Connecting with Intensive Interaction
with Graham Firth
Improving communication for people with learning disabilities and/or autism
Welcome to our ‘Connecting with Intensive Interaction’ website.
On this website you will find a lot of useful information about our social communication approach called Intensive Interaction. This website will help you to understand what Intensive Interaction is, who it is for, how best to use it and what benefits it can bring.
You can also read Graham Firth’s ‘Connecting with Intensive Interaction‘ blog series, and you can sign up at the bottom of this page to be notified of all new posts by email.
If you are a parent, a carer, a teacher, a health professional, or anyone else who is interested in Intensive Interaction, then I hope that you will find something useful here.
What is Intensive Interaction?
Intensive Interaction is an approach that can help people with learning disabilities and/or autism, and those who care for or support them, to better communicate. Intensive Interaction is used by parents, carers, teachers and many others to better communicate with someone (a child or adult) who finds communicating difficult, most usually because of a learning disability or autism.
By simply focusing on what a person can do, and joining in with their current communication behaviours, Intensive Interaction helps us to build better communication, and thus to better socially connect with those people who are special to us. It helps us to enjoy each other’s company even more!
What are the benefits of Intensive Interaction?
• Intensive Interaction can help to develop a person’s fundamental social communication abilities.
• Intensive Interaction can help a person with a communication or social impairment to increase or improve their positive communication behaviours.
• Intensive Interaction can help build better social relationships between someone with a communication or social impairment and those people who care for or support them.
For more information regarding Intensive Interaction, check out the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ page here.
‘By spending time with someone using Intensive Interaction we are valuing them: respecting them and meeting their basic human need to make meaningful and satisfying relationships, which is central for a decent quality of life’
Clinical Psychologist, UK.
Read the latest from Graham Firth’s ‘Connecting with Intensive Interaction Blog’ here:
Improvised music to support Intensive Interaction for children with complex needs: A feasibility study of brief adjunctive music therapy
I have recently been alerted to a new research paper by Music Therapist Dr John Strange. The paper reports on a quantitative research study that is worthy of further consideration.
US corporation takes £50 million ‘dividend’ from its UK care services
In a recent edition of Private Eye, they ran a story about Cygnet Health Care, a private company that runs residential and care services across the UK, stating that it is ‘entirely publicly funded by the NHS and local councils. Patients with learning difficulties in its care were slapped, kicked andContinue reading “US corporation takes £50 million ‘dividend’ from its UK care services”
Some reflections on 17 years as a NHS Intensive Interaction Project Leader
A Blog setting out some reflective thoughts on 17 years as an NHS Intensive Interaction Project Leader … Read on for more …
‘Silent Minority’ TV documentary … the 40th anniversary
The TV documentary ‘Silent Minority’ was first shown on British TV 40 years ago this week – it perhaps did more than anything else to evidence the degrading and inhuman living conditions suffered by many people with learning disabilities in large scale institutional care at the time.
Read on for more…
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