School To Continue Electric Shock

[MedicCook]

School To Continue Electric Shock
Officials Give School One Year Extension

BOSTON -- State officials are allowing a controversial special education school to use electric shock treatments on students for another year.

But the state's Office of Health and Human Services said the extension for the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center comes with conditions.

The center must prove it uses shock treatments only for the most dangerous and self-destructive behaviors, and must also must show the treatments reduce those behaviors.

The decision comes after an August incident in which two emotionally disturbed students were wrongly given dozens of shocks after a prank call from a person posing as a supervisor.

A state report found that staff made multiple mistakes when they followed the prank caller's directions.

The report by the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care said six staffers at a Stoughton residence run by the Canton-based school had reason to doubt the orders to administer the shocks, but did nothing to stop it.

The six staff members and video surveillance worker on duty that night were fired on Oct. 1.

After the Aug. 26 call, the teens, ages 16 and 19, were awakened in the middle of the night and given the shock treatments, at times while their legs and arms were bound. One teen received 77 shocks and the other received 29. One boy was treated for two first-degree burns.

The caller said he was ordering the punishments because the teens had misbehaved earlier in the evening. But none of the staffers had witnessed any problems.

The report says the caller was a former resident of the center with knowledge of the staff, residents and layout of the Stoughton home. Police are looking into filing criminal charges.

The staffers were described as concerned and reluctant about the orders, but failed to verify them with the central office or check treatment plans to make sure the teens could receive that level of shock therapy, the report said.

The incident in Stoughton renewed calls by school critics for the state to ban the shock treatments. But state officials said the parents of some residents defend the school and its methods.

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/14914756/detail.html

[Thomas the Solitary]

The Judge Rotenberg "school" needs to be shutdown.
NOW.

I knew immediately when reading the headline of this post that it was them.

Let me try to explain something.

Think of all the negative stereotypes of mental institutions you can think up from all of those bad movies. What have you got in your mind?

Doctors & Nurses (caregivers) that don't really give a shit.
They carry around a clip board that they mark on.
They seem to be robotic.
Electro-shock treatment.

Yeah. That's this place.
You can read it on their website, it's clear as day. They seem proud of it, even.
http://www.judgerc.org/
There's their website.
The interesting bits are thus:


I studied psychology under the late B.F. Skinner as an undergraduate, as a graduate student, and as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard UniversityWhat does this mean? Imagine a dog, strapped on a table. There's a bell. A paste is administered to the poor dog's mouth, resembling food. After doing this for a bit, they stop the food, and discover that the dog, strapped on the table, muzzled, drools (salivates). This is called conditioning. This is similar to what B. F. Skinner does. The approach is totally devoid of any kind of humanity, just "reward good behavior" and "punish bad behavior" until desired results are obtained.

There is NO consideration of WHY the "bad" behavior is caused. (and for that matter, who judges what is the bad behavior?)

Here are some excerpts from their website again. I'll highlight some of the more "interesting " tidbits that I think make this place an absolute living hell for the kids who are strapped in when they sleep. (I realize that yes, in some of these cases, it's necessary for the patient's own safety to be strapped in. This website also has graphic pictures. However, I don't think they need the electro-shocker strapped on as well... think about it.)
These excerpts come from the history part of their website, here: http://www.judgerc.org/history.html


Behavioral rather than a psychiatric, approach. A behavioral approach essentially views a treatment problem as one in which the individual has certain behaviors that need to be decreased and certain ones that need to be increased. The fundamental technique for accomplishing these increases and decreases is the application of rewards and punishments. We use as one of our most important measures of effectiveness, the frequency of problem and desired behaviors. Behavioral frequencies and trends are displayed on Precision Teaching Charts that had been designed in the 1960s by Dr. Ogden Lindsley, another student of Skinner. Behavioral treatment decisions are based on the data shown on these charts, rather than on clinical impressions, hunches, or observations alone.

Behavioral, rather than traditional counseling. At JRC counseling is done as a fully coordinated and integrated component of a total behavioral approach. We call our counseling “behavioral counseling.” This means, for example, the following: the counseling is not given on a regular schedule but rather on an as-needed basis; the counseling is not given at points where it might function as an inadvertent reward for some problem behavior that has just occurred; [Lowell: in other words, something bad happened. Shock. Go sit in a corner now. Nobody to talk to.] the counseling is given by clinicians and other trained staff that are employed by JRC, rather than being provided by persons outside of JRC;[Lowell: Nobody outside gets in? Hmm.] the content of the counseling session is not necessarily kept private between the counselor and the counselee, but instead is shared with other professionals in the agency as needed; and the purpose of the counseling is to enhance the student’s cooperation with, and progress within, the JRC program and to change his/her behavior toward the treatment goals set by JRC.
I have to say something here. I've been the recipient of some of this style of "counseling". You DO NOT WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT.
Behavioral procedures as the means of treatment, rather than the use of normalization. The dominant philosophy of the care of mentally disabled individuals during much of JRC’s existence, which continues even today, is that of normalization,

AND WHAT THE FUCK IS NORMAL?
also sometimes referred to as social role valorization. This approach, which insists that such persons should be placed in, and cared for, with as “normal” a set of procedures as possible, is frankly opposed to the notion of behavioral treatment. In behavioral treatment, normalization is accepted as the goal of the treatment process, but not as the means for reaching that goal. Indeed, behavioral procedures that will effectively eliminate problematic behaviors and help the student improve his/her condition and live a more normal life often have to be highly abnormal at first until the behavior changes sufficiently. As the behavior changes, however, the environmental conditions can and are made increasingly normal.
I'm starting to loose my cool reading this stuff again.


Here's another good one. No medication.
No or minimal use of psychotropic medication. We have always employed either no psychotropic medication at all, or the very minimal amount that is needed. Psychiatrists are employed to help us assess whether such medication is needed and to help us diminish or eliminate the psychotropic medication when it is not needed. Our psychiatrists make considerable use of our behavioral charts as they make these decisions.

This speaks for itself.
Giving the parent the option to supplement the reward treatment with physical aversives when rewards and educational procedures alone prove to be insufficiently effective. If treatment with the use of rewards, loss of privileges, fines, other non-physical aversives, and educational procedures, prove insufficiently effective by themselves, then the parent should be given the option of supplementing the student’s program with carefully administered physical aversives. In the 1970s and 1980’s, JRC employed physical aversives such as the pinch, spank, muscle squeeze, water spray, vapor spray (mixture of compressed air and water), ammonia capsule, unpleasant taste, and white noise. [white noise will drive some autistics to the brink of madness, in case you didn't know] During the 1991-1993 period, JRC substituted a 2-second remote-controlled shock to the surface of the skin for all of these procedures. This procedure is called the GED (Graduated Electronic Decelerator).

At the time that JRC was starting (1971), a movement to limit the use of punishments in the raising of children was already well under way. In that year, for example, Sweden passed a law banning the use of punishment with children. (Interestingly, no punishment was specified for failing to obey the law). The use of punishments in the education and treatment of children is still, today, vigorously opposed in certain quarters and has even been banned in the regulation of certain state agencies. OCCS regulations, for example, explicitly ban the use of aversive procedures. Every year or so a bill is introduced in the Massachusetts state legislature to ban the use of aversives. (This bill has never passed, however.) Because of all this, JRC and its parents have had to battle fiercely over the years to create and preserve this important component of its treatment.

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Judge Rotenberg Center Help Wanted Ad

I recently googled Filthy Child Abusers Inc.—oops, I meant the Judge Rotenberg Center (http://aspiesforfreedom.org/wiki/index.php?title=Judge_Rotenberg_Center)—and noticed that a large number of help wanted ads came up in the results. Looks as if they may be having a problem with staff turnover. Hmmm, I wonder why? Maybe it's hard to find people who are so sickeningly depraved as to enjoy torturing disabled kids for a living? Naa-a-ah. More likely, their personnel department needs a little help drafting more precise ads to bring in applications from just the right candidates. I'm feeling charitably inclined today, so I'll offer them, free of charge, a few suggestions for a well-targeted ad:

Ability to tell creative stories. No, sorry, the Judge Rotenberg Center isn't looking for kindhearted staff who enjoy telling bedtime stories to the kiddies. The sort of creativity that's needed here is a talent for inventing plausible explanations for injuries, such as claiming that burns from electrodes all over a child's body (http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/05/22/a_question_of_tough_love_vs_torture) were caused by medical conditions. Staff at the Judge Rotenberg Center must also be able to repeat the Big Lie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie) with a straight face, that is, the claim that electric shocks are necessary to prevent severely disturbed youths from maiming themselves through self-injury. Pathological liars are strongly encouraged to apply, as this whopper of a story is becoming much harder to tell now that the mainstream media are reporting the truth. (For example, as reported by the Boston Herald (http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=131026), Antwone Nicholson, a teenager whose mother has filed a lawsuit against the school district that was responsible for sending him to the Judge Rotenberg Center, was routinely shocked whenever he swore or did not cooperate.)

Math skills helpful. It appears that some of the creative storytellers at the Judge Rotenberg Center are a tad mathematically impaired. They're claiming that Antwone Nicholson had 5,000 violent episodes a week (http://edition.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2006/03/shock-therapy-for-kids.html) before they started shocking him. Let's get out our calculators, readers. There are 10,080 minutes in a week. That means the kid would've needed to have a "violent episode" every two minutes, around the clock, for an entire week, without ever stopping to eat, sleep, use the toilet, et cetera. No matter how creatively a "violent episode" may be defined, we're getting into the realm of mathematical impossibility here. (But hey, what's a little perjury and evidence tampering among friends, right?)

Not easily flustered. By bothersome little annoyances like children screaming in extreme pain, tort lawsuits, child abuse investigations, the occasional homicide investigation (http://normemma.com/lcorneli.htm)... heck, it's just another day at the ol' ball yard.

Equal opportunity employer. Male, female, any race, color, creed or national origin are welcome to apply. (No need to mention the disabled. They're not people, are they?)

Preference for veterans. Extra bonus points on the application will be given to those who have experience interrogating prisoners at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay.

And the most essential qualification for a job at the Judge Rotenberg Center?

Total lack of human decency.

http://autisticbfh.blogspot.com/2006/06/judge-rotenberg-center-help-wanted-ad.html

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e310/autisticbfh/curethis.jpg

[MedicCook]

I really thought this shit was done away with years and years ago.

[Thomas the Solitary]

Nope.

I'm having a hard time with it myself at the moment.

[MedicCook]

I do not agree with it for adult mental patients yet for kids and teen's who are in a 'school' setting.

[Thomas the Solitary]

I do not agree with it for adult mental patients yet for kids and teen's who are in a 'school' setting.

"Yet for kids and teens who are in a 'school' setting" what?

I don't think it's EVER a good idea to shock someone for bad behavior with the intention of changing behavior, with no consideration of why such behavior is being acted out.

I think it'd be much better to try to get the person to see that some specific behavior is a cause of much misery in their lives, and to see if they can first acknowledge it; then, as a natural progression of that, to see what they can do to help themselves. Possibly with consoling (the real kind), and further possibly with some drug therapy.

I don't personally like drug therapy, because I think it's being overused in our area of the world, but for some cases it can definitely help.

[MedicCook]

This placed is being referred to as a school. Is that just a cover name so it can get more government funding? Is it really just a troubled youth boarding house?

[Thomas the Solitary]

No, this is the place they send kids with serious physiological problems.
Like autism.
Or retarded kids.

This is not a place you send a run of the mill Goth kid for his wearing black and weird piercings, tattoo's, etc.

This is the place you send (for instance) Autistic kids that rock, flap, just don't understand social behavior (because their brains actually are not wired that way) and you shock them until they act in a certain way. The way the people running it say you should act. These are mostly the lower functioning autistics. Think Rain Man (a bad stereotype, but it helps to get the point across.)
Poor Dustin Hoffman (as rain man) pisses off his brother I think, Tom Cruse, because he doesn't want to fly on any airliner other than quanta. **SHOCK**
Etc.

In other words, it's not simply "troubled youth".

[MedicCook]

So it is not a school at all. It is one step above a psych hospital.

2 movies come to mind when I think of electric shock.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

and

Face Off

[sws4420]

Does shock therapy even work?

[LLL]

Does shock therapy even work?

I'd be shocked if it did. :laughing:

[sws4420]

:mf_electr

[MedicCook]

Does shock therapy even work?

I thought they decided that it was an uneffective form of medical treatment years and years ago. Now all of a sudden it is back. I do not see how they can prove that shocking the brain will help heal them and not hurt them.


I'd be shocked if it did. :laughing:

You need a comedic drummer to finish that one off LLL.

[Thomas the Solitary]

They are not using the same sort of shock therapy that you're all thinking about.

This thing is a backpack sort of deal, very similar to how one of those "anti-barking" dog collars work.

Note that in the article, one of the kids had to be treated for burns?

[sws4420]

Awesome.

[MedicCook]

They are not using the same sort of shock therapy that you're all thinking about.

This thing is a backpack sort of deal, very similar to how one of those "anti-barking" dog collars work.

Note that in the article, one of the kids had to be treated for burns?

Those old style shocking at the temples also caused burns.

The other thing is depending on where they are sending the shock through there is the potential to put someone in immediate cardiac arrest of that electricty goes through the heart and interferes with the hearts own electrical system.

[Thomas the Solitary]

Here are some pictures I've found of the JRC.
I particularly like the first one, no caption needed :unsure:

Here's a link to the original:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock_index.html

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock_4_580x484.jpg
At the Rotenberg Center, students as young as nine and ten receive shocks for misbehaving. Employees wear remotes bearing a picture of each child around their waist so they don't shock the wrong kid.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock_01_580x768.jpg


http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock_2_580x720.jpg


Students use good-behavior points to "buy" goods from this school store. If they're really good, they can also go to the "Big Reward Store," an arcade that is the only place where some are allowed to socialize freely.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock_5_580x444.jpg

[Crystal]

Disgusting if you ask me.

[MERV]

But yet we'll give cops Tazers to shock people that are resisting arrest? Isn't tazing them a form of changing their behavior? Cops have no idea why such people are acting out, but they do it to control the situation. Sounds like a double standard to me. What's good for one is good for all.

[MedicCook]

But yet we'll give cops Tazers to shock people that are resisting arrest? Isn't tazing them a form of changing their behavior? Cops have no idea why such people are acting out, but they do it to control the situation. Sounds like a double standard to me. What's good for one is good for all.

No because the police are not using a taser to over and over again to try and change a behavioral problem. The police are using a taser to take control of a dangerous situation with out using lethal force. The taser is strictly so they can get the person calmed down so they can be handcuffed without risking injury to the officers or being required to use lethal force against the person with a gun.