You have a few misconceptions here. The controversy in psychology over conditions such as severe autism was (a) claims it could be 'cured', and (b) the morality and ethics of claiming people with severe learning difficulties (SLD) are effectively communicating when they do not have that capacity, i.e., exploitation. Woody has severe autism but he does not have SLD, quite the reverse, unless his college, university tutors and publishers are conning the public. So if Woody has the intellectual ability to understand, learn and communicate, he is not SLD and all the hysteria about 'debunking' and 'pseudoscience' just because he is severely disabled yet able to communicate is coming from people who haven't actually done their homework and are just mindlessly jumping on a bandwagon. It is of course possible it is all one big gimmick but there is nothing to suggest that so far.