Lucy Blackman

Lucy Blackman (born 1972 in Melbourne, Australia) is the first functionally non-verbal person with autism in Australia to become credited as a published author, with her book Lucy's Story (2001). Blackman is purported to have begun using typed communication in adolescence and to have progressed to being an independent typer via the discredited technique of facilitated communication. Facilitated communication is intended to allow individuals with disabilities who otherwise cannot communicate to, with a facilitator's assistance, type messages using a keyboard. However, scientific studies demonstrate that facilitated communication is not actually effective and that the resulting messages are essentially written by the facilitators themselves, often unconsciously.

Blackman used facilitated communication in Melbourne's DEAL communication centre, run by Rosemary Crossley, beginning at the age of 14. She has received a BA (Hons) in Literary Studies at Deakin University in Geelong, and subsequently an MA. Advocates of facilitated communication believe Blackman's case provides strong evidence supporting the claim that this technique is a viable pathway to communication where verbal speech may otherwise never develop. She has been quoted as stating: "I find it difficult to understand why other people are more interested in the process of what I produce than the content."

Blackman was credited as the author of a chapter in the book Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone. In the introduction to her chapter, Douglas Biklen, who popularised facilitated communication in the United States, writes:

In all my personal interactions with Lucy Blackman, I have found her opinionated, articulate, humorous, ever so candid, and always ready to challenge my ideas or anyone else's. In her chapter, these qualities persist. At several points, she suggests that my questions are from a nonautistic perspective and therefore not about topics that she would herself choose to discuss; she seems to find mine annoying, For that matter, she questions other normate takes on autism as well. For example, she points out that if experts insist on focusing on communication impairment and social interaction as diagnostic markers for autism, then the field may fail to notice other factors that lead to these "peculiarities" (Blackman's term).