We’ve written previously about the incredible story of a former patient being able to get the staff at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC) to apply electrical shock to two of its current patients. Any safeguards the Center had in place to prevent such a tragedy apparently were not operating that night. We also noted in the comments how the Center destroyed videotape evidence relating to an investigation of the incident, against the direction of the investigator.
A few days ago, The Boston Globe detailed one of the incidents that night in its article, Parent details toll taken by shocks at group home. One of the patients is still there, the other has been moved to another facility.

The details are heart-breaking:

But after that, the staff tied Dumas’s son to a board, restraining all four limbs. The teenager, resigned to his fate, said, “Let them know I’m being compliant.”

During the next hour, he received dozens of rapid-fire shocks to his abdomen and limbs, which in fact violated his treatment plan. At one point, he complained, “Mister, I can’t breathe.”

On tape, the staff recounted the reasons for different shocks, including swearing, verbal threats, and noncompliance. Of the two power levels of shock treatments used by the school, Dumas’s son received the most powerful each time, school officials have said.

Shift supervisor Michael Thompson, on the job for two months, left the room at one point, saying he wanted to “either cry or throw up,” the report said.

The father of this child tried to “keep perspective” on the incident:

The father [… blamed] poor weekend staffing for what transpired that night. He said the home had many immigrants who had difficulty giving even simple directions in English.

“On the weekends, they have a lot of people who don’t speak good English and are fearful of losing their jobs,” Dumas said.

Ahh, well, there you go. Can’t afford legitimate health care workers who speak the language? Get whoever you can, give them a few days of training, and just trust nothing will go wrong.
Unfathomable.

You’d swear I made this up just to capture some sort of weird headlines for the holidays. I wish.
What would you say if I told you there existed a “school” in Massachusetts that caters to the most troubled youth the state has to offer. Using a set of behavioral modification techniques, they try their best to teach their students, while trying to maintain some sense of order. They have 250 adults and children at the school at any given time, and focus on serving people with autism, mental retardation, and emotional problems.
Sounds okay, right? Say what you want about behavior modification techniques, but there’s a solid research base to back up much of their use and effectiveness. Well, most techniques.
What about administering electric shocks to children? Surely we don’t do that today in modern society, right?
Well, we do. And we do it with a system called SIBIS. Every single day.
But here’s where it gets really weird. According to a story in today’s Boston Globe, the school administered electrical shocks to two children based solely upon a prank phone call made to the school by an ex-student.
Take some time to take that in. The school — the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center — delivered 77 electrical shocks to one child and 29 electrical shocks to another child based solely upon a single phone call to the school. By an ex-student, posing as a supervisor.
This occurred in August, but was only made public when the state released a report about the incident this week. To the school’s credit, they notified the police “within hours” of the incident. And the school has assured the public it has put new safeguards in place to prevent this from happening again: “Corrigan, the spokesman for the center, said he is confident the August case will not be repeated.”
But such comments beg the question. How can a school that already has a reputation because of its use of electrical shock as a behavior modification technique in children not already have such safeguards in place in the first place? I mean, shouldn’t shocks — and we’re talking electrical shocks here — only be administered based upon something equivalent to a written prescription by a doctor?
* * *
You see, when it comes to administering electrical shocks to a human, the research gets a little… murky. One of the systems widely used at this school is called SIBIS. And of the 11 (yes, all of 11) citations in PsycINFO, the psychology research database, most are single case studies. Most are also at least 10 years old. Doing a search on “electric and behavior and modification and child” results in 31 citations. Again, mostly single case studies and most older than 10 years. Some are editorial, and some are describing the controversy regarding administering electrical shocks to children.
In other words, the research base for using electrical shock on children is a little thin. SIBIS is a long-standing controversial technique within child psychology and is largely not used as a mainstream treatment.
Helpfully, the JRC hosts its own site, Use of Skin-Shock at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC) (note the implication of the use of the domain, “effectivetreatment.org”). Lots of links to paper presentations at conferences and videos. Not a lot of peer-reviewed research.
There are many “effective treatments” that for ethical and moral reasons we no longer allow. Perhaps SIBIS should be one of them.
This time, however, people aren’t sitting around waiting for the JRC to stop this treatment:

Top officials in New York and Washington, D.C., where many of the center’s students originate, have called for a stop to the controversial shock treatments at the school.
Yesterday, in a prepared statement, state Senator Brian Joyce called on officials to more strictly limit and regulate the use of shock therapy in the state.

Indeed. Especially on the state’s most vulnerable citizens — its children.
Read the full article: Students in Canton given electrical shocks after prank call, report says. The report was published by the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care.

words fail me!

Dear bizi,

Upon reading this article, I was astonished. Although not so astonished as most of you since I was taught in Roman Catholic parochial and high schools in the Northeast when corporal and psychological "behavioral modification" was s.o.p. If only the Christian Brothers, who "taught", (i.e. regularly beat the crap out of me), in grammar school had had access to one the Rotenberg electro-shock machines, they could have saved themselves so much exercise.

It is clear that this "treatment" has nothing in common with "electro-convulsive therapy" which I believe is a valuable treatment of last resort for refractory depressives. This is no more than punishment. Or as the Rotenbergians choose to style it, "aversive" therapy. Somewhere in their lengthy presentation is a statement that one of the goals of the "therapy" is to reduce psychotropic medication. Since it is buried among all the data outlining the effectiveness of the "carrot-and-stick" aversive therapy program, I think its thrown in to make what their doing look more benign. Basically, B.S. Why do they want to reduce meds? Does that goal validate torture as a behavioral modification tool? Come to think of it, since mental institutions are uniformly starved for cash, why not save the price of the electro-convulsive machines and turn instead to punching the residents in the stomach when they misbehave.

I am familiar with group homes from my membership in the Depressive and Bipolar Support Alliance. We constantly receive new members from homes that sound like snake-pits. The city decided to combine programs for substance abusive patients and mentally ill patients back in 2002 to save money. The upshot is that all group home members, including those who are only depressed or bipolar and who do not use illegal drugs or booze are compelled to go through a program of behavioral modification for hypes and/or drunks. (My apologies to the hypes and/or drunks, we all have our problems.) They are frequently supervised by ignorant, untrained former hypes and/or drunks who have the tunnel vision of the ex-hype/drunk. Nothing, outside of visits to a shrink, is done to ameliorate mood disorders of those who are strictly mentally ill. The supervisory staff is typically authoritarian and insensitive to mood disorders, making up for in personal strokes what they lack in pay and knowledge. One wonders how the same economics play out in Rotenberg. Does the custodian get to shock the residents if the "supervisor" is busy elsewhere?

The Rotenberg "program" sounds so laissez-faire and unstructured that were it not "outed" in these articles, it would only have been a matter of time before some deviant "supervisor" used the "aversive behavior mod" to compel a patient to do something vile.

I suppose that I should read more about the pros and cons before reacting emotionally, but the very notion of electrically shocking people strictly for purposes of coercion reminds me of fascism. After all, according to the Rotenberg treatise, this is good for the resident population. Ergo, it must be good.

Cordially,

This post really called for a TRIGGER warning! Please!

Doc John wrote these peices and they were posted elsewhere on these forums...perhaps I should not have posted them here.
I am sorry if I offended you.
bizi