in the documentary as well. He said: "Messages about human sexuality also reflect old problems with FC. Facilitated communication has generated accusations that specific persons have molested FC users sexually. When subsequent investigations failed to support the FC-generated accusations
(e.g., Siegel, 1995), it forced additional consideration about who was doing the accusing, the user or the facilitator? Likewise, when Deej's computer-generated voiceover states “I see scary people who want sex” and his poetry refers to prostitution, viewers should wonder whether these words reflect Deej's perspective on sexuality or a facilitator's speculation."

Let's address the topic of FC generated false reporting of sex crimes. Foster cites Siegel, 1995. But he doesn't discuss the reality that this brief used two subjects and did no general statistical analysis comparing the number of FC generated false reports to the number of false reports of the same crimes in the overall population. We all agree that the risk of a false indictment is dangerous. But we have no statistical understanding of how FC related false indictments compare to non-FC related false indictments. I am trying to understand how Siegel can generalize, or come to any conclusion from, her sample of two subjects, that the risk of false reporting/indictment is higher or lower than the general population. Siegel found that communication wasn't established in these two subjects. How can one confirm or deny anything without establishing communication with either subject? Dr. Siegel does not employ any other method of communication (a yes/no switch for example) to try and establish a baseline. We do not know if Dr. Siegal had specialized training for this type of investigation. We don't know how many interviews the two subjects were made to submit to because of their use of FC. Foster cites Dr. Siegel without mentioning her first sentence in paragraph 3 of the discussion section on page 325 where she states: "This study does not rule out the possibility that there are individuals who may communicate via facilitation when they cannot communicate orally, via sign language or via communication boards." Indeed it cannot rule out the possibility because only two subjects were evaluated.

We are current witnesses to the extremes of skepticism against science. I am concerned that approaching topics like FC that require longitudinal study, with confirmation bias like Foster’s, will push public opinion further away from the scientific community.

Foster's brief exploration of Deej as a vehicle for encouraging improper forms of scientific reasoning confused me. He says, "Deej, the person, is not necessarily representative of the diverse group of people who have complex communication needs. Even if Deej were to demonstrate hidden intelligence, it would not prove that hidden intelligence is widely prevalent. This hasty generalization could be akin to making a documentary about Lionel Messi and suggesting that Argentinians are incredibly talented footballers. Hansson (2013) described the use of hand-picked examples as a characteristic associated with pseudoscience."

But isn't Foster himself hand-picking examples of Deej's documentary and lived experience to frame his own thesis in this review? Does Foster's literature review then fit Hansson's description of a characteristic associated with pseudoscience? Or is this further evidence of confirmation bias in Foster's review?

I can't stress enough that Foster's statements reveal a lack of understanding of the challenges faced by non-speaking AAC users of any kind. When he said, "Still, evidence that Deej can communicate hidden intelligence independently is simply not there." I again feel Foster is evaluating from his armchair without factoring the impact of autistic comorbid conditions and characteristics in his conclusions. Again Foster has no qualitative research on Deej to back up his assertion.

Foster's unconcerned opining of Deej's degree of disability is very similar to the racial bias found in medical doctors. = I actually feel that if FC wasn't part of the DEEJ documentary at all, Foster would have still approached his literary review with the presumption that Deej was incompetent, given his statement,: "The documentary instead provides explanations for the lack of independent communication that follow the explanations provided by FC supporters generally. Deej's computer-generated voiceover states that no assistive device can do what his mother does and that sometimes he experiences anxiety that disrupts his ability to communicate."

I disagree with Foster's implication that Deej is discussing his mother's role as a facilitator alone. Foster does not mention the scene in the film when Deej's grandparents tell his mother that she is the only consistent thing in Deej's life during his stressful transition from the home he's known most of his life to another state and an unknown university campus. Deej, in essence, loses everything from proximity to friends who have known him since early childhood to his father who can't be with them during this transition. Foster also excludes the fact that by the end of the documentary, Deej has transitioned to the Oberlin dorms, and his mother's role is reduced to simply managing his support team. The documentary mentions Deej’s relief at having his mother return to the role of just being his mother.

I want to talk about Foster's mention of the use of a pen as a prompting object to direct Deej's typing. There is tremendous hypocrisy in how psychologists compare their own methods to those used to support typing. Hand over hand techniques and other invasive prompting is common practice in Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). ABA is the only therapy for autism with mandated insurance coverage in most states despite valid ethical concerns verified by recent research into ABA and PTSD in autistic clients. Behavioral psychologists do not claim that any writing done by hand over hand prompting is abusive of autistic clients. If you ask a behavioral psychologist why they are using hand over hand prompting they will tell you that the goal is to fade the invasive prompting over time so their clients eventually write independently. It is hypocrisy for psychologists to champion methods while dismissing the support of individuals who have physical barriers to typing.

While Foster included a non-apology to Deej's family consistent with his policy on respectful skepticism, any heartfelt sincerity in such apologies is lost if those delivering them are undermining a human being's right to be accepted as a competent contributing member of society while doing so.

And Foster's flawed literature review, unfortunately, introduces a taint of confirmation bias to any future publication he pens on this topic. The documentary DEEJ deserves better and so does Deej Savarese himself. I recommend that anyone viewing DEEJ watch the film with an open mind. No one's filtered view, including mine, should interfere with the sharing of one human being's story of adoption, freedom, and hope for his marginalized peers.

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


Nickerson, Raymond S. (June 1998), "Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises", Review of General Psychology, 2 (2): 175–220


Foster CA. Deej-a Vu: Documentary revisits facilitated communication pseudoscience.


Behavioral Interventions. 2019;1–10 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bin.1687


Foster, CA. Skepticism at heart is not partisan. Skeptical Inquirer 2017


https://skepticalinquirer.org/2017/01/skepticism_at_heart_is_not_partisan/


Hagiwara, N., Slatcher, R. B., Eggly, S., & Penner, L. A. (2017). Physician Racial Bias and Word Use during Racially Discordant Medical Interactions. Health communication,


32(4), 401–408. doi:10.1080/10410236.2016.1138389


Confirmation Bias


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias


Kupferstein, Henny (January 2018) “Evidence of increased PTSD symptoms in autistics exposed to applied behavior analysis” Advances in Autism ISSN: 2056-3868


https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AIA-08-2017-0016/full/html


UN calls for investigation of US school's shock treatments of autistic children


https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jun/02/un-investigation-shock-treatments-autism


School Shocks Students With Disabilities. The FDA Moves To Ban The Practice.


https://www.npr.org/2019/01/23/687636057/massachusetts-school-defends-use-of-electric-shock-treatments


The Legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964


https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-act#section_4


Bruno Bettleheim, The Empty Fortress


https://archive.org/details/emptyfortressinf00bett_0


Leo Kanner's infamous 1947 Time Magazine interview that began Bettelheim's destruction of autistic children and their mothers with quotes like "The children, says Dr. Kanner, were "kept neatly in a refrigerator which didn't defrost."


http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,798484,00.html


Siegel, B. (1995). Brief report: Assessing allegations of sexual molestation made through facilitated communication. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 25(3), 319–326. doi: 10.1007/bf02179293

Hansson, S. O. (2013). Defining pseudoscience and science. In M. Pigliucci, & M. Boudry (Eds.), Philosophy of pseudoscience: Reconsidering the demarcation problem (pp. 61–77). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226051826.003.0005

Autism Month Essays: Against The Presumption of Incompetence

Mu in a green hoodie in his favorite spot, debating whether or
not to visit the wild ducks in the pond. Posted as always with
the permission of the subject. © Kerima Cevik

When parenting both our children, my husband and I tried to make certain they knew exactly who they were and hoped they eventually understood that the labels they carried were things they could take ownership of and apply to help them navigate their lives more effectively. 

Our daughter has a clear idea of the entire scope of her multiracial and multicultural identity. Our multiracial, multicultural, nonspeaking autistic son is 15. I have tried my best to ensure he knows his heritage despite communication challenges. I have found other ways of showing him who he is; of indicating to him it is okay to be who he is and that we are proud that he is our son as he is. We want him to know we will be doing our best to support his efforts to live an autonomous life, and such a life must begin with an acceptance of his entire identity.

My son likes to watch Disney World travel infomercials on YouTube. One day he came into the office I share with him to show me a video. The video was a Disney Parks episode where parents were describing what the Disney experience was like with their daughter, who carried an ID/DD (Intellectual Disability/Developmental Disability) label. At the point where she described her daughter as having a developmental disability, my son stopped the video and put my hand on the child's image and then placed my hand on his head. I shook my head yes in response. I said "Yes, son. You are like her. She has a diagnosis of Down Syndrome. You are Autistic."  He hugged me and left the room. I stared after him, an emotional mess, stunned with surprise, shock, sadness, and relief, unknowingly shedding silent tears of pride. 

Knowing ourselves and understanding where we are similar and different from others is a life-altering affirmation of one's competence. My son arrived at this understanding and communicated his suspicions to me without uttering a word.Grasping the scope of one's disability is a giant step in self-advocacy.

 To some degree, everyone needs certain labels. They form the framework of how we begin to define ourselves. But many labels are not positive or even accurate ones, and sometimes they are forced upon us. In fact it may not be the label itself but how we ascribe meaning to it in everyday usage that may devastate. Some labels carry the baggage of bigotry. 

Many parents who impose the goal of becoming indistinguishable from their typical peers on their autistic children feel the idea of acknowledging that their child may carry an ID/DD label is an abhorrent barrier to normalizing them. Additionally, some schools abuse the power to label a child ID/DD on IEP documents because they want to segregate the child from typical peers when said child might do better with supports in an inclusive classroom. The results of either of these circumstances are some devastating potential outcomes to the autistic student that parents and professionals don't spend enough time considering when making arbitrary decisions for or against the use of the ID/DD label. 

I began thinking about how many autistic students were labeled ID/DD and how they came to terms with that label a great deal after my son came to me to question his own identity in gestural language. I was trying to catch up on my friends' status posts on Facebook when I read an entire thread that brought the entire question of the ID/DD label into sharp, painful focus. It was about a family being pressured by an IEP team to add an ID label to their child's disability designations. Several people who were academics, educators, activists and autistic advocates who carried the twice exceptional label were tagged to give their input on the advantages and disadvantages of accepting such a label. I was not one of those tagged.

My son carries the ID/DD label, not by choice but because that is his medical reality. If there is pressure on any family in a school setting to add this label, they need to understand that whatever they decide potentially changes the entire quality of their child's educational future, and this is not always a positive change. The aversion and abhorrence that people who should know better displayed when discussing accepting this label truly disturbed me.

 I'll try to explain why.

I came into this world with dark skin. I am no more able to hide or deny this identity than my son is able to hide or deny his ID label. Yes,  the ID label comes with a heavy burden to fight society's lifelong presumption of incompetence. There was a time when African American labels came with the presumption of incompetence as well as the false accusation that the amount of melanin in one's skin determined who was more intelligent. We dark-skinned people continue to fight these stereotypes. 

Being an African American woman carries lifelong challenges and injustices with it that made me more aware of ableism directed at my son. Despite the hardship, we now know that a clear grasp of a person's identity can give them self-respect that hiding it in shame cannot. The idea that because of these hardships, an identity is something that can be opted out of is wrong. What needed to be said in this thread that wasn't was does this child have a full professional diagnosis? Does that diagnosis include an ID label? If it does, then depriving them of the support they need by hiding this is like leaving a wheelchair user's chair at their departure airport. 

I thought it was our job to right the wrong of institutionalized presumptions of incompetence. That bit of ableism is the fundamental rock in the wall of segregation from every opportunity that keeps our loved ones from their rightful place in our society. History shows clearly that presuming anyone incompetent begins an othering of groups that slides into catastrophic abuses and oppression. There was an air of defeatism in this thread asking whether or not to allow the ID label on a child's educational record that brought me down. Our loved ones will always feel they are less than others if we simply accept the wrong-headed belief that giving a person an ID/DD label equals a lessening of their personhood.

I just don't know when we will get past the idea that if a person cannot speak or learn in the way the average person can, they are less than others in society. We tend to blame our student's disabilities for our societal failure to meet their educational needs when the truth is we have not changed the fundamentals of the way we educate our children since the industrial revolution. Why aren't we fighting to rethink and redesign learning to reach ID/DD students' needs and learning potentials? We simply passively accept things as they are. And each year, our offspring are given less support and less access to learning particularly when they are made to wear that label.

The largest issues I have about parental fear of the ID label and the presumption of incompetence is that if we do not fight the baggage forced on our loved ones with their neurological identity. How can we teach them allow them to carry this label with pride unless we can let our children know with sincerity that ID/DD labels are nothing to be ashamed of?

I wonder if this defeatist attitude contributes to depression and anxiety in our loved ones? I also worry  that denying knowledge about a critical aspect of a student's disability enables the potential devastation to the mental health of the student not aware of why they may have challenges in areas where their peers are succeeding, I wonder how much trying to opt out of ID/DD labels inadvertently slows progress creating educational methods that may maximize our students' potential because distaste for the ID/DD perpetuates our society's  presumption of incompetence. 

It is our responsibility to make our children matter by fully understanding what accepting the ID/DD label means. They can't accept themselves if we are afraid to say whoever they are, whatever their disability constellation entails, we accept them. Believe me, our offspring feel our shame and insincerity and internalize it.

We parents passionately demand better schools, better IEPs, and an end to the use of the r-word. I am thinking that we also need to take a hard look at our own attitudes and make an active effort to change them so our offspring can sense that shift organically and not internalize any subliminal ableism about the labels used to identify their neurology. 

Peace 

Expanding On David Perry's 'Bad Disability Journalism: Autism as 'Genetic Devil''

Fred Dickey uses the smell of Bleach as subliminal messaging throughout
his train wreck of an article on autism. Pictured are Clorox and a bucket
from their #BleachItAway campaign 

I need to make some points about the heinous article professor David Perry discusses in  one of his blog posts. I chose to share it on the Autism Wars community page on Facebook. The discussion on the post is beginning to veer from the point of professor Perry's critique and my original reason for sharing it. So let me break this down from my personal point of view.

The goal of  journalist Fred Dickey is calculated and apparent. He’s written in this style (evil autie trope) nearly 10 years after numerous protests organized by autistic disability rights activists shut down everything from the infamous “ransom notes” campaign launched by New York University's Child Study Center (NYU CSC) to a series of horrific PSAs from misguided organizations like Autism Speaks. The media knows better than to present this dangerous view of autism by now. So we must ask ourselves why Fred Dickey wrote about autism this way at this moment.

Less than one year after the publication of two comprehensive histories of autism, the use of 1950's tropes to characterize disability could be in part Mr. Dickey not researching autism as a disability but rather imposing his personal ableism regarding autistic people into his writing. Mr. Dickey's goal appears to have been the deliberate sensationalization of a family crisis situation involving a vulnerable autistic 10-year-old and his overwhelmed mother. To the comments I've read on making this a teachable moment for Mr. Dickey, I sincerely doubt he is open to teaching nor is that a viable use of time and energy.  He stands to benefit from any sort of written attention  in terms of driving  traffic to his article and the chance to write more on this topic and do further damage. My opinion is such efforts are a zero sum game.

This is an election year that includes great pushes to pass some frankly terrifying attempts at mental health reform by regressing to draconian systems of care, so Dickey's attempt at painting the worst portrait possible may also have a hidden agenda supporting the case for funding the return of the mental institution model that locks disabled community members away from society to be victimized behind prison-like conditions.

Mr. Dickey may have also wanted to anger enough people to force a reaction, and by that reaction, whether  well-intentioned parents trying to educate him in autism awareness or angry activists calling him out on this atrocious piece of work, would serve to make this single article more prominent and more likely to facilitate Dickey being called upon to pen more controversial articles. Mr. Dickey may be using the Trump “strategy” of using shock value to gain attention. Unfortunately, his victim here is Rene Camacho, an autistic 10-year-old. No one should be allowed to do this to a child, and no parent should allow it.

The most effective protest that can be given in reaction to Dickey's sorry excuse for an article is to ignore posting any reaction to it or Fred Dickey and reach out to Rene Camacho and his mother instead since Dickey used them as props in his fake American horror story. Caring about the autistic victim and his clueless family is both the right thing to do and  the moral obligation of the entire community. Reaching out and offering to educate and help the mother, son, and siblings could save their lives.

But it is also important to point out inconsistencies in this story. This kind of deconstruction of destructive content demonizing disabled family members in crisis can go a long way to correct the way other vulnerable autism families view them and reboot the entire train wreck into positive support for the autistic people in crisis being victimized by such rubbish. Here are a few things that caught my attention.

1. How does a woman so overwhelmed she cannot keep furniture or cleaning fluids safe in the house and needing to constantly disinfect because of her son's alleged behavior, have the energy to establish and run a nonprofit that repairs the property damage done by autistic kids in homes?

2. If this Rene's behavior is as described in the article, why is there no mention of his school life and how these behavioral challenges impact it? This would indicate that Mr. Dickey couldn’t find any facts to embellish there, making it conspicuous by its absence. If Rene does well in a school setting then his problems are related to his home environment.

3. The mother in this article claims to have repeatedly discussed her son’s inappropriate use of cloth towels in the bathroom with him, but claims because of her son’s autism, she has now chosen to not have towels in the bathrooms. Two interesting things not intended by Fred Dickey to come out here do once we are able to move past our justifiable outrage at the disclosure of the worst moments and private challenges of a disabled child.

     a. Because she discusses having repeatedly told Rene what the appropriate use of bathroom towels are, we can conclude that Rene has verbal speech, and sadly, his mother and whoever continues the therapies mentioned in the article have not tested Rene for an auditory processing disorder. They have simply assumed he is being noncompliant because they presume his incompetence.

     b. It never dawns on Ms. Camacho that her son Rene may be trying to tell her that something about the toilet paper she’s supplying for example that it is causing him discomfort, and she needs to change her brand of toilet paper. She probably has never asked him if he is having an allergic or sensory reaction to the toilet paper in the bathroom. Because her fixes are based on the presumption of Rene’s incompetence, she sees her own son as behaviorally static, and she will never accept any answer to the question of why a particular behavior is happening in the context of agency. The fact that Rene might be trying to solve a problem by behaving in what those around him view as a maladaptive way requires the presumption of his competence and respect of his agency in his own life.

4. Dickey describes situations like the replacement of a broken window glass with plexiglass, the uprooting of a tree in the context of the family not being able to enjoy their own preferred object and activities because of the autistic member. He does not discuss the changes needed to adapt Rene’s home to make it accessible an accommodate his disability. Had the changes in the house been approached from the standpoint of ADA accommodation, it  would have given a qualitative difference to the article’s narrative.

5. Rene’s sisters have not been taught to engage him as a sibling. They have been taught to blame every unhappiness on their brother including the absence of their father in their lives. His activities to seek sensory input are viewed as behavioral problems rather than attempts to gain accurate input from an environment he is clearly having challenges navigating . No one is educating his sisters about his disability except to scapegoat and victim blame. He is seen as destructive rather than a disabled young man trying to gain vestibular control in order to focus. Someone needs to reach out to these people and educate the lot of them. This is happening in San Diego, CA. I hope this can be made to happen.

6. Ms. Camacho’s husband was in the U.S. Navy, where the nature of duty assignments involves long absences from family and the military spouse is expected to carry on alone. Protracted duty assignments are statistically the cause of a large rate of military marriages ending in divorce, particularly in destabilizing moments for the military member, such as transitioning out of active duty military life, which was mentioned in the article. So the ending of the marriage here being entirely laid on the shoulders of an autistic ten-year-old is overly simplistic and dangerous, even if it gives Rene's mother an excuse beyond her control for the failure of the relationship.

7. The most important trope in the article, Dickey’s use of Ms. Camacho’s anecdote of her father wishing to call a priest to exorcise the autism from his grandson should be a red flag to everyone reading this. It harkens to incidents like the death of Torrance Cantrell who suffered and died at age 8 because his mother's church was trying to expel the demon autism from him. Demonizing, othering, and reaching for unhealthy solutions to a young man whose had no outlet to organize sensory input, navigate his home environment, and interact without ableism with his siblings and parents is not going to end well. That is justification for outrage against Dickey. But he is truly unimportant. Those he used to gain a moment's attention in a content laden Internet are the people that matter.

References/Resources
-----------------------------
Bad Disability Journalism: Autism as 'Genetic Devil' by David Perry
http://www.thismess.net/2016/08/bad-disability-journalism-autism-as.html 
Disability Community Condemns Autism Speaks
http://autisticadvocacy.org/2009/10/disability-community-condemns-autism-speaks/  
The Ransom Notes Affair: When Neurodiversity Came of Age
http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1065/1254
Exorcising 'Genetic Devil' Autism: The Murder of Torrance Cantrell:
http://theautismwars.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-murder-of-torrance-cantrell-towards.html

The Presumption of Incompetence: When Prophecy Fails

Caution sign with the word ableism in all caps

"Back in the 1950s three social psychologists joined a cult that was predicting the imminent end of the world. Their purpose was to observe the cultists’ response when the world did not, in fact, end on schedule. What they discovered, and described in their classic book, “When Prophecy Fails,” is that the irrefutable failure of a prophecy does not cause true believers — people who have committed themselves to a belief both emotionally and by their life choices — to reconsider. On the contrary, they become even more fervent, and proselytize even harder." 

- Paul Krugman, NYT Op-Ed, "When Prophecy Fails"

I was the victim of a seventh-grade teacher who fervently believed that I should not be a student in her class. She was a white supremacist and a true believer that no one my race should occupy the same physical space as anyone her race. She felt it beneath her to educate me. It didn't matter to her what my academic record was. In her mind, no Black student could ever be as intelligent as a white one. Her racism and my obstinate refusal to yield to it led to an inevitable standoff.

It happened in the girl's bathroom which doubled as the changing room for gym. I needed to relieve myself. She demanded I leave the bathroom stall door open so she could "be sure I wasn't trying to steal something." Finally fed up with the months of harassment, I refused. She denied me the right to enter a stall. There we stood for 15 minutes, my teacher smirking, certain that I would urinate on myself and she would have won by my public humiliation when three classmates, who entered to use the bathroom, walked in on us, teacher and student, simply standing there glaring at one another.

Graduation day for the author, seen at the far right in
an orange gown celebrating with a friend and her friend's
 mom  ©K. Çevik

"What's going on, Kendall?" a particularly bubbly girl asked, sensing the tension in the air and nonplussed. "I was just going to the bathroom, wasn't I?" I said, never taking my eyes off our teacher. Suddenly realizing she could not appear to be blocking my access to the bathroom or forcing me to keep the stall door open in front of the other students, she snarled "yes" and blushing furiously, left the bathroom.  That day I realized just how wedded to her beliefs this woman was. By the end of the school year, despite her best efforts, I passed the seventh grade. Her passionate insistence that a Black student could not succeed with white peers overturned, she continued to believe nonetheless that Blacks were inferior to whites.  After I graduated from middle school and went on to achieve in high school,  her belief in my race's incompetence continued regardless of the stellar students my color unfortunate enough to enter her classroom after my year of hell breaking that racial barrier was over.

There is an ableist trap that most visibly disabled nonspeaking individuals find themselves in. I call it the nonspeaker's dilemma. Quite simply put, once a person has been assessed to be nonspeaking and intellectually disabled, no matter what that individual does to demonstrate cognitive acuity, the presumption of incompetence is a prophecy that holds such a tight grip on its believers that it is nearly impossible to override. Society is so wedded to the myth that once a person is labeled intellectually disabled that person has no hope of cognitive competence that each generation ingests the presumption of incompetence automatically, unaware they are doing so. The myth has become a subliminal doomsday prophecy of society that lives a parasitic life within too many people who supposedly advocate and care for those who wear the ID label.

The false prophecy presuming incompetence is kept alive in part by the nonprofit industrial complex, which propagates this myth in order to drive the research funding upon which it exacts a percentage to survive. As a result, when a nonspeaking individual who also wears the ID label somehow manages to break through these barriers and  demonstrate the ability to communicate in any way, for example, type independently or with tech support or accommodation for disability, regardless of the method by which this is achieved, they will continue to be presumed incompetent. This is particularly true with nonspeaking autistics.

 The awful reality of this trap is it places nonspeaking disabled people who somehow manage in any way to demonstrate cognitive ability beyond expectations in an untenable position. I am a survivor of the harm done by bigotry-based presumptions of incompetence; I recognized this destructive attitude when my son entered the public school system.

Tech is power. Mustafa holds his AAC device to
communicate while nature watching ©K.Çevik

In the middle of an IEP meaning, when I asked how the team planned to increase executive function in my son throughout his school day, the entire team gaped at me as if I had just revealed I'd arrived from Mars. They were rendered speechless because they defined intellectual disability as profound intellectual incompetence. They believed that our son was in a static state of intellectual disability such that no intervention could increase his cognition or acuity. Now, how does any parent manage to motivate such an IEP team to generate any instructional design that might deliver learning to a student they have deemed incompetent to learn before ever attempting to teach him anything?

Over the years, our son went through several series of tests to gauge his baseline intelligence. At one point in his life, no medical expert had succeeded in getting a baseline intelligence score off him from any battery of assessments. We had arrived for his annual evaluations and another six hour day of intensive assessments. After three hours of refusing to participate or make eye contact with the formidable  doctor trying to test him, our son, age 8, decided enough was enough. He stood up, placed both arms on the doctor's desk, leaned forward, looked the doctor in the eye and retaining eye contact, raised his left hand and slapped the closed door of an office cabinet with the flat of it, hard. Still staring at the doctor, he grinned and sat back down.

At this point, it became quite clear to the good doctor what we already knew. Mu wasn't responding to the test because he didn't feel like being tested. His father was allowed to enter the testing room, at which point the doctor witnessed Mu easily demonstrating a mastery of fine motor skills needed to get an oatmeal cookie he wanted because it was nearly lunchtime and he was hungry. "How can we get him to do that again?" The doctor asked. "It has to make sense to Mustafa or he won't be interested in doing it" his father answered. Once the doctor respected that boundary set by her young patient and allowed his agency in the assessment process, Mu participated in his assessments and she became the first medical expert to get a baseline intelligence result on our son.

Despite witnessing this and direct evidence of Mustafa's mastery of topics like sight words and basic math concepts, experts still concluded that everything Mustafa learned was rote, that they were wrong about his complete lack of ability to retain but this did not prove his competence. They simply assured one another he'd somehow memorized the material, but did not understand it.  Our son will have to present his case for cognitive competence in such a way that it cannot be refuted. He and thousands of others like him will continue to be denied autonomy in their own lives until they are somehow able to prove they are competent to a group of experts and professionals who are such true believers that intelligence in intellectual disability is static that they will never accept the possibility that like intelligence in every human, cognition in those who carry any label can improve and increase with educational enrichment, assistive technology, and proper supports.

Society's belief in intellectual disability equaling incompetence is so strong that even when clearly visible evidence presents itself to override  expectations and the prophecy of intellectual disability equaling incompetence fails, some professionals go beyond simply accepting the myth and become evangelists for the belief that any ID labeled nonspeaking individual is incompetent.

If a series of social psychology experiments were run in which two sets of disabled individuals, (one who types to speak and is a nonspeaking autistic, and one who has a physical disability and can speak but is given an iPad and told to type as if they cannot use verbal speech,) were placed in rooms and medical and education professionals were told that both the nonspeaking autistic person and the individual with physical disability alone had no intellectual disability, and both communicated through typing, they would be treated with equal respect. Because when the intellectual disability label is deleted from the equation, people base their opinions on what they quantify and observe rather than their biased presumptions about any individual. 

This is the largest barrier for my son and his nonspeaking peers. Not incontinence, or behavioral challenges, or health concerns. It is the fundamental prophecy that the label of intellectual disability, when added to their nonverbal state, means a degree of disability so 'severe'  that no effort on their part can prove their competence. This taints their entire lives, robs them of autonomy, destroys potential avenues of funding that could drive research into more efficient Augmentative Assistive Communication technologies and community-based supports and  solutions based on the principles that autonomy and active participation in society are their human rights.

With the understanding that when prophecy fails, and some nonspeaking individual manages to prove themselves competent, it is our task as stakeholders to ensure that the individual is not objectified, treated as unique, or isolated from their nonspeaking peers in any way, we must push on and ensure that it is understood that we do not know enough about how our own brains work to grasp how competent any individual is.  While trying to form ideas on how this ingrained mentality can be countered, I realized something that is being inadvertently done that must not be done.

One way of making sure it is clear that anyone who is nonspeaking and using AAC supports to communicate is doing so on their own is to allow them to write without editing their words. The Amplify Autistic Voices project was an unsuccessful exercise in seeing how many unedited autistic voices could be amplified and accepted as they were. The primary reason for the failure of such a concept was as some of those voices gained popularity and demand for their content on platforms with greater audiences increased, individuals were inadvertently objectified and othered from their peers. Further detriment when gaining a greater stage for these nonspeaking individuals was once larger platforms were given nonspeaking autistic authors' content, their words were handed to editors, 'tweaked', 'refined', and the result was that further down the road, this caused the competence of very accomplished nonspeaking individuals to be questioned.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I'm going to try and explain what I mean with a story that is a perfect illustration of what happens when someone's right to speak in their own voice is tweaked, improved, or edited. I was once a coordinator for interpreters sent to immigration court. One day my manager called me to their office, telling me the DOJ had been contacted by the court in Utah over a new French interpreter. They wanted the interpreter retrained or disqualified. The interpreter, who was a native speaking French immigrant and language professor married to an American, was horrified. "How could the judge question my French?" She demanded. I asked her to go over everything she'd done in court that day without disclosing case information or compromising her client. Half way through her narrative I realized what had gone so horribly wrong. The refugee, an individual who had spent their entire childhood running from violent conflict in their homeland,  was speaking a dialect of French mixed with a local language and had a 5th-grade education. The professor had decided to "correct" the refugee's French errors as she interpreted them so as she put it, 'the court was more able to understand the refugee's plight.' Thank God the individual had other interpreters prior to that hearing. I explained to the professor that it is a court interpreter's job to translate verbatim the voice of the individual not edit, appropriate, or embellish it. In changing a refugee's voice her client went from someone who spoke the colloquial French of their ancestral home to someone who suddenly commanded a university level French vocabulary, she could have caused the refugee to be imprisoned for fraud and misrepresentation of his case to the U.S. Government.

The moral of the story is that the French interpreter came very close to causing irrevocable harm to the client she was supposed to be a conduit of by appropriating her client's voice, acting based upon her presumption of the client's incompetence to 'tweak and improve' his case in court. The prophecy of the presumption of lifetime incompetence for nonspeaking individuals who are made to carry the ID label is similarly perpetuated by two opposing well-intentioned stakeholder groups that harm when they mean to help.

On the professional/service provider end, there are those who cling to the status accompanying their professions as acolytes cling to false prophets.  They wrap themselves so tightly in the prejudices inherent in what science knew about intellectual disability when they were trained that they are unable to entertain the possibility that someone they were taught to believe would be perpetually incompetent must ethically be presumed competent as better assessment methods and assistive technology redefine and expand the meaning of competence and autonomy across neurology. If a professional who has spent a career erasing the agency of competent human beings suddenly learns they have harmed a great many people who they assumed they were helping they must live with the unthinkable guilt of having harmed those they were trained to help. This alternative truth, that a competent individual exists within their disability and rather than spending the resources to reach, teach, and support them those who claim to advocate for them in fact erase them from agency and control in their own lives deals a blow to the validity of many experts that they are unable to accept. This is my hypothesis on why the tremendous emotional investment in a respected professional identity places a person in such an ableist position that they refuse to dismantle any belief that might threaten this even if it means rationalizing away any proof of competence presented to them by a disabled individual seeking respect, autonomy, and a voice in their own lives.

On the parent/carer and ally end, there is the French professor's error in the story above that must be avoided at all costs. The appropriative tweaking and editing of original content written by nonspeaking people that render the end product so unrecognizable from the original draft that the authenticity of their authorship begins to come into question must end. The much voiced but little-understood concept of acceptance requires allowing our nonspeaking disabled colleagues, peers, and loved one's the power inherent in communicating without editing in their voices as much as possible. The cruelest thing that has happened to my son is the ease with which his accomplishments are dismissed as the work of a lesser being somehow taking cues on how to respond from a mother who loves him. We cannot accept this anymore if we wish the kind of genuine progress needed to end the propagation of the presumption of incompetence.

We all must continue reassessing and ameliorating our own structural ableism and not become a barrier to our disabled loved one's autonomy.  If we don't begin with self-examination and self-correction, at best we will be in the position of those three social psychologists, helpless observers chronicling the unfolding of true believers in the myth of presumption of incompetence, stuck on the sidelines watching them spouting doomsday prophecies well after disabled nonspeaking people present evidence that such prophecies have failed.

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

Dedicated to our son, Mustafa, his hard-fought autism war to be heard, believed, and respected as he is, and my husband Nuri, who exhausts himself to give his wife and son the opportunity to keep fighting on.

Where is Sharisa Joy Kochmeister? The War for Safety, Personhood, and Competence

Sharisa Kochmeister on her College Graduation Day
credit Facebook

The most terrifying thing that can possibly happen to a nonspeaking disabled adult happened to a dear colleague and online friend of mine, Sharisa Joy Kochmeister. She was taken against her will, placed first in a nursing home for seniors with dementia, and is now in a "host home" in an undisclosed location, the supports she needed to communicate were taken away from her, her family, concerned friends, colleagues, even her own doctor are being kept from seeing her.  In one series of unfortunate events, Sharisa is snatched away and her human rights have been snatched from her. Jefferson County, Colorado assumed guardianship of Sharisa, a brilliant, college educated autistic activist and former president of AUTCOM, The Autism National Committee. They have declared Sharisa, who when given her keyboard and safety to communicate freely tested at least 2 standard deviations above the mean, an  IQ of 47. They say she is unwilling to speak to them, therefore they reject her competence. She is not communicating, therefore she is not intelligent or competent? My God, would you speak to these creatures who rip every anchor and support you have away from you while you are in the midst of a serious health crisis, place you in a nursing home for elderly dementia patients, and then declare you incompetent? What on earth could she possibly type to them? A scream?

Sharisa used to blog at My Surreal Life. This is how she describes herself there:

"I'm 31 now, have autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, dyspraxia and a genius IQ; and communicate almost entirely via keyboards. I am former President of Autcom, on the Panel of Advisors on the Spectrum for the Autism Society of America; publisher and managing editor in chief and writer for "The Voices and Choices of Autism" and so on, and etc. I am also a university graduate with a dual degree in Sociology & Psychology with honors and awards; a consultant, an advocate, and a FABULOUS FRIEND! ;-)"

The tragic story of how Sharisa disappeared and is now a prisoner of Jefferson County  is succinctly stated in the Denver Post Op-Ed: Meyer: An outrageous human services case in Jefferson County

Sharisa Joy Kochmeister credit Facebook

I want to scream at them. This is like a chapter in a horror story. Now no friend or colleague is able to check her welfare nor is "allowed" to visit where she is. She has been left without communication supports. We know that she wasn't placed in the correct environment and we know Jefferson County Adult services is still in violation of the Olmstead decision and the Americans with Disabilities Act by holding her against her will. By removing the supports she needs to communicate  they have violated her right to self determination. That is how much power a state agency has over disabled people who need AAC to communicate. In one heartbeat, they can make your loved ones disappear in a quagmire of bureaucracy and cruelty and snatch every right a disabled adult has to make their own decisions, see their own friends and colleagues, and live their own autonomous lives. The erasure of everything Sharisa has achieved and what this must be doing to her mental health is devastating me. I need to make this clear to everyone. So I'm going to repeat what is happening to Sharisa and state again that this is happening over and over to disabled adults across disability constellations who need supports to communicate in crisis situations:

The following violations of Sharisa's rights under Olmstead and ADA took place:

Sharisa typing on her speech device
credit Facebook

1. Sharisa's communication device and supports were removed and she was therefore devoiced and unable to self advocate
2. She was removed to a nursing home for seniors with dementia, an inappropriate placement for her disability and a violation of the Olmstead Decision
3. Jefferson County Adult Services tested her intelligence without her speech support, therefore their finding of her IQ to be 47 is not valid as there is ample documented and video evidence to support she is an independent typer and a college graduate.
4. Jefferson County cannot simply seize control of a person competent to self advocate after blocking the disabled person's ability to communicate without that person's consent regardless of degree of disability.
4. Jefferson County is keeping Sharisa isolated not only from the supposed 'harmful' parents but also from everyone including advocates wishing to do wellness checks on her condition and her own doctor. This is not okay and is a red flag that Sharisa needs her own legal representation not a court appointed advocate that presumes she is incompetent and therefore erase her from the defense of her own right to self advocacy and self determination. Seclusion of disabled people is against the law and a violation of basic human rights.

When did we cease to live in a democracy? When did those agencies whose purpose is to protect become jailers and secret police, denying even a disabled adult's own medical professionals the right to insure their safety in this new setting? Who will be next? Because no matter how much wealth we have, no matter what power we think we wield, this can happen to any of our nonspeaking adult offspring at any stage of their lives and we their parents are powerless to stop it. One misunderstood gesture, one bitter or ableist staff person, any case worker who secretly refuses to believe that nonspeaking adults are competent, and they can take our loved ones away and we will never see them again.

This is a war for the personhood of disabled adults.  This is happening all over our country. Recall the case of Abreham Zemedagegehu, a deaf U.S. Citizen jailed for 6 weeks for a crime he did not commit, mistreated and left voiceless because the police refused to provide him with the communication supports he needed. He was Black and homeless so he was therefore guilty?

 While everyone with privilege is celebrating ADA's 25th anniversary, they also need to be fighting for our people. What benefit is privilege if it cannot save lives?

Beware the accusation of Munchausen by proxy: This accusation is at the center of another high profile case in which a young woman with mitochondrial disease was imprisoned in a Massachusetts hospital, denied treatment for 16 months, and the hospital and the CPS of Massachusetts is responsible for her health declining such that she is now confined to a wheelchair and may never recover her health completely. The story of Justina Pelletier is terrifying:  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06/12/massachusetts-dcf-files-motion-agreeing-justina-pelletier-should-be-returned-to/
The Munchausen by proxy parade of destroyed families and tragedies is endless. Jenny Lockley, the mother of an autistic young student, had her son's formal diagnosis rejected by a school that simply did not wish to provide him services and their insistence that she was "just trying to get attention" nearly destroyed her family and her life:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2554867/The-schools-spy-Munchausen-Mums-Teachers-accuse-lying-childrens-autism-attention.html
Here is the story of Karen, and how she and her husband lost two children to the lie of Munchausen by proxy: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/feb/01/children.health

Image of Sharisa typing with her father seated on
on her left when she was featured in the groundbreaking
documentary "Loving Lampposts."

Regardless of degree of disability every disabled person has a right to self determination: the entire victory in the landmark case of Jenny Hatch, is that a disabled adult, regardless of degree of disability, has a legal right to decide where they want to live.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/woman-with-down-syndrome-prevails-over-parents-in-guardianship-case/2013/08/02/4aec4692-fae3-11e2-9bde-7ddaa186b751_story.html
If you take away a person's wheelchair you've deprived them of their mobility. If you snatch away a person's certified ASL interpreter, you have devoiced them. If you take away a nonspeaking disabled person's AAC support you have devoiced them and taken away their ability to advocate for themselves. Removing a critical support from a disabled person is against the ADA and might even be a legal assault on their person.

 I am waiting for a statement of outrage from more disability rights organizations on this. From the onset, I've been waiting for a proper petition, a form email and a list addresses to write to those in charge of adult services in Colorado. Sharisa needs her voice back. She needs her right to decide where she lives and how she lives back. Sharisa is one of the women who led the fight for the presumption of competence of nonspeaking autistic people. She doesn't deserve this degradation and isolation, nor this abandonment from the community she fought for.

All of this hoopla about the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act means zip if any human services entity can get away with devoicing, snatching guardianship, and obliterating all the self advocacy and self determination of a nonspeaking disabled adult. Is this the world we want for our children? I for one don't. This nightmare straight out of a Lemony Snicket novel needs to end.


Where is Sharisa Kochmeister?
Colorado: Give Sharisa her life back.

Autism Community. Fight for Sharisa. Write the Governor of Colorado, Human Services, anybody. Email Colorado law makers.

Fight. She fought for us. Now it is our turn.

UPDATE: 
There is a new petition for Sharisa on change.org: http://tinyurl.com/pqzznul
Sharisa is in what is labeled in Colorado a "host home" facility now in an undisclosed location. To our knowledge she is still being denied any assistive technology communication supports. As soon as we have a postal address or email where we can sent letters or email to her I will post it here. She needs our words of support to tell her she's not alone. Sharisa life is very restricted and now and going from a free life to the this one must be traumatic for her. Others are also blogging about her crisis situation. I'll post those effortsin the reference list.

References:
Sharisa's story: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_28533686/meyer-an-outrageous-human-services-case-jefferson-county
The Loving Lampposts Documentary featuring her: http://lovinglamppostsmovie.com/
What is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)? https://adata.org/learn-about-ada
What is tIn Olmstead v. L.C., 527 U.S. 581, 119 S.Ct. 2176 (1999) ("the Olmstead decision"),? http://www.ada.gov/olmstead/

On Denial of Communication Supports for the Disabled 

Abreham Zemedagegehu's Story : http://tinyurl.com/qfggb3a
New: Amy Sequeniza for the Autism Women's Network: 
http://autismwomensnetwork.org/sharisa-joy-kochmeister-give-her-back-the-right-to-communcate/
Deaf couple denied interpreter fo birth of baby:
 http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/19/deaf-couple-lack-interpreter-birth-university-college-hospital-london
Deaf Mom Sues for the Right to Have Sign Language Support in Delivery Room:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/article1984639.html

On seizing guardianship of children and adults using the Munchausen by proxy accusation: 
Justina Pelletier's Story : http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06/12/massachusetts-dcf-files-motion-agreeing-justina-pelletier-should-be-returned-to/
Jenny Lockley's Story : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2554867/The-schools-spy-Munchausen-Mums-Teachers-accuse-lying-childrens-autism-attention.html

On the Right of Neurodivergent individuals to self determination in  deciding where they live:
Jenny Hatch's Story:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/woman-with-down-syndrome-prevails-over-parents-in-guardianship-case/2013/08/02/4aec4692-fae3-11e2-9bde-7ddaa186b751_story.html
And here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-woman-with-down-syndrome-becomes-hero-to-the-disabled/2013/08/17/0da21766-062e-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html