Ido Kedar

Ido Kedar is a non-speaking autistic author, memoirist, essayist, educator, and autistic advocate. His written works include the essay collection Ido in Autismland.

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. Until he was seven, despite understanding language and being able to read, Kedar did not believe his intelligence would be discovered. After he began writing with his mother, he soon began using a letter board. Soma Mukhopadhyay helped work with him on communication.

As he began communicating more adeptly, Kedar was able to become less isolated, proving his desire to communicate. He moved into advanced courses in school and onto a college track. He went on to score highly in the California High School Exit Exam.

Career

Kedar began writing essays and memoirs about his experience in his early teens. Kedar's 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 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."

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."

In his work Kedar is critical of dismissal of autistic voices and thought, especially of those who use facilitated communication (FC). 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). 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."

His 2018 Wall Street Journal op-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." 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."

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.

He also works as an educator, sometimes via speaking appearances at conferences and guest lectures, to help other nonverbal autistic people make similar progress in communication. He also works with educators to help set expectations around the abilities of nonverbal autistic people.

Kedar uses a tablet to communicate, on which he types without assistance.

In a 2021 literature review by Keri Delport in Counselling Psychology Review "conducted while concurrently engaging with the members of autistic community in order to establish research gaps and to include their input in practice", Delport noted the ongoing limited availability of "psychological interventions", even though "Autistic individuals such as Carly Fleishman, or Ido Kedar in the United States have taught us that non-speaking does not necessarily equate to a disconnect from accessing emotions or communicating about them."

Publications

Books

• Ido in Autismland: Climbing Out of Autism's Silent Prison (2012) ISBN 978-0988324701
• In Two Worlds (2018) ISBN 978-1732291508

Opinion

• "I Was Born Unable to Speak, and a Disputed Treatment Saved Me". WSJ. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. September 23, 2018. Retrieved March 4, 2023.

Recognition

• Quarter Finalist for the 2018 Publishers Weekly BookLife prize.
• Recipient of the 2017 Diller teen Tikkun Olam award in recognition of Ido in Autismland.

External links

• Ido in Autismland blog