Disability Law

Parents Defend School?s Use of Shock Therapy

By Danielle

From the New York Times, Parents Defend School?s Use of Shock Therapy -

Nearly a year ago, New York made plans to ban the use of electric shocks as a punishment for bad behavior, a therapy used at a Massachusetts school where New York State had long sent some of its most challenging special education students.

But state officials trying to limit New York?s association with the school, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, southwest of Boston, and its ?aversive therapy? practices have found a large obstacle in their paths: parents of students who are given shocks.

So, we’re sending our children to a school where electroshock treatment is being used as a punishment “for a wide variety of actions, including shouting profanities and spitting, which are known to be effectively treated with less extreme punishments.” Why? According to attorney Michael P. Flammia, the lawyer for Rotenberg (the school in question), because ?People want to believe positive interventions work even in the most extreme cases. If they did, that is all we would use. Many of these kids come in on massive dosages of antipsychotic drugs, so doped up that they are almost comatose. We get them off drugs and give their parents something very important: hope.?

Hope. We are subjection children to dangerous, painful, and violent shocks because it gives their parents hope. According to Massachusetts investigators, “a child at the school was shocked 77 times in three hours last summer as a result of a prank.” But it gives their parents hope.

Just how painful those shocks are has been an area of particular debate. Technically, the lowest shock given by Rotenberg is roughly twice what pain researchers have said is tolerable for most humans, said James Eason, a professor of biomedical engineering at Washington and Lee University. The highest shock given by Rotenberg is three times the lowest amount.

It’s hard to explain what electroshock therapy is like to someone who has never seen it. It’s hard to explain to people who don’t know that we still use it, that it still exists in our hospitals and schools.

Ms. Handon, however, does not share these qualms. She said she likes the fact that the school will let her visit any time, unannounced. From her computer, she can monitor Crystal?s progress. One green bar chart keeps track of the number of times her daughter has engaged in prohibited behavior; another, the number of times she was given a shock. In the past month, it appears that her daughter has been given shocks only four times, down from the 200 a month she received at first.

Imagine that! The transparency is actually incredible, and admirable. But I wonder what actually goes through that mother’s mind when she sees on her screen that her daughter has just been shocked.

Still, the parents say the shocks are making a difference in their children?s lives as nothing else has. In 2006, after New York issued an immediate ban on electric shock for behavior modification, Ms. Handon was among the parents of more than 40 children who sued and won a court injunction to keep treatments going.

In January, the state, which pays for treatment of all New York students at Rotenberg to age 21, enacted a new ban on the treatment for those students, to take effect in 2009; it also set new restrictions on who can begin the therapy in the interim. But the parents amended their suit, and a trial beginning in 2008 will decide the issue.

That trial should be very interesting to watch as it goes along.

Full post as published by Mental Disability Law Blog on December 28, 2007 (boomark / email).