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Facilitated communication

Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique, which claims to allow non-verbal people, such as those with autism, to communicate. The technique involves a facilitator guiding the disabled person's arm or hand in an attempt to help them type on a keyboard or other such device which they are unable to properly use if unfacilitated.

There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person. The facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board. Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object). In addition, in numerous cases disabled persons have been assumed by facilitators to be typing a coherent message while the patient's eyes were closed or while they were looking away from or showing no particular interest in the letter board.

Facilitated communication has been called "the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities". Some promoters of the technique have claimed that FC cannot be clearly disproven because a testing environment might cause the subject to lose confidence. However, there is a scientific consensus that facilitated communication is not a valid communication technique, and its use is strongly discouraged by most speech and language disability professional organizations. There have been a large number of false abuse allegations made through facilitated communication.

Overview
Facilitated communication is promoted as a means to assist people with severe communication disabilities in pointing to letters on an alphabet board, keyboard or other device so that they can communicate independently. It has also been called "supported typing", "progressive kinesthetic feedback", and "written output communication enhancement". It is related to the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), also known as "informative pointing", which also has no evidence of efficacy.

The person with disabilities, who is often unable to rely on speech to communicate, is called the communication partner, while the person holding their arm is called the facilitator. The facilitator holds or touches the communication partner's elbow, wrist, hand, sleeve or other parts of the body while the communication partner points to letters of the alphabet on a keyboard or other device.

One device popular with early FC users was the Canon Communicator, which printed a tape of letters when activated. However, two American companies were later charged by the Federal Trade Commission for making "false and unsubstantiated claims" that the device could enable disabled people to communicate using FC. The companies settled and stopped mentioning FC in their advertising campaigns.

Proponents of FC claim that the reason people with autism cannot communicate effectively involves motor issues such as apraxia, and that they "lack confidence in their abilities" but physical support helps them overcome this limitation. However, this claim is unsubstantiated. Research indicates that non-verbal autistics are unable to communicate due to intellectual disability.

The facilitator is depicted as helping the patient with pointing to letters, controlling involuntary arm movements, avoiding mistakes, initiating movement, verbal prompts, and moral support. It is also claimed that the facilitator must believe in the patient's ability to communicate. Former facilitator Janyce Boynton, who came to reject the technique after taking part in double-blind trials, later reported that her training took for granted that the process worked, and that the complexity of facilitation made it hard to realise that messages were coming from her expectations and not from her patients: "When you're facilitating, you're so distracted by other things. You're carrying on conversations, you're asking and answering questions, you're trying to look at the person to see if they're looking at the keyboard...Your brain is so engaged that you lose sight of what's happening with your hand...that's what makes it feel like it's working because the more you practice it, the more the movements feel really fluid."

Scott Lilienfeld, the Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University, writing in The Neuroethics Blog, admonishes practitioners of mental health practice not to ignore their "epistemic duties – responsibilities to seek out and possess accurate knowledge about the world," and wrote: "Ultimately, the proponents of facilitated communication very much wanted to help individuals with autism. But the facilitated communication tragedy teaches us that good intentions are not sufficient. Good intentions paired with grossly inaccurate knowledge and an absence of a self-critical mindset can be disastrous. This tragedy also teaches us that by not attending to their epistemic duties, professionals can do grave harm without intending to do so."

History
Techniques similar to FC appeared around the 1960s, with early observations regarding facilitated teaching of children with autism being published by Else Hansen (Denmark), Lorna Wing (England), and Rosalind Oppenheimer (U.S.). Studies were made in Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s, but did not have an impact outside of the country, and the debate there died out in the early 1980s due to a lack of scientific evidence.

In Australia, special educator Rosemary Crossley independently created facilitated communication in 1977, where it became popular largely due to her efforts. It was popularized in the United States beginning in the late 1980s by Arthur Schawlow and Douglas Biklen. FC has also received attention in Asia and Europe.

Early users of facilitated communication praised it for its apparent simplicity. It was promoted as a "teaching strategy" that did not require objective evaluation or close monitoring. However, as early as 1991, more than 40 peer-reviewed studies had not only failed to demonstrate FC's efficacy, but indicated that any successes reported were due to facilitator influence. This influence is usually attributed to non-conscious movements, and it is thought that facilitators are genuinely unaware that they are controlling the communications.

In 1994, the American Psychological Association (APA), passed a resolution cautioning against the use of facilitated communication, citing the lack of scientific evidence. They also stated that information obtained via FC should not be used to confirm or deny allegations of abuse or to make diagnostic or treatment decisions. In recognition of the continued scientific evidence against the technique, this was followed by similar statements from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), and the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC) In 1998, a British government report concluded that "the phenomenon fails to materialise once facilitator effects have been controlled. It would be hard to justify further research on this". By 2001, it was reported in a comprehensive review of peer-reviewed literature that "Facilitated Communication (FC) had largely been empirically discredited as an effective intervention for previously uncommunicative persons with disabilities, especially those with autism and related disorders. Key empirical findings consistently showed that the facilitator and not the client initiated communication."

Many people believed FC had passed its peak, characterizing it as a fad and pseudoscientific. However, promotion of the technique continued, with supporters dismissing empirical investigations as irrelevant, flawed, or unnecessary, and calling FC an "effective and legitimate intervention". As of 2014, the facilitated communication movement remained popular and it continued to be used in many countries. Mostert writes:"All the newer pro-FC studies operate from the premise that FC works and is a legitimate practice to be used in investigating any number of other phenomena related to people with autism and other related severe communication problems. Such assumptions increasingly morph FC into a valid intervention among readers who are unaware of the empirical dismissal of the intervention and who might not be skilled in distinguishing solid from suspect research. In this regard, it is likely that FC will continue to reinforce the assumptions of efficacy among parents and practitioners. These perceptions will continue to be reinforced by professional organizations such as the Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse University, a fairly wide acceptance of FC internationally, and the vacuum created by few if any future solid empirical studies that are likely to dissuade the faithful."Facilitated communication is closely related to the rapid prompting method (RPM), in which the facilitator holds the letter board instead of touching the patient. Proponents of RPM deny similarities with FC and state that the prompts are "nonspecific". However, RPM contains subtle cuing that makes it highly susceptible to influence from the facilitator.

Other similarities between RPM and FC include: reluctance or refusal to test their claims in controlled settings (purportedly because the process breaks the trust between facilitator and client), presumed competence, reliance on anecdotal accounts as proof of efficacy, maintenance of practices, techniques and claims that are inconsistent with the known research, claims of extraordinary literacy or intellectual breakthroughs, unconscious verbal or physical cuing by facilitators to obtain the expected responses, and inadequate or non-existent protocols to account for the effects of the facilitator.

In 2019, a dispute about the use of Spelling to Communicate (S2C), a brand of RPM, developed between the Lower Merion School District and the parent of a child attending school there. The parents claimed the child was deprived of a free education because the district declined to pay for a private educational program based on S2C. In December of that year, the hearing officer in the Pennsylvania Office of Dispute Resolution found that there was no evidence that S2C enabled the child to communicate and thus the school district prevailed.

Supporters
In 2010, Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Reference Handbook mentioned the Autism National Committee (AutCom), a parent-led nonprofit, as the main example of an organization that continued promoting facilitated communication, despite research in the mid-1990s which found that facilitators were doing the communicating rather than the children themselves. As of 2022, AutCom continues to state on its website that it "[stands] with autistics, along with their families, friends, and allies, and others who know and respect them, who are working to gain a reliable, autonomous voice", and lists methods it supports including "Facilitated Communication Training (FCT), Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), Spelling to Communicate (S2C), or Informative Pointing Method". Other organizations supporting FC have included the Association for Persons with Severe Handicaps (TASH) and the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN).

Opponents
Organizations opposing facilitated communication include:
 * The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP)
 * The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)
 * The American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD), previously called the American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR)
 * The American Psychiatric Association Council of Representatives (APACR)
 * The American Psychological Association (APA)
 * The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)
 * The Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI)
 * The Association for Science in Autism Treatment
 * The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
 * Heilpädagogische Forschung
 * The Institute on Disability (IOD) at the University of New Hampshire
 * The University of Northern Iowa
 * The International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC)
 * National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)
 * The New York State Department of Health
 * The New Zealand Ministries of Health and Education
 * The Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network
 * Socialstyrelsen (The National Board of Health and Welfare, Sweden)
 * Speech-Language and Audiology Canada (SAC)
 * Speech Pathology Australia
 * The Swedish Autism and Asperger Association
 * The Victorian Advocacy League for Individuals and Disabilities Inc. (VALID)

Claims and evidence
There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and multiple disability advocacy organizations that FC is not a valid technique for communicating with those with autism spectrum disorder. Instead, research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC (involving ideomotor effect guidance of the arm of the patient by the facilitator). Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object).

While video tapes exist that appear to show disabled people communicating through FC, or who have used it as a means to learn independent typing, these videos are widely regarded as inaccurate and misleading. According to one researcher, "You can edit videotape and show whatever you want. They'll show you a close-up of the finger moving across the keyboard... but you're not getting what else is going on."

Authorship of messages
Researchers attribute the facilitators' beliefs about authorship to the ideomotor effect (also called the Clever Hans or Ouija effect). While proponents say that FC should never involve guiding the patient, researchers attending an FC class in 1993 observed that physical force was used to prevent the patients from moving their hand away from the keyboard. Facilitators may also influence movements without realizing it. Researcher Gina Green stated: "Very subtle influence can affect people's behavior. It doesn't even have to be touch. It can be the slightest sound, the slightest visual cue." Guidelines for facilitators instruct practitioners to expect the emergence of hidden skills and sensitive personal information, to use anecdotal data to validate authorship, to avoid objective scrutiny.

Some observers have reported that while the facilitators were watching the letter board, their communication partners were often distracted, staring off into space, rolling around on the floor, falling asleep, or otherwise not paying attention. In other cases, the communication partners spoke words that conflicted with the words being typed. Individuals described as highly competent would also give wrong answers to simple questions or information that they should have readily known (e.g. the name of the family dog, the names of family members, the spelling of their own name) but which facilitators did not.

Proponents of the technique believed that patients who had not been taught reading, writing or mathematics were capable of writing down complex thoughts and solving multiplication problems. Patients have also been claimed to write books and poetry, advocate for better treatment of people with disabilities, express a desire to get married,  have sexual relations,  decide important medical issues, and, in some cases, report abuses allegedly occurring in their homes. According to psychologist Adrienne Perry, "The adult or child with autism is made a 'screen' for a facilitator's hostilities, hopes, beliefs or suspicions".

Autism
While proponents of FC claim that autism is primarily a motor control problem that can be overcome with physical support,  this view is not accepted by the scientific community. Autism is often accompanied by intellectual disabilities affecting language and communication which cannot be overcome by supportively holding someone's hand. Facilitators reject objective data and use public opinion and qualitative studies to promote FC's efficacy despite contradicting a long history of autism research. In some cases, patients learn to give specific responses to cues from the facilitator, such as in cases where the facilitator only touches their shoulder or does not touch the patient at all. Proponents also say that a few individuals using FC have developed the ability to type independently or with minimal support, but these claims are anecdotal and have not been substantiated. Many facilitators deny they are influencing their communication partners' movements, even when faced with evidence to the contrary.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) clinical report, Identification, Evaluation, and Management of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, published in January, 2020, the "Current scientific evidence does not support the use of facilitated communication in which a nonverbal individual is guided to communicate. This differs from augmentative and alternative communication, in which the individual is taught to communicate independently."

Belief in facilitated communication is promoted by its status as a claimed "miracle cure" presented when parents are undergoing stress and grief from learning that their child has a disability. The only evidence of success is the transcript of apparent communication. In some cases of autism, parents reject the diagnosis and say that their child's disability is physical rather than developmental, and with FC or RPM their beliefs are confirmed. Researchers James Mulick, John Jacobson and Frank Kobe state that FC is used to "...stroke their hopes with empty promises, regardless of their sincerity, while reaping personal or political rewards and working hard to prevent systematic verification of their claims". They add that "people with handicaps can be valued members of their families and communities without resorting to appeals to miracle cures" and that genuine help is available, but "advances in treatment and understanding come at the price of rigorous training, dedication to accuracy and scientific standards, and objective verification of all treatment claims".

Bernard Rimland, a research psychologist who founded the Autism Research Institute of San Diego and the Autism Society of America, asked "How is it possible that an autistic kid can pick up the last tiny crumbs of potato chips off a plate but not have sufficient motor coordination to type the letter E?" Howard Shane, director of the Center for Communication Enhancement at Children's Hospital in Boston and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, finds it "curious that those being facilitated can only create [these] insightful comments" when helped by an assistant. Why, when technology allowed people with severe disabilities the opportunity to access independent communication with even the slightest movement (e.g., an eye wink, movement of an eyebrow, a puff of air into a straw), would a facilitator need to hold their hand?

Testifying in the Anna Stubblefield court case, psychology professor James Todd called facilitated communication "the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities" and that every methodologically sound study of FC has shown it to be invalid. Writing about that case in the journal "Disability and Society", Mark Sherry voiced similar concerns about FC's lack of scientific validity, calling it a "sham", "hoax" and a "fraud." Sherry's was the first article published in a Disability Studies journal which thoroughly critiqued Stubblefield's actions, a noteworthy contribution because Stubblefield had also been in Disability Studies and had previously published about FC in the journal Disability Studies Quarterly. Sherry suggested that some of the defenders of Stubblefield (and FC more broadly) are either her personal friends or work in institutions which receive substantial income from providing FC. A newspaper editorial from Syracuse University, where the techniques relevant to the case had been taught, called it "inexcusable" and "embarrassing" that the university continues to support FC after over 25 years of research has discredited it.

Opposition to research
Members of the FC movement rely on anecdotal and observational data (e.g., the existence of unique spellings or unexpected skills or revelations made during the communication session) in order to back up their claims. However, because cueing is often subtle and it is not always possible to observe the influence of the facilitator, informal observations and facilitator reports have proven unreliable in determining authorship.

Parents and researchers who questioned FC's effectiveness and supported evaluating FC by objective methods have been accused of being "oppressors of the disabled," told they were narrow-minded, outmoded, evil, jealous they were not the ones to discover FC, and, in some cases, accused of hate speech for advocating a more studied approach. Proponents claim that testing is demeaning to the disabled person, that the testing environment creates performance anxiety, or that those being facilitated may purposely produce nonsense, refuse to respond, or give wrong answers to counteract the negative attitudes of those who are skeptical of the technique.

Mostert wrote in 2001, "FC proponents must be encouraged to subject their claims to further scientific verification, the claims of anecdotal evidence notwithstanding. If any small part of FC is ever to be found effective or even plausible, it is abundantly clear that only by careful use of controlled experimental methods will this be established." The only way to determine whether communications are truly independent is to perform controlled testing, where the facilitator does not already know the answers to questions and, therefore, cannot inadvertently or purposefully cue their communication partner to obtain the desired answer. Even if the facilitator feels like they are not moving the other person's hand, they can still be providing cues that lead to specific letters on the keyboard.

In 1992, when FC was fairly new to the United States, Douglas Biklen was quoted in The Washington Post as saying he "welcomed scientific studies", but the article went on to say: "he doesn't want to do them. He's an educator, not a psychiatrist, and like other educators who have written about facilitated communication, he is comfortable with the fact that there is often a lag time between the application of a new method and its scientific validation." Although proponents say that FC is difficult or impossible to objectively test, psychologist James T. Todd wrote: "the determination of authorship in FC involves a straightforward application of basic experimental methods described comprehensively by Mill (1843) more than a century and half ago, but understood for millennia. We are not speaking of obscure or controversial techniques. We are speaking of authorship validation by selectively presenting different information to two people then observing what is produced."

Blind testing
Despite the FC community's reluctance to participate in testing, researchers outside the community set up blinded experiments to identify who was doing the communicating. Some of the tests were conducted as a direct response to cases involving sexual abuse allegations made through facilitated communication against parents, teachers, and caregivers of people with disabilities. However, a number of controlled evaluations were also conducted by clinicians, researchers, and program administrators who were considering the use of FC, but wanted an objective, empirical basis for deciding what role, if any, FC would have in their programs.

The O.D. Heck Center in Schenectady, New York was one of the first in the United States to go public with their findings, which were that their clients produced meaningful responses through facilitated communication only when their facilitators had access to the correct responses. The report also ruled out issues of confidence or skepticism on the part of the evaluators. All twelve participants (people with disabilities) were chosen for the evaluation because their facilitators believed in their ability to communicate through FC. The study demonstrated that the communication partners were "systematically and unknowingly" being influenced by their facilitators. The researchers wrote:"In fact, the nature of the findings permits us to assert that their output in facilitated communication was not only influenced, but was controlled and determined by the facilitators. To all appearances, these participants had been producing thoughtful communication, and several had consistently engaged in interactive conversations using facilitated communication. Many people serving these individuals believed that this output reflected the valid expressions of the participants."The result of the O.D. Heck study seemed so startling, especially in light of the positive response FC was getting in the popular press, that Frontline featured the story in its 1993 "Prisoners of Silence". In 1993, Genae A. Hall, research director for the Behavior Analysis Center for Autism, wrote: "The fact that facilitators often control and direct the typing has been called 'facilitator influence,' which seems to be a misnomer. 'Facilitator influence' suggests that the disabled person is emitting verbal behavior, and the facilitator is exerting partial control (or 'influence') over that behavior. Although partial control certainly may occur when fading prompts within structured teaching programs, such control has not been demonstrated in most cases of FC. Rather than influencing the typed messages, the facilitator appears to be the sole author of those messages. Thus, the focus of analysis is shifted from the disabled person's behavior to the facilitator's behavior." Multiple other double-blind studies were being conducted at the same time, and whenever conditions were adequately controlled to prevent the facilitator from knowing the answers to questions, the results revealed facilitator influence, if not direct authorship.

In 1994, Thistledown Regional Centre in Ontario, Canada conducted an internal study of 20 people with autism and stopped using FC when the results showed facilitator influence was "contaminating the messages being produced." By 1995, these results had been replicated by researchers worldwide in at least 24 studies in credible, peer-reviewed research journals using multiple different methods that ensure the facilitator does not know or cannot guess the expected message, or does not look at the letters.

In 1997, reflecting on the trajectory FC has taken in several countries, including Denmark, the U.S. and Australia, von Tetzchner wrote:"In the struggle to keep up to date with an increasing number of published papers, both researchers and practitioners tend to forget history. In order to avoid making the same mistakes over again, the issues and processes underlying the rise and fall of facilitating techniques--as well as other intervention methods--in various countries should have a natural place in research reviews. When an intervention claimed to have exceptional effects disappears, the likely reason is lack of positive results."By 2005, more than 50 controlled studies and blind tests had been conducted, in addition to numerous controlled tests conducted in legal cases. The studies consistently showed "without a doubt" that the messages obtained through facilitated communication were controlled by the facilitators and not their communication partners.

The vast majority of evidence now indicates that facilitated communication is not scientifically valid. However, this information has not stopped many individuals from using this technique under various circumstances and furthermore, advocating for its effectiveness. The overwhelming majority of studies conducted on the efficacy of this technique has revealed that any "positive" results indicating that facilitated communication has worked can be attributed to the facilitators themselves. Be it the facilitator attributing their own beliefs and views onto the individual, or creating a pseudo-personality for the disabled individual based on their previous encounters with them, it is clear that the facilitator is really the one doing all the communicating.

The American Psychological Association (APA) issued a statement in 1994 that there was "no scientifically demonstrated support for its efficacy." Finally, even further defining facilitated communication as a pseudoscience, the APA issued a statement indicating that facilitated communication studies have repeatedly demonstrated that it is not a scientifically valid technique and that it is a controversial and unproved communicative procedure with no scientifically demonstrated support for its efficacy.

Previous proponents
Pat Mirenda, professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology and Special Education at the University of British Columbia and co-author David R. Beukelman, Barkley Professor of Communication Disorders at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had included FC in early versions of their textbook Augmentative and Alternative Communication: Supporting Children and Adults with Complex Communication Needs. These versions are quoted in pro-FC literature. However, they decided not to include FC in revised versions, and in 2015 Mirenda stated, "I came to recognize (painfully, to be honest) that my advocacy stance biased me to interpret what I saw on videotapes as independent typing even though other explanations were more plausible (e.g., subtle prompting, resulting in an ideomotor effect), and that, even if independent typing did occur subsequent to FC exposure, only correlational—but definitely not causal—evidence exists with regard to its relationship to FC. In short, I do not endorse FC as a communication or instructional technique, and I do not support its use."

Stephen N. Calculator of the University of New Hampshire, an early proponent of FC, later distanced himself from the movement because he could not replicate claims of independent communication in his own research studies. He described the importance of determining the extent of facilitator influence: "The consequences of falsely attributing messages to communicators, rather than facilitators, continue to have significant financial, social and moral ramifications. Facilitators must take extraordinary precautions to assure that they are not unduly influencing messages and thereby impinging on communicators' freedom of speech. The rights of individuals to express their thoughts and ideas should not be circumvented by facilitators who communicate for them, unwilling or not."

Janyce Boynton, who at one time was a strong FC proponent, is now one of FC's leading critics. In the early 1990s, she was the facilitator for a non-speaking high school girl with autism who seemed to describe having been sexually abused by her parents, resulting in the girl and her brother being removed from their home. However, systematic testing by Howard Shane revealed that the girl could not have been the author of the messages. The case was described in the 1993 PBS Frontline documentary "Prisoners of Silence". Unlike many in the FC-proponent community, Boynton accepted the evidence from Shane's testing and other well-controlled scientific studies. She stopped using FC, convinced her school administration to implement a system-wide prohibition on its use, and apologized to the falsely accused parents of the girl she had worked with. In a presentation at the CSICON meetings in 2019, Boynton argued that most FC facilitators are well-meaning but are caught up in a belief system that leads them to discount the overwhelming evidence that FC does not work. She maintains a clearinghouse of professional articles and media coverage about FC, and helped in convincing the University of Northern Iowa to stop sponsoring an annual workshop that included instruction in FC. As stated by another member of that group (Stuart Vyse), "this is just the beginning. There are a number of other universities and governmental organizations that tacitly or explicitly endorse FC and/or its related techniques, and Ms. Boynton and her allies have their eyes on a number of these future targets".

In 2006, Belgian neurologist Steven Laureys claimed that Rom Houben, a comatose man, was able to type out thoughts on a keypad with the help of facilitated communications. However, when independent tests demonstrated that FC could not produce the correct answers to questions if the facilitator had not been in the room, he agreed that Houben had not been communicating.

Presentation in the media
Stories of purported successes are still reported in magazines such as Reader's Digest, in movies     and plays, and on television shows such as ABC's 20/20 Prime Time Live with Diane Sawyer. Thousands of people—teachers, parents, speech pathologists, psychologists—struggling to find a way to communicate with individuals who, otherwise, demonstrated little ability to use words to communicate—adopted FC with "blinding speed" with little public scrutiny or debate. Eric Schopler, then director of an autism education program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and editor of the Journal of Autism, described promoting facilitated communication with no empirical evidence as "reckless".

Describing this rapid rise in popularity, particularly in the United States, doctors John W. Jacobson, James A. Mulick, and Allen A. Schwartz wrote: "The general acceptance of FC by the public and segments of the professional community has called into question the rigor with which educational and therapeutic interventions are evaluated in publicly funded programs and the ability of many professionals to critically assess the procedures they use. As such, FC serves as a case study in how the public and, alarmingly, some professionals, fail to recognize the role of science in distinguishing truth from falsity and its applicability to assessing the value of treatment modalities."James Randi, a magician familiar with the ideomotor effect commonly attributed to dowsing and later linked to FC, was called in to investigate facilitated communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1992, and later called it "a crock that does more harm than good by raising false hopes among families of autistic children". The James Randi Educational Foundation has offered a million-dollar prize "to a valid demonstration of facilitated communication." In 2009, Randi responded in an interview for the Rom Houben case, where it was shown that messages from a Belgian man who was believed to be in a coma for 23 years were generated by the facilitator, "Our prize is still there."

Syracuse University
In 1992, Syracuse University founded the Facilitated Communication Institute to promote the use of FC. Douglas Biklen was appointed as the institute's first director. In 2010, the name was changed to the Institute on Communication and Inclusion (ICI). It is part of the Center on Disability and Inclusion of the School of Education. According to the ICI website, the Institute "... is an active research, training, and support center, and the nation’s leading resource for information about communication and inclusion for individuals who type to communicate." The Institute carries out training and research in FC and publishes scholarly articles, books, and films.

University of Northern Iowa
From 2014 through 2018, the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) held the Midwest Summer Institute that focused on "inclusive schools, employment and daily living, as well as communication and supported or facilitated typing for people with autism spectrum disabilit[ies] and other complex communication needs." In 2018, following the release of a statement from scientists and academics arguing FC had long been discredited and calling it an "invalidated and demonstrably harmful practice," UNI announced it would stop supporting the conference.

Abuse allegations and facilitator misconduct
There have been instances in which facilitated communication produces allegations of sexual or physical abuse. Often, the alleged abuse is sexual and contains "extensive, explicit, pornographic details." It is not known whether FC generates more abuse allegations than other suggestive techniques.

Researchers suspect that facilitators involved in this type of case may, mistakenly, believe there is a link between early abuse and autism, or suspect familial abuse for other reasons. As Green wrote in a 1995 article:"suggestions about sexual abuse permeate the culture. Just watch Oprah or Phil [Donahue] almost any time or scan the pop psychology section at your local bookstore. Couple that with mandatory abuse reporting laws, mix in a little bit of crusading zeal to 'save' people with disabilities from mistreatment, and you have a potent set of antecedents for facilitators to produce allegations."In 1993, Frontline 's "Prisoners of Silence" featured the story of Gerry Gherardi of North Carolina who was accused, through FC-generated messages, of sexually abusing his son. Despite protestations of innocence, Gherardi was forced to stay away from his home for six months. The charges were dropped when court-ordered double-blind tests showed that Gherardi's son could not write. In the same year, Rimland reported in a New York Times article that he knew of about 25 cases where families were accused through facilitated communication of sexually abusing their children.

By 1995, there were 60 known cases, with many others settled without reaching public visibility. Since then, the number of cases continues to increase. In addition to accusations of sexual abuse, facilitators have reportedly fallen in love with their communication partners and, relying on FC for consent, initiated sexual, physical contact with people in their care, raising serious ethical and legal problems.

Anna Stubblefield
In 2015, Anna Stubblefield, a Rutgers University–Newark philosophy professor, was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault against a man with severe mental disabilities. A proponent of facilitated communication, Stubblefield's web site described her as "certified as a Facilitated Communication Trainer by the FC Institute at the School of Education, Syracuse University. She provides motor planning support for communication and literacy for adults and children." At the time the investigation began in 2011, Stubblefield was the chair of Rutgers-Newark's philosophy department, whose professional work centered on ethics, race, and disability rights, but she was subsequently put on administrative leave without pay and removed as chair of the philosophy department.

The victim was identified as D.J., a 33-year-old African-American man with severe mental disabilities who cannot speak, has cerebral palsy, and is unable to stand independently or accurately direct movements of his body. Based on his disability, his mother and brother were appointed his legal guardians. Stubblefield stated that she had successfully communicated with him, determining he was of normal intelligence. She subsequently brought him to conferences where she "held him out as a success story". In 2011, she revealed to his mother and brother that she had had sexual relations with D.J. and said that they were in love, attributing consent to messages received while facilitating. Stubblefield stated that the two of them had a mutually consenting relationship established through facilitated communication. However, testing of D.J. by family members failed to establish the ability to communicate, and Stubblefield was thanked but denied further access to D.J. She continued to attempt to maintain contact with D.J. and began challenging control of D.J.'s legal guardians over him. In August 2011, the family contacted the police.

Stubblefield pleaded not guilty to the charges and said that FC revealed D.J. was mentally capable, while prosecutors said that FC was scientifically discredited and that D.J. did not have the ability to consent to sexual relations. Experts evaluating D.J. testified he did not have the intellectual ability to consent to sexual activity. Facilitated communication testimony from D.J. was not allowed as the technique was ruled unreliable under New Jersey law. After a three-week trial, the jury found Stubblefield guilty of two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault. After conviction, the judge revoked bail, saying that she was a flight risk, and she was sentenced to 12 years in prison. This included requiring her to register as a sex offender. In July 2017, an appeals court overturned her conviction and ordered a retrial, and in 2018 she pleaded guilty to "third-degree aggravated criminal sexual contact" and was sentenced to time served. In October 2016, the family was awarded $4 million in a civil lawsuit against Stubblefield.

The 2023 documentary film Tell Them You Love Me by Louis Theroux covers the story.

Martina Susanne Schweiger case
In 2014, Martina Susanne Schweiger of Queensland, Australia, received an 18-month suspended jail sentence for two counts of indecent dealing with a 21-year-old client with severe autism with whom she worked at a disability services home. The client required 24-hour support and was not able to speak, write or use manual sign-language.

Schweiger believed the client expressed love for her through FC, which she claimed to reciprocate. She also believed the client, again through FC, indicated a desire to have sex. On one occasion, Schweiger removed her clothes in front of her client. On another, she "play wrestled" with him, touching his penis with her hands and mouth. She confessed her actions to her employer. After hearing reports from Alan Hudson, psychology professor at RMIT University, that FC "did not work for the young man", Judge Gary Long of Maroochydore District Court found Schweiger guilty of the charges, indicating that FC was neither reliable nor accurate as a method of communication.

title: Facilitated communication


text:
ACF River Basin

The Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin (the ACF River Basin) is the drainage basin, or watershed, of the Apalachicola River, Chattahoochee River, and Flint River, in the Southeastern United States.

This area is alternatively known as simply the Apalachicola Basin and is listed by the United States Geological Survey as basin HUC 031300, as well as sub-region HUC 0313. It is located in the South Atlantic-Gulf Water Resource Region, which is listed as HUC 03. The basin is further sub-divided into 14 sub-basins.

Geography
The ACF River Basin begins in the mountains of northeast Georgia, and drains much of metro Atlanta, most of west Georgia and southwest Georgia and adjoining counties of southeast Alabama, before it splits the central part of the Florida Panhandle and flows into the Gulf of Mexico at Apalachicola Bay, near Apalachicola, Florida. It drains an area of 20,355 square miles. Most of the northern half of the basin abuts the Eastern Continental Divide on the east, and the ACT River Basin to the west.

Water wars
These states and Alabama have been involved in a water-use dispute for two decades, known as the Tri-state water dispute. Georgia has also lobbied the United States Congress to end navigation on the Appalachicola and lower Chattahoochee, to conserve more water during droughts. Keeping the two rivers at a navigable depth during these times requires large releases from dams upstream, sending potential drinking water downstream for shipping, and often dropping lakes to levels dangerous to boaters.

Conservation
Other ecological conservation and economic concerns include protecting harvests of oysters in Apalachicola Bay, which require a large enough flow of fresh water to prevent excessive saltwater intrusion from the Gulf. Numerous endangered and imperiled species occur in the basin, including many endemic mussels

The cost of dredging silt, much of it caused by uncontrolled growth across metro Atlanta's fine red clay soil, has also been criticized as a wasteful exercise to float so little ship traffic.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: ACF River Basin


text:
Thom Yorke

Thomas Edward Yorke (born 7 October 1968) is an English musician who is the main vocalist and songwriter of the rock band Radiohead. He plays guitar, bass, keyboards and other instruments, and is noted for his falsetto. Rolling Stone described Yorke as one of the greatest and most influential singers of his generation.

Yorke formed Radiohead with schoolmates at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire. Their 1992 debut single, "Creep", made Yorke a celebrity, and Radiohead went on to achieve acclaim and sales of more than 30 million albums. Yorke's early influences included alternative rock acts such as Pixies and R.E.M. With Radiohead's fourth album, Kid A (2000), Yorke moved into electronic music, influenced by Warp acts such as Aphex Twin. For most of his career, he has worked with the producer Nigel Godrich and the cover artist Stanley Donwood.

Yorke's solo work comprises mainly electronic music. His debut solo album, The Eraser, was released in 2006. To perform it live, he formed a new band, Atoms for Peace, with musicians including Godrich and the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. They released an album, Amok, in 2013. Yorke's second solo album, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, was released in 2014, followed by Anima in 2019. In 2021, Yorke debuted a new band, the Smile, with the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and the drummer Tom Skinner. Yorke has collaborated with artists including PJ Harvey, Björk, Flying Lotus and Modeselektor, and has composed for film and theatre, including the films Suspiria (2018) and Confidenza (2024).

Yorke is an activist on behalf of human rights, animal rights, environmental and anti-war causes, and his lyrics incorporate political themes. He has been critical of the music industry, particularly of major labels and streaming services such as Spotify. With Radiohead and his solo work, he has employed alternative release platforms such as pay-what-you-want and BitTorrent. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Radiohead in 2019.

Early life
Yorke was born on 7 October 1968 in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. He was born with a paralysed left eye, and underwent five eye operations by the age of six. According to Yorke, the last surgery was "botched", giving him a drooping eyelid. He decided against further surgery: "I decided I liked the fact that it wasn't the same, and I've liked it ever since. And when people say stuff I kind of thought it was a badge of pride, and still do."

The family moved frequently. Shortly after Yorke's birth, his father, a nuclear physicist and later a chemical equipment salesman, was hired by a firm in Scotland. The family lived in Lundin Links until Yorke was seven, and he moved from school to school. The family settled in Oxfordshire in 1978, where Yorke attended primary school in Standlake.

Yorke said he knew he would become a rock star after seeing the Queen guitarist Brian May on television for the first time at the age of eight. He initially wanted to be a guitarist rather than a singer, but began singing as he had no one else to sing the songs he was writing. He received his first guitar as a child. At 10, he made his own guitar, inspired by May's homemade Red Special. By 11, he had joined his first band and written his first song. Seeing Siouxsie Sioux in concert at the Apollo in 1985 inspired him to become a performer; Yorke said he had never seen anyone "captivate an audience like she did".

Yorke attended the boys' public school Abingdon in Oxfordshire. He felt out of place, and got into physical fights with other students. He found sanctuary in the music and art departments, and wrote music for a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. At school, he performed a vocal recital of a Schubert piece, which helped him find the confidence to become a singer. Terence Gilmore-James, the Abingdon director of music, recalled Yorke as "forlorn and a little isolated" thanks to his unusual appearance, but talkative and opinionated. He said Yorke was "not a great musician", unlike his future bandmate Jonny Greenwood, but a "thinker and experimenter". Yorke later credited the support of Gilmore-James and the head of the art department for his success.

1985–1991: On a Friday

In sixth form at Abingdon, Yorke played with a punk band, TNT, but left when he was dissatisfied with their progress. He began playing with the students Ed O'Brien, Philip Selway and Colin Greenwood, joined later by Colin's younger brother Jonny. In 1985, they formed a band, On a Friday, named after the only day they were allowed to practice. According to Selway, while each member contributed songs in the band's early period, Yorke emerged as the main songwriter.

After leaving Abingdon, Yorke took a gap year and tried to become a professional musician. He held several jobs, including a period selling suits and working in an architect's office, and made a demo tape. He was also involved in a serious car accident that influenced the lyrics of later songs, including the Bends B-side "Killer Cars" (1995) and "Airbag" from OK Computer (1997). In the late 1980s, Yorke made a solo album, Dearest, which O'Brien described as similar to the Jesus and Mary Chain, with delay and reverb effects.

On the strength of their first demo, On a Friday were offered a record deal by Island Records, but the members decided they were not ready and wanted to go to university first. Yorke had wanted to apply to St John's to read English at the University of Oxford, but, he said, "I was told I couldn't even apply – I was too thick. Oxford University would have eaten me up and spat me out. It's too rigorous." He also considered studying music, but could not read sheet music.

In late 1988, Yorke left Oxford to study English and fine arts at the University of Exeter. On a Friday entered hiatus aside from rehearsals during breaks. At Exeter, Yorke performed experimental music with a classical ensemble, played in a techno group called Flickernoise, and played with the band Headless Chickens, performing songs including future Radiohead material. He also met his future wife Rachel Owen, and Stanley Donwood, who later produced artwork for Radiohead and Yorke's solo releases. According to Yorke, his paintings at Exeter were "shit"; he was rejected by his classmates and "went AWOL for three months". Yorke credited his art school education for preparing him creatively for his later work.

On a Friday resumed activity in 1991 as most of the members were finishing their degrees. Ronan Munro, the editor of the Oxford music magazine Curfew, gave the band their first interview while they were sharing a house in Oxford. He recalled: "Thom wasn't like anyone I'd interviewed before ... He was like 'This is going to happen... Failure is not an option.' ... He wasn't some ranting diva or a megalomaniac, but he was so focused on what he wanted to do."

1991–1993: "Creep" and rise to fame
In 1991, when Yorke was 22, On a Friday signed to EMI and changed their name to Radiohead. They gained notice with their debut single, "Creep", which appeared on their 1993 debut album, Pablo Honey. Yorke grew tired of "Creep" after it became a hit, and told Rolling Stone in 1993: "It's like it's not our song any more ... It feels like we're doing a cover."

According to Yorke, around this time he "hit the self-destruct button pretty quickly". He tried to project himself as a rock star and drank heavily, often becoming too drunk to perform. Yorke said: "When I got back to Oxford I was unbearable ... As soon as you get any success you disappear up your own arse." Years later, Yorke said he had found it difficult to cope with Radiohead's success: "I got angry ... I got more control-freakery. I put my hands on the steering wheel and I was white-knuckled, and I didn't care who I hurt or what I said." He later apologised to his bandmates for his behaviour.

1994–1997: The Bends
Paul Q Kolderie, the co-producer of Pablo Honey, observed that Yorke's songwriting improved dramatically after ''Pablo Honey.  O'Brien later said: "After all that touring on Pablo Honey ... the songs that Thom was writing were so much better. Over a period of a year and a half, suddenly, bang''."

Recording Radiohead's second album, The Bends (1995), was stressful, as they felt pressured to release a follow-up to "Creep". Yorke in particular struggled. According to the band's co-manager, Chris Hufford, "Thom became totally confused about what he wanted to do, what he was doing in a band and in his life, and that turned into a mistrust of everybody else." The Bends was engineered by Nigel Godrich, who became one of Yorke's longest-running collaborators.

The Bends received critical acclaim and brought Radiohead wider international attention. It influenced a generation of British and Irish alternative rock acts; The Observer wrote that it popularised an "angst-laden falsetto" which "eventually coalesced into an entire decade of sound". The American rock band R.E.M., a major influence on Radiohead, picked them as their support act for their European tour. Yorke befriended the R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, who gave him advice about how to deal with fame. Yorke joined R.E.M. to perform their song "E-Bow the Letter" on several occasions from 1998 to 2004.

1997–1998: OK Computer
During the production of Radiohead's third album, OK Computer (1997), the members had differing opinions and equal production roles, with Yorke having "the loudest voice", according to O'Brien. OK Computer achieved acclaim and strong sales, establishing Radiohead as one of the leading rock acts of the 1990s.

Yorke struggled with the attention the success brought him, and the stress of the OK Computer tour. Colin Greenwood described the "hundred-yard stare" in Yorke's eyes when performing, and said "he absolutely did not want to be there... You hate having to put your friend through that experience." Yorke said later:

"When I was a kid, I always assumed that [fame] was going to answer something – fill a gap. And it does the absolute opposite. It happens with everybody. I was so driven for so long, like a fucking animal, and then I woke up one day and someone had given me a little gold plate for OK Computer and I couldn't deal with it for ages."

In 1997, Yorke provided backing vocals for a cover of the 1975 Pink Floyd song "Wish You Were Here" with Sparklehorse. The following year, he duetted on "El President" with Isabel Monteiro of Drugstore, and sang on the Unkle track "Rabbit in Your Headlights", a collaboration with DJ Shadow. Pitchfork cited "Rabbit in Your Headlights" as a "turning point" for Yorke, foreshadowing his work in experimental electronic music.

For the soundtrack of the 1998 film Velvet Goldmine, Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Andy Mackay of Roxy Music and Bernard Butler of Suede formed a band, the Venus in Furs, to cover Roxy Music songs. In 2016, Pitchfork wrote that Yorke "weirdly comes off as the weak link", with understated vocals that did not resemble the Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry.

1999–2004: Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief
Following the OK Computer tour, Yorke suffered a mental breakdown and found it impossible to write new music. He experienced imposter syndrome, and became self-critical and over-analytical. He was approached to score the 1999 film Fight Club, but declined as he was recovering from stress.

Around this period, acts influenced by Radiohead emerged, such as Travis and Coldplay. Yorke resented them, feeling they had copied him. He said in 2006: "I was really, really upset about it, and I tried my absolute best not to be, but yeah, it was kind of like— that sort of thing of missing the point completely." Godrich felt Yorke was oversensitive and told him he did not invent "guys singing in falsetto with an acoustic guitar". He saw Yorke's resentment as "a byproduct of being so focused on what he wanted to do that he figures he's the only person that's ever had that idea".

To recuperate, Yorke moved to Cornwall and spent time walking the cliffs, writing and drawing. He restricted his songwriting to piano; the first song he wrote was "Everything in Its Right Place". During this period, Yorke listened almost exclusively to the electronic music of artists such as Aphex Twin and Autechre, saying: "It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music." Yorke gradually relaxed and came to enjoy his work again.

Radiohead took Yorke's electronic influences to their next albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), processing vocals, obscuring lyrics, and using electronic instruments such as synthesisers, drum machines and samplers. The albums divided listeners, but were commercially successful and later attracted acclaim. Kid A was named the best album of the decade by Rolling Stone and Pitchfork.

In 2000, Yorke contributed vocals to three tracks on the PJ Harvey album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea,  and duetted with Björk on her song "I've Seen It All" from her soundtrack album Selmasongs. Radiohead released their sixth album, Hail to the Thief, a blend of rock and electronic music, in 2003. Yorke wrote many of its lyrics in response to the war on terror and the resurgence of right-wing politics in the west after the turn of the millennium, and his shifting worldview after becoming a father. Yorke and Jonny Greenwood contributed to the 2004 Band Aid 20 single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", produced by Godrich.

2004–2008: The Eraser and In Rainbows
Yorke recorded his debut solo album, The Eraser, during Radiohead's 2004 hiatus. It comprises electronics songs recorded and edited with computers. Yorke, who formed Radiohead while the members were in school, said he was curious to try working alone. He stressed that Radiohead were not splitting up and that the album was made "with their blessing". According to Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead were happy for Yorke to make the album: "He'd go mad if every time he wrote a song it had to go through the Radiohead consensus." Godrich said that working with Yorke on The Eraser was easier than working with Radiohead, as "when we were in a room when it's with Radiohead ... I'm trying to manage a relationship between [Yorke] and the band and it's me butting heads with him and trying to work on behalf of the band."

The Eraser was released in 2006 on the independent label XL Recordings, backed by the singles "Harrowdown Hill", which reached number 23 in the UK Singles Chart, and "Analyse". It reached the top ten in the UK, Ireland, United States, Canada and Australia, and was nominated for the 2006 Mercury Prize and the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album. It was followed by a B-sides compilation, Spitting Feathers, and a remix album by various artists, The Eraser Rmxs.

In 2007, Radiohead independently released their seventh album, In Rainbows, as a pay-what-you-want download, the first for a major act. The release made headlines worldwide and sparked debate about the implications for the music industry. Yorke described it as a statement of Radiohead's belief in the value of music and a "contract of faith" between musicians and audiences.

In the same year, Yorke sang on the Modeselektor track "The White Flash" from the album Happy Birthday!. Pitchfork likened it to The Eraser and wrote that Yorke's vocals "work so perfectly that it feels like this is his band". Yorke also sang backing vocals on Björk's 2008 charity single "Náttúra".

2009–2010: Atoms for Peace
In 2009, Yorke released a cover of the Miracle Legion song "All for the Best" with his brother, Andy, for the compilation Ciao My Shining Star: The Songs of Mark Mulcahy. In July, Yorke performed solo at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk and released a double-A-side single, "FeelingPulledApartByHorses/TheHollowEarth". He also contributed the track "Hearing Damage" to the Twilight Saga: New Moon film soundtrack.

That year, Yorke formed a new band, Atoms for Peace, to perform songs from The Eraser. Alongside Yorke, the band comprises Godrich on keyboards and guitar, the bassist Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the drummer Joey Waronker and the percussionist Mauro Refosco of Forro in the Dark. Yorke said: "God love 'em but I've been playing with [Radiohead] since I was 16, and to do this was quite a trip ... It felt like we'd knocked a hole in a wall, and we should just fucking go through it."

Atoms for Peace performed eight North American shows in 2010. They went unnamed for early performances, billed as "Thom Yorke" or "??????". In February, Yorke performed a benefit concert at the Cambridge Corn Exchange for the British Green Party. In June, he performed a surprise set at Glastonbury Festival with Jonny Greenwood, performing Eraser and Radiohead songs.

Yorke provided vocals for "...And the World Laughs with You" from the Flying Lotus album Cosmogramma,  and for "Shipwreck" and "This" on the Modeselektor album Monkeytown, both released in 2010. Along with Damien Rice and Philip Glass, he contributed to the soundtrack for the 2010 documentary When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun.

2011–2013: The King of Limbs and Amok
In 2011, Radiohead released their eighth album, The King of Limbs, which Yorke described as "an expression of physical movements and wildness". Yorke sought to move further from conventional recording methods. The music video for "Lotus Flower", featuring Yorke's erratic dancing, became an internet meme. By 2011, Radiohead had sold more than 30 million albums.

In the same year, Yorke collaborated with the electronic artists Burial and Four Tet on "Ego" and "Mirror", and collaborated with Greenwood and the American rapper MF Doom on "Retarded Fren". In 2012, Yorke provided vocals for "Electric Candyman" on the Flying Lotus album ''Until the Quiet Comes. '' He also remixed the single "Hold On" by the electronic musician Sbtrkt, under the name Sisi BakBak. His identity was not confirmed until September 2014.

In February 2013, Atoms for Peace released an album, Amok, followed by a tour of Europe, the US and Japan. Amok received generally positive reviews, though some critics felt it was too similar to Yorke's solo work. That year, Yorke and Jonny Greenwood contributed music to The UK Gold, a documentary about tax avoidance. The soundtrack, described by Rolling Stone as a series of "minimalist soundscapes", was released free in February 2015 through the online music platform SoundCloud.

2014–2017: Tomorrow's Modern Boxes and A Moon Shaped Pool
Yorke released his second solo album, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, via BitTorrent on 26 September 2014. It became the most torrented album of 2014 (excluding piracy), with more than a million downloads in its first six days. Yorke and Godrich hoped to use the BitTorrent release to hand "some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work". In December 2014, Yorke released the album on the online music platform Bandcamp along with a new track, "Youwouldn'tlikemewhenI'mangry".

In 2015, Yorke contributed a soundtrack, Subterranea, to an installation of Radiohead artwork, The Panic Office, in Sydney, Australia. The soundtrack was composed of field recordings made in the English countryside and played on speakers at different heights with different frequency ranges. The radio station Triple J described it as similar to the ambient sections of Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, with some digitally spoken sections similar to "Fitter Happier" from OK Computer. The music was not released. In July 2015, Yorke joined the band Portishead at the Latitude Festival to perform their song "The Rip".

Yorke composed music for a 2015 production of Harold Pinter's 1971 play Old Times by the Roundabout Theater Company in New York City. The director described the music as "primeval, unusual ... The sort of neurosis within [Yorke's] music certainly has elucidated elements of the compulsive repetition of the play." That year, Yorke performed with Godrich and the audiovisual artist Tarik Barri at the Latitude Festival in the UK and Summer Sonic in Japan. Radiohead released their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool, on 8 May 2016. Yorke contributed vocals and appeared in the video for "Beautiful People" from Mark Pritchard's 2016 album Under the Sun.

2018–2019: Suspiria
Yorke's first feature film soundtrack, Suspiria, composed for the 2018 horror film, was released on 26 October 2018 by XL. It was Yorke's first project since The Bends not to feature production from his longtime collaborator Nigel Godrich; instead, it was produced by Yorke and Sam Petts-Davies. Suspiria features the London Contemporary Orchestra and Choir, and Yorke's son, Noah, on drums. Yorke cited inspiration from the 1982 Blade Runner soundtrack and music from Suspiria 's 1977 Berlin setting, such as krautrock. The lyrics do not follow the film narrative and were influenced by discourse surrounding President Donald Trump and Brexit. "Suspirium" was nominated for Best Song Written for Visual Media at the 2020 Grammy Awards.

Yorke performed two shows in 2017, and toured Europe and the US in 2018. That year, Yorke and the artist Tarik Barri created an audiovisual exhibition, "City Rats", commissioned by the Institute for Sound and Music in Berlin. I See You, a limited-edition zine edited by Yorke with Crack Magazine, was published in September 2018, with profits donated to Greenpeace. Yorke contributed music to the 2018 short films Why Can't We Get Along? and Time of Day for the fashion label Rag & Bone.

On 29 March 2019, Yorke was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Radiohead. He did not attend the induction ceremony, citing cultural differences between the UK and America and his negative experience of the Brit Awards, "which is like this sort of drunken car crash that you don't want to get involved with".

2019–2020: Anima
Yorke's third solo album, Anima, was released on 27 June 2019. It became Yorke's first number-one album on the Billboard Dance/Electronic Albums chart. At the 2020 Grammy Awards, it was nominated for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package. Philip Sherburne of Pitchfork wrote that it was Yorke's most ambitious and assured solo album and the first that felt complete without Radiohead. The album was accompanied by a short film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Music Film. In August, Yorke released Not the News Rmx EP, comprising an extended version of the Anima track "Not the News" plus remixes by various artists. A solo tour set to begin in March 2020 was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the 2019 film Motherless Brooklyn, Yorke wrote "Daily Battles", with horns by his Atoms for Peace bandmate Flea. The director, Edward Norton, enlisted the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis to rearrange the song as a ballad reminiscent of 1950s Miles Davis. It was shortlisted for Best Original Song at the 92nd Academy Awards. Yorke's first classical composition, "Don't Fear the Light", written for the piano duo Katia and Marielle Labeque, debuted in April 2019.

In April 2020, Yorke performed a new song from his home, "Plasticine Figures", for The Tonight Show. In the same year, he collaborated with Four Tet and Burial again on "Her Revolution" and "His Rope", and remixed "Isolation Theme" by the electronic musician Clark. Yorke said his remix mirrored the COVID-19 lockdowns, "entering a new type of silence".

2021–present: the Smile and Confidenza
In March 2021, Yorke contributed music to shows by the Japanese fashion designer Jun Takahashi, including a remixed version of "Creep". That August, he contributed two remixes of "Gazzillion Ear" by the rapper MF Doom.

In May, Yorke debuted a new band, the Smile, with Jonny Greenwood and the jazz drummer Tom Skinner, produced by Godrich. Greenwood said the project was a way for him and Yorke to work together during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The Smile made their surprise debut in a performance streamed by Glastonbury Festival on May 22, with Yorke singing and playing guitar, bass, Moog synthesiser and Rhodes piano. The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis said the Smile "sound like a simultaneously more skeletal and knottier version of Radiohead", exploring more progressive rock influences with unusual time signatures, complex riffs and "hard-driving" motorik psychedelia.

In October 2021, Yorke performed a Smile song, "Free in the Knowledge", at the Letters Live event at the Royal Albert Hall, London. In the same month, Yorke and the Radiohead cover artist Stanley Donwood curated an exhibition of Kid A artwork and lyrics at Christie's headquarters in London, ahead of a reissued package of the Kid A and Amnesia albums, Kid A Mnesia. The pair also contributed lyrics and artwork to Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, a free digital experience for PlayStation 5, macOS and Windows.

On 9 April 2022, Yorke performed a solo concert at the Zeltbühne festival in Zermatt, Switzerland, playing songs from across his career. In May, the Smile released their debut album, A Light for Attracting Attention, and began a European tour. Yorke wrote two songs, "5.17" and "That's How Horses Are", for the sixth series of the television drama Peaky Blinders, broadcast in 2022. He executive-produced Sus Dog (2023), the tenth album by Clark, contributing vocals and bass and acting as a mentor for Clark's vocals.

In September 2023, Yorke and Donwood exhibited a selection of artwork, The Crow Flies, in London. The paintings, based on Islamic pirate maps and 1960s US military topographic charts, began as work for A Light For Attracting Attention. The Smile released their second album, Wall of Eyes, in January 2024, and began a European tour in March.

Yorke composed the score for the 2024 film Confidenza by the Italian filmmaker Daniele Luchetti. It features the London Contemporary Orchestra and a jazz ensemble including Yorke's Smile bandmate Tom Skinner. On 22 April, Yorke released two tracks from the soundtrack, "Knife Edge" and "Prize Giving". The soundtrack was released on 26 April. In October, Yorke is due to begin a solo tour in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Japan, performing songs from across his career.

Artistry
Yorke writes the first versions of most Radiohead songs, after which they are developed harmonically by Jonny Greenwood before the other band members develop their parts. His solo work comprises mainly electronic music. Stereogum characterised it as "largely interior", "frigid" and "beat-driven", unlike the "wide-open horizons" of Radiohead songs.

Yorke said the nature of being a creative person was "to retain a beginner's mind. The search is the point. The flailing around is the point. The process is the point." Yorke said he used to be more controlling in the studio, but learnt to be more relaxed and open to new ideas. He likened the creative process to surfing: "You can sit out there on a board for ages waiting for the right wave to come along. You can't get angry about it. You know it will happen eventually and you start to understand the waiting itself might be part of it."

Yorke has worked with the producer Nigel Godrich on most of his projects, including Radiohead, Atoms for Peace, the Smile and most of his solo work. Yorke credits Godrich with helping edit his work, identifying which parts need improvement and which have potential. He said they sometimes had arguments that last for days, but that they always resolve their differences, and likened him to a brother. Godrich said the pair were "very productive together and that's a really precious and important thing and it changes within the context of whatever we're doing".

Instruments
Yorke is a multi-instrumentalist, and plays instruments including guitar, piano, bass and drums. He played drums for performances of the 2007 Radiohead song "Bangers and Mash". With the Smile, Yorke has used a Fender Mustang bass with a fingerstyle technique.

Yorke uses electronic instruments such as synthesisers, drum machines and sequencers, and electronic techniques including programming, sampling and looping. In 2015, he said: "Really I just enjoy writing words sitting at a piano. I tend to lose interest in the drum machine." According to Godrich, "Thom will sit down and make some crazy, fractured cheese-grater-on-head mayhem on a computer, but at some point he always gets his guitar out to check he can actually play it."

Unlike his bandmate Jonny Greenwood, Yorke does not read sheet music; he said: "You can't express the rhythms properly like that. It's a very ineffective way of doing it, so I've never really bothered picking it up." Explaining why he turned down a request to play piano on the song "Mr. Bellamy" on Paul McCartney's album Memory Almost Full (2007), Yorke said: "The piano playing involved two hands doing things separately. I don't have that skill available. I said to him, 'I strum piano, that's it.'"

Vocals
Yorke has one of the widest vocal ranges in popular music. He is known for his falsetto, which Paste described as "sweet", "cautious" and "haunting". Rolling Stone described his voice as a "broad, emotive sweep" with a "high, keening sound". The Guardian described it as "instrument-like" and "spectral", and wrote that it "transcends the egocentric posturing of the indie rock singer stereotype". The music journalist Robert Christgau wrote that Yorke's voice has "a pained, transported intensity, pure up top with hints of hysterical grit below ... Fraught and self-involved with no time for jokes, not asexual but otherwise occupied, and never ever common, this is the idealised voice of a pretentious college boy ... Like it or not the voice is remarkable."

Yorke often manipulates his voice with software and effects, transforming it into a "disembodied instrument". For example, on "Everything in Its Right Place" (2000), his vocals are treated to create a "glitching, stuttering collage". Pitchfork wrote in 2016 that, over the decades, Yorke's voice had evolved from "semi-interesting alt-rocker" to "left-field art-rock demigod" to "electronic grand wizard". In 2006, Yorke said: "It annoys me how pretty my voice is. That sounds incredibly immodest, but it annoys me how polite it can sound when perhaps what I'm singing is deeply acidic." He said he keeps vocals in mind whenever he builds music, no matter the genre, and that he found it difficult to listen to dance music without imagining a voice. In 2023, Yorke said that his vocal range had dropped with age and that he now found "Creep" difficult to sing.

In 2005, readers of Blender and MTV2 voted Yorke the 18th-greatest singer of all time. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked him the 66th-greatest and wrote that he was one of the most influential singers of his generation, influencing bands such as Muse, Coldplay, Travis and Elbow. In their updated 2023 list, Rolling Stone ranked Yorke the 34th-greatest singer, praising his "genuine edge of alienation".

Lyrics
Yorke's early lyrics were personal, but he found that "tortured" lyrics became tired. He said his lyrics were not "some deep heartfelt thing"; instead, he likened them to a collage assembled from images and external sources such as television. From Kid A, he experimented with cutting up words and phrases and assembling them at random. He sometimes chooses words for their sounds rather than their meaning, such as the title phrase of "Myxomatosis" or the repeated phrase "the rain drops" on "Sit Down. Stand Up". A 2021 study found that Yorke had among the largest vocabularies of pop singers, based on the number of different words used in each song.

Yorke deliberately uses cliches, idioms and other common expressions, inspired by the American artist Barbara Kruger. For example, according to the Pitchfork writer Rob Mitchum, the Kid A lyrics feature "hum-drum observations twisted into panic attacks". Another Pitchfork writer, Jayson Greene, said the approach suggested "a mind consumed by meaningless data". Yorke said he hoped to capture the experience people have every day of trying to make emotional sense of the words and images that surround them, and that "lyrics should be a series of windows opening rather than shutting, which is incredibly hard to do". Colin Greenwood described his lyrics as "a running commentary on what's happening in the world ... like a shutter snapping in succession".

The New Republic writer Ryan Kearney speculated that Yorke's use of common expressions, which he described as "Radioheadisms", was an attempt "to sap our common tongue of meaning and expose the vapidity of everyday discourse". Kearney felt the approach had become a crutch for Yorke, creating a "senseless mush". He wrote in 2016 that he was "the most overrated lyricist in music today", and that fans, critics and academics had "taken the bait and delivered one overwrought interpretation after another".

Yorke said his lyrics were motivated by anger, expressing his political and environmental concerns and written as "a constant response to doublethink". The lyrics of the 2003 Radiohead album Hail to the Thief dealt with what Yorke called the "ignorance and intolerance and panic and stupidity" following the 2000 election of US President George W. Bush and the unfolding war on terror. Yorke wrote his 2006 single "Harrowdown Hill" about David Kelly, the British weapons expert and whistleblower. In a 2008 television performance of "House of Cards", Yorke dedicated the "denial, denial" refrain to Bush for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. The 2011 single "The Daily Mail" attacks the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper.

Many of Yorke's lyrics express paranoia. The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis described "what you might call the Yorke worldview: that life is a waking nightmare and everything is completely and perhaps irreparably screwed". In a 2015 interview with the activist and writer George Monbiot, Yorke said: "In the 60s, you could write songs that were like calls to arms, and it would work ... It's much harder to do that now. If I was going to write a protest song about climate change in 2015, it would be shit. It's not like one song or one piece of art or one book is going to change someone's mind." Working on Radiohead's ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool, Yorke worried that political songs alienated some listeners, but decided it was better than writing "another lovey-dovey song about nothing".

Greene wrote that Yorke's lyrics on A Moon Shaped Pool were less cynical, conveying wonder and amazement. Many critics felt the lyrics might address Yorke's separation from Rachel Owen, his partner of more than 20 years. However, Yorke denied writing biographically, saying he instead writes "spasmodic" lyrics based on imagery.

Dance
Yorke often incorporates dance into his performances, described by the Sunday Times as his "on-stage signature". He began dancing on stage after Radiohead released Kid A in 2000, as many songs did not require him to play guitar. The New York Times contrasted Yorke's "tortured" 1990s appearance with his later "looser", more comfortable performances. Yorke said he enjoyed "messing around with the idea of being the rock star or the uptight [1990s] guy. I can choose to do something completely different and be stupid or jump around."

Yorke's dancing features in music videos for songs such as "Lotus Flower" and "Ingenue", and the short film Anima. Critics have described it as "erratic", "flailing" and unconventional. In 2011, Rolling Stone readers voted Yorke their 10th-favourite dancing musician.

Influences
As a child, Yorke's favourite artists included Queen, R.E.M., Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division and Bob Dylan were important to him as a teenager. He initially attempted to emulate singers including Michael Stipe, Morrissey and David Sylvian. He also wrote that Mark Mulcahy of Miracle Legion had affected him "a great deal" at this time: "It was the voice of someone who was only truly happy when he was singing ... It changed the way I thought about songs and singing."

When he was 16, Yorke sent a demo to a music magazine, who wrote that he sounded like Neil Young. Unfamiliar with Young, Yorke purchased his 1970 album After the Gold Rush, which gave him the confidence to reveal "softness and naiveté" in vocals. Yorke also credited Young as a lyrical influence. He said: "It was his attitude toward the way he laid songs down. It's always about laying down whatever is in your head at the time and staying completely true to that, no matter what it is." Yorke said that Jeff Buckley had given him the confidence to use falsetto and be vulnerable in his singing.

Yorke cited the Pixies, Björk and PJ Harvey as artists who "changed his life", and in 2006 he told Pitchfork that Radiohead had "ripped off R.E.M. blind for years". He cited Stipe as his favourite lyricist: "I loved the way he would take an emotion and then take a step back from it and in doing so make it so much more powerful." The chorus of "How to Disappear Completely" from Kid A was inspired by Stipe, who advised Yorke to relieve tour stress by repeating to himself: "I'm not here, this isn't happening." Yorke cited the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante as an influence on his guitar playing on In Rainbows, and Scott Walker as an influence on his vocals and lyrics. Yorke admired how the Beastie Boys worked independently despite being signed to a major record label, and was influenced by their activism, such as their Tibetan Freedom Concerts.

After OK Computer, Yorke and Radiohead incorporated influences from electronic artists such as Aphex Twin and Autechre. In 2013, Yorke cited Aphex Twin as his biggest influence, saying: "Aphex opened up another world that didn't involve my fucking electric guitar ... I hated all the music that was around Radiohead at the time, it was completely fucking meaningless. I hated the Britpop thing and what was happening in America, but Aphex was totally beautiful." He cited the jazz musician Charles Mingus as another formative influence during this period, particularly the 1962 live album The Complete Town Hall Concert, which he described as "just fucking chaos ... There's this incredible tension and it was the most formative record of the whole time."

Artwork
Since the EP My Iron Lung (1994), Yorke has created artwork for Radiohead and his other projects with Stanley Donwood. The pair met as art students at the University of Exeter. Donwood said his first impression of Yorke was that he was "mouthy. Pissed off. Someone I could work with." Yorke is credited for artwork alongside Donwood as the White Chocolate Farm, Tchock, Dr. Tchock and similar abbreviations.

Whereas Donwood described himself as having a tendency towards "detailing and perfectionism", he said Yorke is "completely opposed, fucking everything up ... I do something, then he fucks it up, then I fuck up what he's done ... and we keep doing that until we're happy with the result. It's a competition to see who 'wins' the painting, which one of us takes possession of it in an artistic way." The artist Tarik Barri provides live visuals for Yorke's solo and multimedia projects and shows with Atoms for Peace.

Music industry
Yorke has been critical of the music industry and has pioneered alternative release platforms with Radiohead and his solo work. Following Radiohead's tour of America in 1993, he became disenchanted with being "right at the sharp end of the sexy, sassy, MTV eye-candy lifestyle" he felt he was helping sell. After a 1995 Melody Maker article suggested that Yorke would kill himself like the Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, Yorke developed an aversion to the British music press. In November 1995, NME covered an incident in which Yorke became sick and collapsed on stage at a show in Munich, and titled the story "Thommy's Temper Tantrum". Yorke said it was the most hurtful thing anyone had written about him, and refused to give interviews to NME for five years.

The 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy portrays Yorke's disaffection with the music industry and press during Radiohead's OK Computer tour. After Radiohead's fourth album, Kid A (2000), was leaked via the peer-to-peer filesharing software Napster weeks before release, Yorke told Time he felt Napster "encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do. I think anybody sticking two fingers up at the whole fucking thing is wonderful as far as I'm concerned." In 2001, Yorke criticised the American live music industry, describing it as a monopoly controlled by Clear Channel Entertainment and Ticketmaster.

After Radiohead's record contract with EMI ended with the release of Hail to the Thief (2003), Yorke told Time: "I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say 'Fuck you' to this decaying business model." In 2006, he called major record labels "stupid little boys' games – especially really high up".

Radiohead independently released their 2007 album In Rainbows as a download for which listeners could choose their price. Yorke said the "most exciting" part of the release was the removal of the barrier between artist and audience. However, in 2013, Yorke told the Guardian he feared the In Rainbows release had instead played into the hands of content providers such as Apple and Google: "They have to keep commodifying things to keep the share price up, but in doing so they have made all content, including music and newspapers, worthless, in order to make their billions. And this is what we want?" In 2015, he criticised YouTube for "seizing control" of contributor content, likening it to Nazis looting art during World War II.

Spotify
In 2013, Yorke and Godrich made headlines for their criticism of the music streaming service Spotify, and removed Atoms for Peace and Yorke's solo music from the service. In a series of tweets, Yorke wrote: "Make no mistake, new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile, shareholders will shortly be rolling in it ... New artists get paid fuck-all with this model." Yorke called Spotify "the last gasp of the old industry", accusing it of only benefiting major labels with large back catalogues, and encouraged artists to build their own "direct connections" with audiences instead.

Brian Message, a partner at Radiohead's management company, disagreed with Yorke, noting that Spotify pays 70 percent of its revenue back to the music industry. He said that "Thom's issue was that the pipe has become so jammed ... We encourage all of our artists to take a long-term approach ... Plan for the long term, understand that it's a tough game." Yorke's music was re-added to Spotify in December 2017.

For Yorke's second solo album, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes (2014), released via BitTorrent, he and Godrich expressed their hope to "hand some control of internet back to people who are creating the work ... bypassing the self-elected gatekeepers". Asked if the release had been a success, Yorke said: "No, not exactly ... I wanted to show that, in theory, today one could follow the entire chain of record production, from start to finish, on his own. But in practice it is very different. We cannot be burdened with all of the responsibilities of the record label."

Climate change
In 2000, during the recording of Kid A, Yorke became "obsessed" with the Worldwatch Institute website, "which was full of scary statistics about icecaps melting and weather patterns changing". He said he became involved in the movement to halt climate change after having children and "waking up every night just terrified".

In 2003, Yorke became a spokesperson for the environmental organisation Friends of the Earth and their Big Ask Campaign. He said this was a difficult decision, as it would expose him to personal attacks, and that journalists had harassed his friends and family for personal details. In an article for the Guardian, Yorke wrote that he initially felt he would be a poor match as his touring consumed a large amount of energy. However, Friends of the Earth persuaded him that this was ideal as they did not want to "present a holier-than-thou message". He accepted that he would be criticised for his support.

In 2006, Yorke and Jonny Greenwood performed at the Big Ask Live, a 2006 benefit concert to persuade the British government to enact a new law on climate change. That year, Yorke refused an invitation from Friends of the Earth to meet the prime minister, Tony Blair. Yorke said that Blair had "no environmental credentials" and that his spin doctors would manipulate the meeting. He told the Guardian that Blair's advisers had wanted to vet him and that Friends of the Earth would lose access if he said "the wrong thing", which he equated to blackmail. Yorke also found it unacceptable to be photographed with Blair because of his involvement in the Iraq War.

In 2008, Radiohead commissioned a study to reduce the carbon expended on tour. Based on the findings, they chose to play at venues supported by public transport, made deals with trucking companies to reduce emissions, used new low-energy LED lighting and encouraged festivals to offer reusable plastics. That year, Yorke guest-edited a special climate change edition of Observer Magazine and wrote: "Unlike pessimists such as James Lovelock, I don't believe we are all doomed ... You should never give up hope."

In 2009, Yorke performed via Skype at the premier of the environmentalist documentary The Age of Stupid, and gained access to the COP 15 climate change talks in Copenhagen by posing as a journalist. In 2010, he performed a benefit concert at the Cambridge Corn Exchange for the British Green Party and supported the 10:10 campaign for climate change mitigation. The following year, he joined the maiden voyage of Rainbow Warrior III, a yacht used by Greenpeace to monitor damage to the environment.

Yorke endorsed the Green Party candidate Caroline Lucas at the 2015 UK general election. In December 2015, he performed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris at a benefit concert in aid of 350.org, an environmental organisation raising awareness about climate change. His performance was included on the live album Pathway to Paris, released in July 2016. Yorke contributed an electronic track, "Hands Off the Antarctic", to a 2018 Greenpeace campaign.

2017 Israel concert
In April 2017, more than 50 prominent figures, including the musicians Roger Waters and Thurston Moore, the rights activist Desmond Tutu and the filmmaker Ken Loach, signed a petition urging Radiohead to cancel a performance in Tel Aviv as part of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, a cultural boycott of Israel. A week before the Tel Aviv performance, a Radiohead concert in Glasgow was attended by protestors waving Palestinian flags and signs. Yorke responded with anger on stage.

In a Rolling Stone interview, Yorke said of the criticism: "I just can't understand why going to play a rock show or going to lecture at a university [is a problem to them] ... It's really upsetting that artists I respect think we are not capable of making a moral decision ourselves after all these years. They talk down to us and I just find it mind-boggling that they think they have the right to do that."

Yorke said that the petitioners had not contacted him. This was disputed by Waters, who wrote in an open letter in Rolling Stone that he had attempted to contact Yorke several times. In a statement, Yorke responded: "Playing in a country isn't the same as endorsing the government. Music, art and academia is about crossing borders not building them, about open minds not closed ones, about shared humanity, dialogue and freedom of expression."

Other issues
In 1999, Yorke travelled to the G8 summit to support the Jubilee 2000 movement calling for cancellation of third-world debt. In a 2003 Guardian article criticising the World Trade Organization, he wrote: "The west is creating an extremely dangerous economic, environmental and humanitarian time bomb. We are living beyond our means." In 2005, he performed at an all-night vigil for the Trade Justice Movement, calling for a better trade deal for poor countries.

In 2002, Yorke performed at the Bridge School Benefit, a charity concert organised by the Canadian songwriter Neil Young, one of Yorke's influences. His set included a cover of Young's 1970 song "After the Gold Rush", performed on the piano Young wrote it on. In September 2004, Yorke was a key speaker at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally outside the Fylingdales air base in Yorkshire, protesting Tony Blair's support of the Bush administration's plans for the "Star Wars" missile defence system. In 2011, alongside Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack and Tim Goldsworthy of Unkle, Yorke played a secret DJ set for a group of Occupy activists in the abandoned offices of the investment bank UBS.

To celebrate the 2008 election of US president Barack Obama, Yorke released a remixed version of his single "Harrowdown Hill" as a free download. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, he tweeted lyrics from Radiohead's single "Burn the Witch", interpreted as a criticism of Trump's policies. In June 2016, following the Orlando nightclub shooting in Florida, Yorke was one of nearly 200 music industry figures to sign an open letter published in Billboard urging the United States Congress to impose stricter gun control. He opposed Brexit, and in March 2019 joined the People's Vote march calling for a second referendum.

Yorke is vegetarian. In a 2005 film for the animal rights foundation Animal Aid, he said: "Society deems it necessary to create this level of suffering in order for [people] to eat food that they don't need ... You should at least be aware of what you're doing rather than assuming that that's your right as a human being to do it."

Personal life
For 23 years, Yorke was in a relationship with the artist and lecturer Rachel Owen, whom he met while studying at the University of Exeter. In 2012, Rolling Stone reported that Owen and Yorke were not married. However, The Times later found that they had married in a secret ceremony in Oxfordshire in May 2003. Their son, Noah, was born in 2001, and their daughter, Agnes, in 2004.

On Yorke's 2018 soundtrack album Suspiria, Agnes collaborated on the artwork and Noah played drums on two tracks. In September 2021, Noah released a song, "Trying Too Hard (Lullaby)". NME likened its "ghostly" arrangement to Radiohead's album In Rainbows. Noah has since released several songs and is due to release an EP, Cerebral Key. He also performs with James Knott as the noise duo Hex Girlfriend.

In August 2015, Yorke and Owen announced that they had separated amicably. Owen died from cancer on 18 December 2016, aged 48. In September 2020, Yorke married the Italian actress Dajana Roncione in Bagheria, Sicily. Roncione appears in the video for the Radiohead song "Lift" and the Anima film. They live in Oxford.

Yorke practises meditation. He has suffered from anxiety and depression, which he treats with exercise, yoga and reading. While recording in California with Atoms for Peace, he took up surfing, which he said taught him patience in creativity. His younger brother and only sibling, Andy, is the singer of the band Unbelievable Truth. In 2023, an extinct stingray species was named Dasyomyliobatis thomyorkei in his honour.

Awards and nominations
{| class=wikitable ! Award !! Year !! Work !! Category !! Result !! Ref. ! scope="row" rowspan=2|A2IM Libera Awards ! scope="row" |Brit Awards ! scope="row"| Chicago Film Critics Association Award ! scope="row"| David di Donatello ! scope="row" rowspan=5| Denmark GAFFA Awards ! scope="row" rowspan=5|Grammy Awards ! scope="row" rowspan="2"|Libera Awards ! scope="row" |Mercury Prize ! scope="row" |NME Awards ! scope="row" |Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association ! scope="row" rowspan=4|UK Music Video Awards !scope="row" rowspan=4|Žebřík Music Awards
 * rowspan=2|2020
 * Himself
 * Marketing Genius
 * Nominated
 * rowspan=2|
 * Anima
 * Best Dance/Electronic Album
 * Nominated
 * Nominated
 * 2007
 * Himself
 * British Male Solo Artist
 * Nominated
 * 2018
 * Suspiria
 * Best Original Score
 * Nominated
 * 2020
 * Suspiria
 * Best Score
 * Nominated
 * 1998
 * rowspan=4|Himself
 * Best Foreign Songwriter
 * Nominated
 * rowspan=5|
 * 2001
 * rowspan=3|Best Foreign Male Act
 * Nominated
 * 2004
 * Nominated
 * rowspan=2|2006
 * Nominated
 * The Eraser
 * Best Foreign Album
 * Nominated
 * The Eraser
 * Best Foreign Album
 * Nominated
 * Nominated
 * 2007
 * The Eraser
 * Best Alternative Music Album
 * Nominated
 * rowspan=4|2020
 * rowspan=3|Anima
 * Best Alternative Music Album
 * Nominated
 * Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package
 * Nominated
 * Best Music Film
 * Nominated
 * "Suspirium"
 * Best Song Written for Visual Media
 * Nominated
 * "Suspirium"
 * Best Song Written for Visual Media
 * Nominated
 * Nominated
 * rowspan="2"|2020
 * rowspan="2"|Anima
 * Best Dance/Electronic Record
 * Nominated
 * rowspan="2"|
 * Marketing Genius
 * Nominated
 * Nominated
 * 2006
 * The Eraser
 * Album of the Year
 * Nominated
 * 2008
 * Himself
 * Hero of the Year
 * Nominated
 * 2018
 * Suspiria
 * Best Score
 * Nominated
 * rowspan=3|2019
 * rowspan=3|Anima
 * Best Special Video Project
 * Nominated
 * rowspan=3|
 * Best Production Design in a Video
 * Nominated
 * Best Choreography in a Video
 * 2020
 * "Last I Heard (...He Was Circling the Drain)"
 * Best Alternative Video - UK
 * Nominated
 * 2020
 * "Last I Heard (...He Was Circling the Drain)"
 * Best Alternative Video - UK
 * Nominated
 * 2000
 * rowspan=4|Himself
 * rowspan=4|Best International Male
 * Nominated
 * rowspan=3|
 * 2001
 * Nominated
 * 2003
 * Nominated
 * 2005
 * Nominated
 * 2005
 * Nominated
 * Nominated

Studio albums

 * The Eraser (2006)
 * Tomorrow's Modern Boxes (2014)
 * Anima (2019)

Film soundtracks

 * When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun (2010; additional music only)
 * The UK Gold (2013; with Robert Del Naja)
 * Why Can't We Get Along (2018; Rag & Bone short film)
 * Time of Day (2018; Rag & Bone short film)
 * Suspiria (2018)
 * Confidenza (2024)

Albums produced

 * Suspiria (2018)
 * Sus Dog by Clark (2023; executive produced)

title: Thom Yorke