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.[1]
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.[2][3]
Until he was seven, despite understanding language and being able to read, Kedar did not believe his intelligence would be discovered.[4] After he began writing with his mother, he soon began using a letter board. Soma Mukhopadhyay helped work with him on communication.[2][5][6]
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.[8]
In a Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education essay for the Harvard Educational Review, Carrie C. Snow discusses how "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" and "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."[9]
In the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Joseph Valente analyzed Ido in Autismland, which Valente described as an "auti-biography," to explore what he described as "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."[10]
In his work Kedar is critical of dismissal of autistic voices and thought, especially of those who use facilitated communication (FC).[8][11][12] 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 (ABA).[13] 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."[7]
His 2018 Wall Street Journalop-ed, entitled "I Was Born Unable to Speak, and a Disputed Treatment Saved Me", along with his 2012 collection Ido in Autismland, 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."[11][unreliable source?] His 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal also received a response in a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Elise Davis-McFarland, the president of the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA), because Kedar had referred to the position of the ASHA about the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM); 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."[14]
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"[8] and as "one of the few novels by an author with nonverbal autism" by a Kirkus Reviews Indie Review.[15]
Kedar has had speaking appearances at conferences and guest lectures.[4][2][16] He uses a tablet to communicate, on which he types without direct assistance.[2][4][6]
Publications
Books
Ido in Autismland: Climbing Out of Autism's Silent Prison (2012) ISBN978-0988324701
Not Talking Is Not the Same as Not Thinking. In Vallejo Peña, Edlyn (Ed.). (2019). Communication alternatives in autism: Perspectives on typing and spelling approaches for the nonspeaking. McFarland. (pp. 69-82) ISBN978-1476678917
^Sources for non-verbal, autistic, autism advocate and author:
Happé, Francesca (January 12, 2018). "Immutable beauties: Considering the autistic spectrum". The Times Literary Supplement. No. 5989. p. 28. ISSN0307-661X. GaleA634283674. Higashida also describes how difficult it is to resist the call of a special interest or fascination, and Mitchell quotes another autistic author, Ido Kedar, who says that resisting a fixation is as hard as stopping yourself from vomiting.
Eastman, Susan G. (October 2, 2021). "Communication, Agency, and the Relational Self in ASD and the Letters of Paul". Journal of Disability & Religion. 25 (4): 427–450. doi:10.1080/23312521.2021.1911743. Ido Kedar, an autistic author who learned through facilitated communication, interprets professional wariness toward the treatment as the result of demeaning assumptions that 'not talking equals not thinking' and therefore that someone on the spectrum could not possibly be expressing such intelligence, emotion, or wit.
Mitchell, David (July 7, 2017). "Colours of the spectrum: how a silent Japanese boy with an alphabet grid showed me that almost everything I'd been told about my son's autism was wrong". New Statesman. Vol. 146, no. 5374. p. 42. ISSN1364-7431. OCLC4588945. Evidence against the 'uniqueness possibility' came in the form of other non-verbal writers with severe autism such as Carly Fleischmann and (more recently) Ido Kedar
Fennell, Louise C. P.; Johnson, Shannon A. (January 16, 2020). "Examination of professional biases about autism: How can we do better?". The Clinical Neuropsychologist. 36 (5): 1094–1115. doi:10.1080/13854046.2021.1958922. We know from individuals on the autism spectrum like Carly Fleishman and Ido Kedar that non-verbal individuals on the autism spectrum can be anything but 'low' functioning.
Van der Klift, Emma (2019). "A reflection on self-regulation and neuro-conceal". International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work (3): 68–72. ISSN1446-5019. OCLC49944881. Ido Kedar, a young non-speaking Autistic activist, has written that 'it's like living in a body with a mind of its own'
Kirkus Indies (June 12, 2019). "In Two Worlds". Kirkus Reviews. Kedar (Ido in Autismland, 2012) is an autism advocate who communicates and writes by typing on an iPad or keyboard and pointing to letters on a board. This book is one of the few novels by an author with nonverbal autism.
^ abMcCollum, Sean (October 2016). "A New Frame of Mind: What autistic students wish you knew about who they are and how they learn". Education Digest. 82 (2): 45–46 – via Academic Search Complete. ProQuest1815500286
