8:45pm February 20, 2012

➸ codeman38's tumblings: I'm looking up this Judge Rotenberg Center at the moment (TW for extreme ableism, abusive "treatment"). I'm surprised...

Among their “treatments” over the years:

Applied behaviour analysis

Withholding of food

Electroshock therapy

Forced Ammonia inhalation

Spanking

Foot pinching

Other physical punishments

Last year, the Center was forbidden from submitting new patients to electroshock…

One of the legislators in Massachusetts has a relative there. That’s one reason they’re having so much trouble closing the place down. Despite deaths and stuff.

What they do to people there isn’t what most people call electroshock though. Electroshock is normally a word for ECT (where they shock the brain to create seizures). What happens at JRC is skin shock, where they apply electricity to the body through the skin to cause pain. Both of them are generally really terrible (I know people who have had ECT who almost died, lost huge amounts of memory and had to relearn everything, lost all memory of the time since they had kids, woke up in horrific pain, and other fun stuff) but they’re two different things. Skin shock is to cause pain to modify behavior, and ECT is roughly the equivalent of bashing a person hard over the head with a two by four and hoping it resets something. (Occasionally it does, usually it just screws stuff up.) Although there are places where ECT is something they threaten people with for behavior mod purposes as well. JRC just isn’t one of them.

Oh also I once uncovered a video from the JRC they use to train parents. It’s basically brainwashing – it teaches the parents why to disregard any complaint the kid has about the place, and then teaches the parents how to brainwash their kids into only saying good things about the place and not complaining. I blogged about it and they rapidly took it off their website (they have people there who monitor blogs that blog about the place and inundate them with stories about how great the place is). But I bet they still use it.

Oh and this is also really important: I once saw photos of the place. Inside. I immediately knew it was probably a terrible place. Why? Because they made such an over the top attempt to decorate it. Like in an absurdly intense “children will love it here” way. That may fool parents but as someone who’s been in a fair variety of institutions, I knew that was a warning signal rather than a good thing. That means “pay close attention because they may be hiding something awful”.

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