TV REVIEW : ‘Prisoners’ Puts Autism Technique to Test

Call tonight a Double-Blind Date on PBS.

First, on the “Nova” special, “Secrets of the Psychics,” there is magician and parapsychology critic James Randi conducting a scientific double-blind test--so-called since it ensures that neither subject nor observer distorts the evidence. Randi’s test disproves the claims of Russian psychics and the scientists supporting them.

Then, on the “Frontline” report, “Prisoners of Silence” (at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15; 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24), psychologists conduct a double-blind test revealing that facilitated communication, a controversial technique that seemingly allows autistic students to write, is just as baseless.

Like the scientist allies of the psychics, the scientists and academics behind “FC,” as it’s dubbed, end up looking like the Wizard of Oz. But just as psychic healers can offer patients false hopes of recovery, so FC practitioners are apparently providing parents and loved ones of autistic students groundless claims that these brain-impaired young people can actually write and think for themselves.

The evidence in “Prisoners” rather devastatingly suggests that it is the facilitators and not the students who are writing messages, sentences, even poems and short stories by pressing letters on a keyboard. Producer Jon Palfreman’s investigation suggests that this represents a research scandal--”the cold fusion of human services”--in which a well-endowed FC program at Syracuse University led by Prof. Douglas Biklen may be based on work never subjected to rigorous scientific trials.

The damage, though, has gone beyond academic reputations or the embarrassed feelings of former FC adherents who now realize their work was useless. With echoes of “Frontline’s” epic “Innocence Lost,” about alleged child abuse in a North Carolina town, Palfreman shows how autistic Matt Gerardi, using FC, supposedly typed charges of sex abuse by his father, Gerry. Gerry lividly recalls how social service authorities believed the FC-generated charges over his claims of innocence, and how the ensuing case nearly tore the Gerardi family apart. Only when court-ordered double-blind tests showed that autism patients can’t write were the charges dropped.

The deeper tragedy is that the Gerardi story isn’t unique: A proliferation of such cases in the United States triggers a question that’s never satisfactorily answered in Palfreman’s report. It is bad enough that well-intentioned teachers and psychologists would unconsciously manipulate the hands of their autistic students to write what they wish them to write. But why would some of these same FC aides manipulate students to write sex abuse claims? And what does it say about some social service workers?