Ido Kedar


Ido Kedar is a non-speaking autistic author and autism advocate. His written works include the essay collection Ido in Autismland, and the novel In Two Worlds.
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Early life

Kedar was diagnosed autistic at age two. He was soon enrolled in Applied Behavior Analysis where he was rewarded with food for performing daily drills. Soma Mukhopadhyay, the inventor of the rapid prompting method, was involved with subsequent facilitated communication interventions which were claimed to successfully unlock Kedar's ability to communicate. In later interviews and interactions, Kedar uses an IPad on which he types without physical contact from a facilitator. For example, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported about an interview Kedar did with them in such a fashion. In the transcript of that interview, Kedar is reported to have communicated that until the age of seven, despite understanding language and being able to read, he did not believe his intelligence would be discovered. Kedar enrolled in advanced courses in high school and was placed on a college track. He received high scores on the California High School Exit Exam.

Writing

Essays and memoirs attributed to Kedar were produced in his early teens. A self-published collection of essays, Ido in Autismland was written prior to age sixteen.
In a "Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education" essay for the Harvard Educational Review, Carrie C. Snow writes that "the especial importance of movement in the process of learning has been amply documented," and discusses Kedar's description in Ido in Autismland of "how swimming aids his sense of body awareness." She continues: "Similarly, playing the piano was a saving grace for him as a student but also, more importantly, as a person. It gave him the tactile, routine, rhythmic, kinesthetic, intellectual, and creative sense of stimulus and discipline he needed to ground himself in a world that was overwhelmingly negatively receptive of how he showed up."
In the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Joseph Valente analyzes Ido in Autismland, which he describes as an "auti-biography," to explore "the literary expectation that the autistic protagonist will conquer the adversity posed by the condition to the degree that it will feel as if something along the lines of a "miracle recovery" has been achieved. A significant subgenre of autism tale does strive to obey both of these summons, and its member texts typically display a species of "aesthetic nervousness" unforeseen by Ato Quayson when he coined the phrase to capture the disconcerted reaction to disability in and of literary texts."
In his work Kedar is critical of dismissal of autistic voices and thought, especially of those who use facilitated communication. In a Studies in Social Justice article by Becky Gold, Kedar was one of several advocates and bloggers noted for their "insightful critiques" of Applied Behaviour Analysis. In Education Digest, Sean McCollum notes Kedar "expresses his contempt for ABA" in Ido in Autismland and that his "deficits are not cognitive, but a self-described neurological disconnect between mind and body."
In 2018, he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "I Was Born Unable to Speak, and a Disputed Treatment Saved Me". This received a response in the Wall Street Journal by Elise Davis-McFarland, the president of the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association, because Kedar had referred to the position of the ASHA about the Rapid Prompting Method ; Davis-McFarland wrote that other organizations, in addition to ASHA, did not recommend the method due to a "lack of high-quality scientific proof of RPM's efficacy."
In 2018, Kedar self-published In Two Worlds, which was described by the Irish Independent as "the first novel ever published by a severely autistic non-speaking person" and as "one of the few novels by an author with nonverbal autism" by a Kirkus Reviews Indie Review.
Kedar has had speaking appearances at conferences and guest lectures.
Kedar's writings were cited as supporting examples by Melanie Heyworth, Timothy Chan, and Wenn Lawson in Frontiers in Psychology of why "At the very least, as researchers, we have a duty of care to acknowledge and listen to the voices of FC/RPM users who have become independent of physical support and who have irrefutably demonstrated cognitive and communicative competence." In a response to this article, Katharine Beals asserted that "facilitator influence need not involve physical contact: auditory and visual cues... can also influence messages." She pointed out that nonverbal autistic individuals who require a nearby facilitator to communicate, even without physical contact, may be responding to the known psychological phenomenon of cueing, so that the facilitator is authoring some or all of the communication.

Publications

Books

Ido in Autismland: Climbing Out of Autism's Silent Prison
  • ''In Two Worlds''

Opinion

  • "Not Talking Is Not the Same as Not Thinking." In Vallejo Peña, Edlyn.. Communication alternatives in autism: Perspectives on typing and spelling approaches for the nonspeaking. McFarland.

Recognition