By Brooke Potthast 

“A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” Christopher Reeve 

As far as I am concerned every child or person with non- verbal or low verbal autism is a hero.  It’s difficult to imagine what they deal with every day. At an IACC meeting in the summer of 2013, Portia Iverson gave a presentation about this non-verbal group of the autism population.  She had a big pie chart to help the committee see how many children may not have functional speech in the US today. Unfortunately she had to make a stab at the numbers because for some reason there is no data being collected on this.  The safe estimate was 750,000 people in this country with limited expressive speech.

Well thank God for Soma Mukhopadhyay and RPM.  She created a life changing solution to the problem.  Now if we can just make it accessible to everyone who needs it and stop whatever it is that is causing the tragic loss of speech. 

Here is a short film made by my son James and four other teens about about their autism and how their life has changed since they can communicate meaningfully through Rapid Prompting Method.  It is called the “The Power of Words”.