I was caught off guard with the bias in this Wikipedia article. I mean, I know it’s written and edited by humans, but still, this really struck me. A significant portion of the article was spent to how some people think it’s a hoax:
The book alleges that its author, Higashida, learned to communicate using the scientifically discredited techniques of facilitated communication and rapid prompting. Since Higashida lacks a genuine ability to use either written or verbal language, researchers dismiss all claims that Higashida actually wrote the book himself. Psychologist Jens Hellman said that the accounts “resemble what I would deem very close to an autistic child’s parents’ dream.”
Higashida was diagnosed with severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when he was five years old and has limited verbal communication skills. With help from his mother, he is purported to have written the book using a method he calls “facilitated finger writing”, also known as facilitated communication (FC). The method has been discredited as pseudoscience by organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association (APA). Researchers dismiss the authenticity of Higashida’s writings.
It all comes down to communication, ie, autistic people aren’t supposed to be able to. The method may have been discredited in 2014 when the above citations were written, but I can attest to the fact that I’ve interacted with many non-verbal autistics who use it, and write with it. I’ve read a lot of essays written by autistics using it. There’s just a cultural bias that autistics shouldn’t be able to communicate.
Michael Fitzpatrick, a medical writer known for writing about controversies in autism from the perspective of someone who is both a physician and a parent of a child with autism, said some skepticism of how much Higashida contributed to the book was justified because of the “scant explanation” of the process Higashida’s mother used for helping him write using the character grid and expressed concern that the book “reinforces more myths than it challenges”. According to Fitzpatrick, The Reason I Jump is full of “moralising” and “platitudes” that sound like the views of a middle-aged parent of a child with autism. He said the book also contains many familiar tropes that have been propagated by advocates of facilitated communication, such as “Higashida’s claim that people with autism are like ‘travellers from a distant, distant past’ who have come…‘to help the people of the world remember what truly matters for the Earth,’” which Fitzpatrick compared to the notion promoted by anti-immunisation advocates that autistic children are “heralds of environmental catastrophe”.
“Like Mitchell, like other parents, I have spent much time pondering what is going on in the mind of my autistic son. But I have come around to agreeing with the pioneering Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger that ‘the autist is only himself’ – there is nobody trapped inside, no time traveller offering redemption to humanity…I believe that my son enjoys swimming pools because he likes water, not because, in the fanciful speculations of Higashida, he is yearning for a ‘distant, distant watery past’ and that he wants to return to a ‘primeval era’ in which ‘aquatic lifeforms came into being and evolved’.”
— Michael Fitzpatrick, Spiked, August 29, 2013
Sallie Tisdale, writing for The New York Times, said the book raised questions about autism, but also about translation and she wondered how much the work was influenced by the three adults (Higashida’s mother, Yoshida, and Mitchell) involved in translating the book and their experiences as parents of autistic children. She concluded, “We have to be careful about turning what we find into what we want.”
Again, we are dealing with people’s opinions, not facts. And these are opinions from people who get paid to write about their opinions.
Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism is a follow-up to The Reason I Jump, written in 2015 and credited to Japanese author Naoki Higashida when he was between the ages of 18 and 22. Higashida has severe autism and his verbal communication skills are limited. However, he is able to communicate by pointing at letters on an alphabet chart. Skeptics have claimed that there is no proof that Higashida can communicate independently, and that the English translation represents the ideals of author David Mitchell and Keiko Yoshida. In response, Mitchell claims that there is video evidence showing that Higashida can type independently.
Interestingly, at the end of the article, the tone shifts and becomes less biased. Both the controversy and the idea that he wrote the book are given equal weight. And there’s even a response to the controversy.
I got incensed by the idea that non-verbal autistic people can’t have a rich inner life, simply because they are non-verbal. Non-verbal doesn’t mean not thinking. Just because a person can’t communicate in way you’d like doesn’t mean that they don’t have something to say.
I’m loving the movie so far, can’t wait to finish it. I’m going to read his books, too. His words as they’re used in the movie are incredible, so I can’t wait to read all of them on the page.