Oliver Sacks Deceived By Mother Of Autistic Man

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Curious of opinions.

Tito Mukhopadhyay and therapist-mother Soma Mukhopadhyay.
Covered by 60 Minutes etc from 2000-2017.
Coverage stopped when the below author presented his case against her.
Article
Article with clickable links

A similar case.
Carly Fleischmann and therapist Howard Dalal.
Covered by 20/20 etc from 2008-2018.
Coverage stopped when the below author presented his case against him.
Article
Article with clickable links

Discussion about Oliver Sacks is in the first article.

I recall reading that article about Tito Mukhopadhyay once before.

I remember getting the impression that the kinds of interactions between Tito and his mother that the author interprets as evidence of "fraud" seemed to me more like evidence of the kinds of preparations that they would naturally make (even if genuine) to answer questions on a live TV show with an audience of millions.

As for Carly Fleischmann, I'm a bit surprised to see anyone attacking her credibility. If I recall correctly, she learned to type via an officially-approved ABA-based method, not via one of the more controversial methods that skeptics tend to dismiss as being allegedly just another variant of "Facilitated Communication."

All the more reason to doubt Dan Howitt's analysis of his observations of both Carly Fleischmann and Tito Mukhopadhyay.

I read the articles and had heard of these both in the past.

I looked up one of Carly’s You Tube videos. It certainly is not typing as I would normally consider it. She is not hitting enough keys to form the words being voiced. I guess the explanation is there is some sort of auto-fill program going on? The video was not convincing to me.

Has she been found or heard from after her disappearance?

As far as Tito goes, his mother uses a lot of hand gestures and cues. I wouldn’t be surprised if this cuing was instrumental in the process.

In my profession, I have worked with autistic individuals and their families and teachers. I’ve observed a tendency to describe abilities in ways that would indicate a higher degree of competence than I observed.

Here is an example. A teacher told me this autistic third grader could tell time and volunteered to show me. She took a large cardboard analog clock with the hour and minute hands. She would set a time on the clock and ask the child what time it is. It took about a dozen verbal prompts, along with some demonstration, before the child came up with the correct time.

Verbal prompts were cues like, “not quite,” “look here,” and sounding out the first letter of the correct response.

Demonstrative prompts were things like if the child said, for example, “10:30”, the teacher would move the hands of the clock to 10:30 and say, “this is what 10:30 looks like. We want 9:30. Can you find Niiiine-thirty?” The child might then move the hands to 8:20.

Parents of autistic children, at least the ones I’ve known, desperately want a cure and will believe the most unlikely of treatments in an attempt to fix their child.

If "he" wrote 7 books, would he need preparation to write, "I would have been a vegetable", on 60 Minutes during one of his mothers many demonstrations to the public? He wrote a small number of sentences of a few words each on 60 Minutes.

The mother on 60 Minutes, PBS, and Closer To Truth, also led him from word to word via fraud - telling him the first letter of the next word.

Doing something in front of an audience of millions is a very different experience from doing the same thing in everyday life. Wouldn't you have stage fright? Wouldn't you want to prepare? Wouldn't you want to rehearse, even for a brief appearance? I certainly would.

All the more so would I expect lots of preparation to be needed especially by someone with a severe neurological condition like motor dyspraxia, or by someone with severe executive functioning difficulties. Without substantial preparation -- and prompts -- I would expect such a person to be literally paralyzed by stage fright.

I can see why this might look like fraud to a person predisposed to see it as fraud. But there are alternative explanations that makes at least as much sense to me.

What this means is that tests of the genuineness of a severely disabled person's communication cannot be done in front of an audience of millions. Any such tests need to occur in a more familiar, everyday setting.

Sorry the wrong link for the case on Carly Fleischmann was provided. It is corrected above and here.

By the way this article on Carly shows this tape over her face may have been done by her therapist Howard Dalal who appeared with her on several television programs. This is powerful duct tape, it adheres to the skin, removing it from skin is horrible, this is on her face, over much of her face, and laid flat over much of her face's skin including her upper lip. She has never been shown to do anything like this to herself, nor cut anything like this, use tape, nothing like this ever. Howard could have used a scarf, paper, something not harmful like this. The above article shows all of "her" social media (facebook etct) was done by Dalal.