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.
11 comments
Hmm. This surprises me a great deal. I remember learning about the positive / negative reinforcement / punishment distinction as an undergraduate and I was fairly sure that we were told that it was illegal for psychologists / teachers to administer positive punishment. There are of course issues around whether something is a positive punisher (presence of shock) or a negative punisher (removal of non-shock) but I suppose the distinction is fairly intuitive for juries etc.
This came up for us in the context of the childhood disorder where infants throw up milk that is presented to them thereby starving themselves to death. The condition can be successfully treated by administering small electric shocks to punish their throwing up. After a certain number of shocks have been administered the infants stop throwing up and hence they don’t starve to death.
We were told that it was illegal for psychologists to administer the electric shocks to infants in the US and that some psychologists are willing to teach the parents how to administer the shocks in order to alter their infants behaviour (thus saving their lives), however. The trouble is that administering shocks to their own infants tends to be extremely traumatic to parents even though the parents know they are saving the lives of their infants.
This particular story sounds extremely unethical especially in the light of the above practice being outlawed in the US (where there is good evidence that it it effective in the eating disorder case). Shocks need to be administered FAST after the problem behaviour – delay undermines the efficacy and increases the liklihood of the shock punishing some other unproblematic behaviour that occurred just prior to it.
Rewarding good behaviour (or gradually shaping behaviour toward good behaviour by way of reinforcement of successive approximations) is also much more effective than punishing bad behaviour. Did they look into the function of the behaviour BEFORE punishing it? I think that punishing unwanted behaviour BEFORE figuring out what need the behaviour is serving (and hence rewarding better behaviour that similarly meets that need) should be considered unethical if not unlawful.
I’m surprised and frankly rather appalled at this. Sounds like an abuse of power to me. An abuse of power indeed.
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The Boston Globe reported to day that the seven low-level staff members on the overnight shift when this incident occurred were actually fired back in October, but the center only announced the firings yesterday:
link
Shouldn’t an administrator or supervisor actually responsible for setting whatever the policy was that allowed this to happen in the first place also face some sort of disciplinary action or sanction?
If there is a policy that they shock the students then, yes.
(I really don’t think any trained applied behaviour analyist would condone such a practice – there simply isn’t the evidence to support it and I’m fairly sure it is illegal in the US as I said)
If there isn’t then the people who did the shocking should be tried for assault IMHO.
The article didn’t state how many children are treated there that don’t have a problem, but are just being WAREHOUSED there because of parental issues. How often is Münchhausen’s by proxy diagnosed? cruel and unusual punishment is illegal under US law, tho acceptable for use with children. who’s sick here? And yes they should be tried for felony criminal child abuse,found guilty and serve the max.
Professional stupidity is a MENACE to us all!!
For an accurate summary of what the Judge Rotenberg Center is really about, please go to http://www.judgerc.org/responsetoblogs.pdf
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While that’s certainly a biased “summary” of what the JRC is about, I’d hardly say it’s “accurate” or a “response to blogs” and speaks nothing to what kind of procedures (or lack thereof) were in place that did not prevent this abuse of one of the clients of the JRC.
“Skin-shock therapy is used for only 42% of the school-age students currently enrolled at JRC…”
Only 42%? I think that being proud this extreme procedure is used on nearly half your population does not reflect well.
“and the thorough regulatory oversight that is provided by three Massachusetts state agencies”
Obviously not thorough enough to allow another prior patient at your facility to call in some shocks to two of your charges. What about internal regulation and safeguards?
“There are no negative side effects and many
positive ones as has been found in a paper that has recently been accepted for publication…”
So you’re saying you’ve been using these procedures for years without such understanding of the negative and positive side effects? What kind of legitimate research paper finds zero negative side effects? How about qualifying that statement some, such as “no side effects during the time measured.” What about 10 years from now? 20? 30? Has no patient of yours ever been inadvertently harmed by these electric shocks? Zero??
Sounds like the perfect treatment!
Unfortunately for JRC, every JRC journal publication is tainted by the fact that every JRC author has a significant financial incentive to publish — their very livelihood is at stake. So we tend to put more weight on non-JRC publications where such bias isn’t evident or as likely to influence a study’s findings.
Seriously though, falling back on, “We must do something or these children will pull out all their hair” (as one example cited in this paper) isn’t really a strong or convincing argument for administering electric shocks to children.
And the paper says nothing about the lax oversight and management of a facility that allowed this incident to happen in the first place. Which is what most of the attention is about, not the electric shocks themselves.
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It gets even better. The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center destroyed the videotapes that a state investigator ordered preserved:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/01/18/report_says_shock_tapes_destroyed_against_order/
Again, if you’ve got nothing to hide, why all the efforts to cover up this behavior? Very sad.
We have endured and so has our 12 yr old daughter, head hitting for alf of her life. Where can we get this electric therapy (SIBIS) device ??? She and we need this opportunity where everything else has failed. Where ????
Before we judge parents harshly, we need to consider what their stuggle is. It’s important to see what parents go through when trying to protect their autistic children who self-abuse. I found this website helpful insight. I’m not sure where I stand on this issue, but it’s certainly a very difficult behavior to treat and therefore we need to work better on behalf of these parents dealing with this devastating behavior. The blog is at http://www.autismseizureselfinjuriousbehavior.com/…/controversial-adjunctive-therapy-for.html