Anne McDonald

Rosemary Crossley
Born	(1945-05-06) 6 May 1945 Horsham, Victoria, Australia
🏳️ Nationality	Australian
💼 Occupation
Known for	Facilitated communication
Notable work	Annie's Coming Out

Rosemary Crossley AM (born 1945) is an Australian author and advocate for facilitated communication (FC), a scientifically discredited technique which purports to help non-verbal people communicate. Crossley is the director of the Anne McDonald Centre near Melbourne, Victoria, which promotes the use of facilitated communication. The 1984 film Annie's Coming Out was made about her work with a facilitated communication patient named Anne McDonald. Many of her claims in legal cases and the media that certain nonverbal individuals can communicate through FC have been challenged and disproven.

Advocacy controversies

The Anne McDonald Centre, a centre for FC use in Melbourne directed by Crossley.

In 1975, Crossley was working at St. Nicholas Hospital, Carlton, Victoria, which was run by the Mental Health Authority and housed children with intellectual disabilities. Concerned that the hospital schedule accommodated inflexible staffing arrangements, rather than the needs of the children, Crossley made a submission to a Victorian committee on mental retardation. She also raised questions with the Mental Health Authority about some of the children in the hospital, claiming that although they had severe physical disabilities, they were not intellectually disabled.

Crossley is a controversial figure in the field of autism and disabilities. She has been praised by some – she received membership in the Order of Australia in 1986, Crossley established the DEAL (Dignity, Education, Advocacy, Language) Communication Centre, training a wide range of functionally non-verbal people in the use of communication techniques with family, friends and carers. It was later renamed the Anne McDonald Centre. Douglas Biklen of Syracuse University, Division of Special Education and Rehabilitation, visited her in Australia, and went on to popularise facilitated communication in the US.

In 2012, journalist Andrew Rule published two articles in the Melbourne Herald Sun about Crossley, under the titles 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'True Crime'. The latter claimed that Crossley falsely claimed facilitated communication was effective for McDonald, as McDonald did not have the capability to advocate for herself. The newspaper later published clarifications that they did not intend to convey the meaning that Crossley deliberately misled people, nor that she was a criminal. They removed both articles from the newspaper's website.

Crossley also attempted to travel with Leonie McFarlane, another individual who has cerebral palsy and is nonverbal, to a conference about disability in another state, but her application to the Supreme Court was not successful. McFarlane's parents opposed the request because they claimed that she could not communicate independently. Crossley had previously been banned from seeing McFarlane in 1980 at St Nicholas Hospital, but after the closure of the hospital, McFarlane had often gone on outings with Crossley and McDonald.

Crossley attempted to also give a woman named Angela Wallace the legal right to leave the institution she was at by using facilitated communication. However, based on an investigation by Dr. Peter Eisen, it was determined that Wallace would not have the ability to give consent. Additionally, it was found that Crossley helped create a false accusation of sexual assault through "Carla", who allegedly claimed through FC that her father was abusing her.

Crossley claimed in the 1993 Frontline documentary "Prisoners of Silence" that a comatose man that she was working with could pick his own housing arrangement, but Frontline disproved this claim using digital overlays.

Crossley has defended professor Anna Stubblefield against charges that she sexually assaulted a man with severe cerebral palsy, identified as D.J., by claiming that he could answer yes/no questions independently. Mark Sherry, a professor of sociology, claimed that Stubblefield manufactured D.J.'s communications.

Authorship controversy

Anne McDonald
Born	11 January 1961 Seymour, Victoria, Australia
💀Died	22 October 2010(2010-10-22) (aged 49) Melbourne, Victoria, Australia22 October 2010(2010-10-22) (aged 49)
🏳️ Nationality	Australian
💼 Occupation
Notable work	Annie's Coming Out

Crossley is a co-author of Annie's Coming Out, a story about a girl named Anne McDonald (11 January 1961 – 22 October 2010) who Crossley claimed had learned to communicate through facilitated communication. McDonald's story went on to be made into a film titled Annie's Coming Out (also called A Test Of Love) in 1984 starring Angela Punch McGregor and directed by Gil Brealey. The screenplay for the film was written by Crossley's partner, Chris Borthwick, with both Crossley and McDonald credited as contributing writers. The film won Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

McDonald was born on 11 January 1961 in Seymour, Victoria. As a result of a birth injury, she developed severe athetoid cerebral palsy. Because she could not walk, talk or feed herself, she was diagnosed as having severe intellectual disability. At the age of three, she was placed by her parents in St. Nicholas Hospital, Melbourne, a Health Commission (government) institution for children with severe disabilities, and she lived there without education or therapy for eleven years. During McDonald's time in the hospital she was neglected and starved, and in a later court case the Health Commission conceded that at age 16 she weighed only 12 kilograms. In 1977, when McDonald was 16, Rosemary Crossley reported that she was able to communicate with her by supporting her upper arm while she selected word blocks and magnetic letters. Crossley continued using similar strategies with McDonald and other individuals with disabilities, developing what has become known as facilitated communication training.

Through Crossley, McDonald appeared to seek discharge from St. Nicholas. Her parents and the hospital authorities denied her request on the grounds that the reality of her communication had not been established. In 1979, when McDonald turned eighteen, a habeas corpus action in the Supreme Court of Victoria was commenced against the Health Commission in order to win the right to leave the institution. The court accepted that McDonald's communication was her own and allowed her to leave the hospital and live with Crossley.

Patricia Margaret Minnes objected with the following statement:

However in my opinion the results of this assessment cannot be considered objectively reliable and valid until such time as Anne is shown to perform at a similar intellectual level under experimentally controlled conditions. In my view there are at least three variables which need to be controlled, namely – (a) the nature of support to Anne's arm, (b) the amount of information available to the supporting person regarding the response requested of Anne, and (c) the nature of Anne's responses. In my opinion these factors can be controlled and until the assessment is made under objectively reliable experimental conditions in my opinion the results of Mr. Healey's assessment cannot be taken as conclusive.

After leaving the institution, McDonald got a Higher School Certificate (University entrance) qualification from a night school and went on to receive a humanities degree from Deakin University in 1993. On the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, 3 December 2008, McDonald received the Personal Achievement Award in the Australian National Disability Awards at Parliament House. McDonald died of a heart attack on 22 October 2010. She received a posthumous award from the Australian Group on Severe Communication Impairment (AGOSCI).

Annie's Coming Out depicts how Crossley claimed to have developed facilitated communication. Widespread controversy has continued to accompany its use in the autistic population, with a number of peer reviewed scientific studies have concluded that the language output attributed to the clients is directed or systematically determined by the therapists who provide facilitated assistance. Some have questioned whether McDonald was actually communicating through Crossley.

Crossley later wrote Speechless: Facilitating Communication for People Without Voices about the experiences of several people who are purported to have first acquired communication through this technique. She was the Keynote Conference Speaker at the International Association of Severe Disabilities in 1990.

Bibliography

• The Dole Cookbook (Collingwood: Outback, 1978) ISBN 0-86888-219-4 Search this book on .
• Annie's Coming Out (Penguin Books, 1980) ISBN 0-14-005688-2 Search this book on .
• Facilitated Communication Training (Teachers College Press, 1994) ISBN 0-8077-3327-X Search this book on .
• Speechless: Facilitating Communication for People Without Voices (1997) ISBN 0-525-94156-8 Search this book on .

External links

• IMDB link to the film Annie's Coming Out
• link for DEAL Communication Centre

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