American Children Tortured

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Ever heard the expression I'ts the amps that kill???

45 milliampere is WAY MUCH... and at 60 volts.... which you think is nothing. With the right amps, 30 volts can kill you! Even at a low voltage 65 milliampere can kill you!! These people are adminestering shocks as massive as they possibly DARE. Any higher and the kids would start dropping like flies. Also, given for 2 seconds that electricity will travel down to the muscle, it is NOT a skin shock.

This school has a lot of teens. Teens can be schizophrenic.

When I took psychology at uni I read all reports about aversion therapy. It was quite popular in the 60s and in the 90s it was back in fashion some, because of the CBT wave, but guess what, basically every trial is conclusive, and aversion therapy simply doesn't work! That is also (part from the abuse factor) why more schools like this one don't exist. This is just alive because some fanatics run it.

I've seen the schools own videos, how they say kids learn yadda yadda and they learn a healthy lifestyle and lose weight. They show students who are working silently on computers, looking quite normal. They also show pics of students that lose weight. Then you see the interviews. THOSE students still seem rather dysfuctional and no, all aren't skinny, far from. THEN you hear what the parents say. I didn't look at all parents interviews but those I saw, those people seem to have NO education, they can't speak full sentences, they are very obese (not trying to b1tch out fat people just making a point what these people are, like), they don't seem of normal IQ. It is not the achademia sitting here folks. These are people who are clueless about anything science... or clueless about most things. So NO, they don't know what is best for their kids. They don't have the IQ and/or education to understand.

I'm sure most parents do this out o love. Some, however, don't and I'm pretty sure of it. Some are not even sent there by parents but by relatives who had a difficult kid dumped at them.

But love is never enough, in itself...

If those parents are so good, then they could fix this discipline act at home. Sure they can learn to press a button....

My parents weren't at all bad parents, still they didn't know what was best for me and made a lot of mistakes, they are just people, not gods. And I know myself better than they knew me....

For every parent that loves their kids as they are, you have five that love their kids but want to change them into something they are not. As long as people are told being different is wrong schools like this will be around. I once was at a school where if you got up set or did something not okay they would lay right on top of you. They knew I did not like to be touched and when I was touched I would melt down. Needless to say I was out of there in three days.

Lori Schiller began to hear voices when she was sixteen. (Or was it seventeen?) It happens.

Monique, you misunderstand. I'm sorry I wasn't clear. I was saying that it's possible for someone to be intelligent but unable to communicate, and that that's one reason why you should treat someone kindly even if you believe them to have no more brain function than your average lizard. I was also stating that if you add on so many qualifiers that we know for sure that someone really has that little intelligence, that in itself destroys the argument for shock by invalidating the argument against drugging them up, this argument being that it zombifies. I mean, is zombifying worse than seemingly random uncontrollable pain?

Please see http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?p=404 for what I mean by "intelligent but can't communicate."

It is true that in most cases, parents know and love their children more than anyone else. It is not universally true, however. Witness the many mothers who kill their children, witness the abusive parents who do exist. Also, in the case of an NT parent of an autistic (or other neurodiverse) child, I give you even odds that the parent doesn't understand very well at all. Witness the many, many, many parents (of people on this site, among others) who assume that the child will react like an NT and when this is proven incorrect, continue to assume that the child will react to things like an NT and decide the child is deliberately misbehaving and needs to be punished. This can easily happen even in the case of a loving parent who would have done very well as the parent of an NT-- mothers who lightly touch children who are sensitive to light touch; who unwittingly try to discipline children for involuntary behaviors, or behaviors that are voluntary but which the child can't perceive themselves doing; who tell their seemingly-shy children to "talk to people" without realizing that the problem is that they don't know how; who ask their children to "look at me when I'm talking to you"; who treat meltdowns like temper-tantrums and so punish children for an involuntary behavior triggered by being upset...

Let me tell you something. I'm high-functioning. I can talk, and in fact spoke early. I am generally good at learning things, and can pass for normal in many situations. I am in my late teens, and am only now beginning to be able to, with very little reliability and no ability to put it to use, perceive certain aspects of my own tone of voice and body language. Unfortunately, having been for most of my life unaware of their very existence (while passing for normal in many situations and seeming quite intelligent, making me by far luckier than the people we're discussing), and certainly always (even now) unable to control them, I never realized (and still cannot act on the realization) that they make me sound rude or, in some cases, like I'm threatening to attack people. My mother never realized that I couldn't perceive what I was doing. She would get angry and yell and sometimes punish me. I was unable to perceive a pattern to her behavior. As someone who has studied some psychology, I can tell you in sciency terms what happened. The only pattern that I could discern for certain was that these events occurred only with my mother (actually, they did not, but most people aren't so rude as to call me on it, and of those who were, they described it differently from my mom, so it never generalized; those events got filed under "teachers are mean" most of the time). What's worse is, they didn't always happen. You'd think that would make it better, but it doesn't; when reinforcement is only intermittent to begin with, extinction takes more than ten times as long. (Translation: if A leads to B all the time, and then doesn't anymore, then A only has to happen a few times for you to stop expecting B. If A leads to B sometimes, and then never, A can happen a hundred times before you stop expecting B.) As a result, the conditions were ideal for me to learn to associate my mother with pain in the most difficult way to break. It never taught me to be polite; learning to perceive my own vocal inflection will probably do so, but as yet I haven't learned to control it.

I was able to escape my mother a lot of the time, which meant having control over that particular bad experience; if you've studied Martin Seligman's work, you know that however you come by it, even having a little control can mean the difference between sinking into hopelessness and depression and coming out the other side okay. If the people at the JRC can't even get away, I shudder to think what could happen to them.'

As to your response to frag, what do you call someone who intentionally causes pain to someone in their control? All frag is doing is giving perspective, and in fact he just said that they're not out to kill these kids (well, he implied it, and not all that heavily; it requires reading between the lines and assuming a causal relationship between his statement that the shocks are "as massive as they possibly DARE" and his statement that "[a]ny higher and the kids would start dropping like flies"). You get an A in reading comprehension.

Macbeth, please don't compare this to ECT; although they both involve electric current, that's the only similarity. Shock used as an aversive is meant to cause pain to teach a behavior; ECT is meant to cause minor brain damage to snap someone out of depression. ECT is very dangerous, but it is not intended to cause pain, and it does have legitimate uses.

Regarding parents not loving or not knowing their children...
http://elmindreda.blogspot.com/2005/11/ ... -down.html
http://bookgirlwa.livejournal.com/15200.html

Note that composing this post took a long time so others will have gotten in between my clicking reply and my clicking submit. Don't be surprised if I double-post. Apologies in advance.

n4mwd... on the schools own page you can hear it hurts like heck (and if it wasn't true I don't think they would want it on their own page, also on their own page it says they have schizos.

So stop messing.

About the electric shock level - the JRC has revised its GED three times (they are now on GED-IV) to make it more painful. Just to be clear, this means that they have shocked people who are sent there so much that they have had to make three subsequent versions of the machine to make sure that they're hurting. Not only does this speak of the level of pain they're causing and intend to cause, but it also means that the treatment is NOT effective, if someone must be "treated" for long enough and with enough shocks to go through the first three and become completely desensitized to them.

Second of all, possibly more terrifying than the electric shocks themselves are the ways in which they are used, and some of the other forms of aversives used on the mentally disabled in this facility (I have only listed the ones here that have been reported on JRC's website. While I fully believe the Mother Jones, NYSED and MDRI reports, I am not going to debate their veracity here):

-Children may be forced to go through an entire day without food under the "Contingent Food Program" if they misbehave, receiving only one large meal at the end of the day. Worse than that, some children can be deprived of up to 75% of their normal food intake for misbehavior under the "Specialized Food Program." The fact that these quacks think that near-starvation is conducive to mental health, let alone that of children, is indicative of their lack of expertise (See the study performed immediately after World War II on the effects of starvation for more info. The results weren't pretty, and that was when it was performed on adults who had gotten involved completely voluntarily).

-Electric shocks can be used in combination with restraints for the sole purpose of inducing terror, supposedly in order to induce behavioral modification. A child can be strapped to a 4-point restraint board and shocked intermittently over the course of 30 minutes without warning. From what I know, this is not even consistent with even other behaviorist theory, in that, in order for a reward or punishment to be effective, it must be applied directly after a behavior happens in order to form an association. Furthermore, it goes above and beyond to cause trauma, being even more completely disproportionate to whatever the actual offense was than regular electric shock would be in that it adds an element of psychological as well as physical torture. In addition to the cruelty involved in this, it is also hypocritical - the JRC bills itself as providing an alternative to the extensive use of restraints, going so far as to post on one page the picture of a girl who died from the wrongful use of restraints as an unspoken argument in favor of its use of other aversives, but uses these and other restraint and seclusion practices regularly.

-The staff conduct "behavioral research lessons" on students. This involves forcing students to engage in a behavior that they are not supposed to engage in and then shocking them when they indeed do engage in this behavior. The same students are punished if they refuse to engage in the misbehavior as ordered.

-There are students, including the nephew of JRC's strongest supporter in the Massachusetts legislature, who have been shocked hundreds or thousands of times a day. Just to be clear, if aversives were truly being used for their stated purpose, this would mean that the students receiving such shocks would be misbehaving nonstop all day (and possibly all night) long. Especially in conjunction with the fact that some of these students (including, once again, the aforementioned nephew of the Massachusetts representative) have been at the JRC for years, it speaks to how (in)effective such treatments are in actually addressing the problem.

-Actual therapy has to be "earned," and is no more than another way in which the program can reinforce itself, as the therapists are supposed to defend the JRC's practices against criticism. Also, students who are suicidal are punished as attention-seeking, just in case they got anything "rewarding" out of their therapy sessions.

-Students must earn the "privilege" to interact with other people - including positive interactions. Autism (as well as some other mental illnesses or developmental disabilities) often involves social skills deficits or other. You do the math as to how effective being denied the opportunity to "practice" will be. How much are you willing to bet that this is more about control, in the form of "atomization," than any actual treatment goals?

-Behaviors that can be punished are not only those that are actually self-injuring or dangerous to others - if indeed that was cause enough to shock people at all. According to the JRC website itself, a student can be shocked for getting out of his or her seat, swearing or giving the wrong answer to a question (if the teacher thinks that the student was "purposely" giving a wrong answer). If you ask me, such a system of punishing "antecedent" behaviors is rife with opportunities for abuses of power, and goes a long way towards explaining how, for instance, staff members shocked one student well over 70 times and another over twenty at the behest of a prank caller without asking questions. The fact that so egregious an episode could happen makes me highly skeptical of the "few bad apples" excuse or anything like it in explaining it.

These things, and more, pulled from JRC's own words as well as the reports done on the Center's (ab)use of aversives, make me think that the justification for the use of such techniques falls way short of addressing what's actually going on here. I am no fan of psychiatric drugs or the pharmaceutical companies, despite what supporters of the use of aversives claim about their opponents, and in fact think that there are scary consent issues in using drugs with potentially devastating and permanent side effects on people who may not be able to consent and/or convey their (lack of) consent to treatment. That being said, I find the use of treatments that are *known* to cause physical and/or psychological trauma, and are to some extent meant to do so, the worse of two evils. However, given the availability of positive behavioral supports and how they can prevent situations from escalating to the point where drastic interventions are needed, the pro-aversives crowd may well be presenting us with a false dichotomy.

Lastly, I also question why someone would get offended at the comparison of abused disabled children to Christ. Unless one is objecting to comparing ANY person to Christ (which I can understand conceptually), I think there's unfortunate implications in saying, basically, "How dare you compare disabled people to Jesus!"

(...Why yes, this is my special interest, why do you ask? )

I feel I must confess that I stated something incorrect earlier. The Synoptic Gospels do say that Jesus's cross was carried by Simon of Cyrene, but I was reading John today and found that it is actually mentioned (I hadn't noticed when I was just skimming) and does say that Jesus carried his own cross.

Sorry to have spread misinformation.

I think that the big test is to imagine the following

"Person X is shocking his dog with cattle prod in an attempt to prevent the dog from stimming by moving its tail from side to side"

I guess that you all would be offended and disgusted, if it is wrong to do it to a dog then to do it to a child at a special school is even worse.

_________________
Health is a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity I am not a jigsaw, I am a free man !

Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.

This is disturbing...

That's pretty disgusting. And arguing for electrical shocks is facepalm-worthy.