Interrogating The Telepathy Tapes: Ethical Obligations at the Intersection of Disability, Lived Experience, and Entertainment

Fifteen million listeners and counting have devoured the 2024 podcast The Telepathy Tapes. Despite its extraordinary claims of paranormal abilities in profoundly autistic people, and its grounding in the pseudoscientific intervention Facilitated Communication (FC), bioethicists and other scholars in the medical humanities have been slow to respond. This paper uses the framework of narrative ethics to interrogate the obligation, if any, such experts have to challenge the lived experience depicted in The Telepathy Tapes. While many attach epistemic privilege to this kind of knowledge production, calling for "narrative humility," others argue that "narrative vigilance" is required, noting that personal narratives are just as prone to intentional and unintentional inaccuracies as any other source. The tremendous and well-documented harms that FC poses to profoundly vulnerable people, I argue, demand this latter, sceptical attitude, as part of an increasingly imperative defence of the rights of the autistic and intellectually disabled to evidence-based interventions.