Judge Rotenberg Center uses electroshock "aversive therapy"

[Rossum]

This morning I received a petition from Change.org that brought this story to my attention. It seems that the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts has been using painful electroshock therapy on the patients in its care, including Andre McCollins an autistic 18 year old who was tied down and shocked 31 times (this took place in 2002 and it seems they reached a settlement since then).

Anyway, here's an article.

A jury in Dedham, Mass., saw video this week of an 18-year-old being tied down and shocked 31 times as he screamed in pain.

WARNING: The video below is not suitable for everyone.

The footage was presented by lawyers of Andre McCollins, who is suing the Judge Rotenberg Center for developmentally disabled students, which treated him in part by attaching electrodes to his body and shocking him.

The incident recorded on video took place in 2002 after McCollins refused to take off his coat, according to MyFox Boston.

The station reports that lawyers for the center fought to keep the public from seeing the video, but a judge denied their request.

"These are dramatic tapes, there’s no question about that,” Edward Hinchey, an attorney who represents two of the Rotenberg Center’s clinicians said. “But the treatment plan at the Rotenberg Center, the treatment plan that Andre had in place on October 25, was followed.”

The lawsuit is just one of several ongoing investigations and lawsuits involving the center, which remains open, according to Mother Jones magazine.

On its site, the center insists that "JRC relies primarily on the use of positive programming and educational procedures to modify the behaviors of its students. If however, after giving these procedures a trial for an average of eleven months, they prove to be insufficiently effective, JRC then considers supplementing them with more intensive treatment procedures known as aversives."

The center contends that these procedures are only administered after "prior parental, medical, psychiatric, human rights, peer review and individual approval from a Massachusetts Probate Court."

In a 2007 expose on the center, Mother Jones reported that, "Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten."

Mother Jones also notes that the center is the only facility that uses shocks to discipline students, "a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons."

A quick Google brought up several other links:

Statement from NARPAA

CBS article on the case (one of the commenters right after the article named Ricky Lender has an interesting comment about abuse in supposed treatment centers for troubled teens. I also find it interesting that the CBS article puts quotation marks around "torture" in their title.)

Finally, an article from the Boston Herald website says that the Andre McCullins case reached a settlement recently.

A lawyer for the school tells WFXT-TV there is no admission of guilt in the settlement and that shock treatment can be beneficial to some patients.

The Change.org petition that brought this to my attention can be found here.


Note: This case sounds familiar as if I read something like here on the News and Politics board, I did a search to see if "Rotenberg" showed up in any previous posts but all I got were posts about wikileaks. I suppose I should be more morally outraged at the idea of disabled children (or teenagers) being electrocuted for hours by the treatment center their parents took them to for treatment... but I just feel so dead inside that I can't really work up a rage. I just hope I've properly posted this information so people with a better perspective can note it for what it is.

[SirNitram]

Electroshock therapy, administered by trained professionals after examination and prescription by other professionals, can be very beneficial.

Electric torture while upside down, for multiple hours, for over two dozens shots, while the operators are laughing and mocking your desperate pleas for help, or merely a stop of the pain, is nothing more or less than beating a dog with a baseball bat for hours for peeing on the carpet before it's housetrained. Oh, and if the dog was a full human being.

I'm not surprised. I can't be surprised. Dr. Ole Ivar Lovaas pioneered 'Beat conformity into them' under the guise of 'teaching' and 'aversion therapy'. At least these chuckleheads didn't attach the shock device to the back and keep it on the victim to be cowed into proper obedience at any time.

The Lovaas 'method' is nothing more than instilling neverending fear that if you show the slightest sign that you're not the well-behaved drone you were beaten into. It works, they claim, through childhood and teenage years. Some behaviors can be modified. I've never seen any checking on the poor souls after they're adults. I doubt it looks so rosy.

[Setesh]

I've never seen any checking on the poor souls after they're adults. I doubt it looks so rosy.

There is a disturbing lack of follow-up data on the people subjected to this 'treatment'. Since its only applied to children the watchdogs only seem to care until they hit 18.

It should be noted that Lovass came up with this bullshit in the 70s to 'treat' potentially gay or transgendered children (called gender-variant children at the time) with George Rekers professional homophobic lying ass. Their first 'subject' was 4 years old when they started treatment, after being pronounced 'cured' and suffering from years of depression he killed himself citing the treatments as the major reason.