In the mid-90s, around the age of eleven, I saw a television show on PBS about old asylums that would do horrifying things to people society deemed insane. It scared me, especially since it didn’t clarify what happened to those same people in modern times.
I asked my mother, who took some time before she answered. While waiting for her response, my mind raced with early memories I tried to suppress: frequent teasing, adults concerned about how I didn’t “act normal” and had atypicality in developmental milestones.
Jennifer Msumba/Wikimedia
A drawing by a former resident of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center depicting the punishment of GED shocks while restrained to a four-point board. According to the artist, residents sometimes received multiple GED shocks while restrained to a four-point board as punishments for standard infractions.
“Well, there’s definitely still improvements to make,” my mom finally said, “but those awful torture-like treatments don’t happen to people with mental health issues anymore.”
While she was right about most things, she was sadly wrong about this.
To this day, there are Americans being subjected to a treatment that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has officially condemned as torture at the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC), a residential school for students with disabilities in Canton, Massachusetts.
Patients at the facility with “developmental disabilities, emotional disorders, and autistic-like behaviors” are being shocked using an extreme form of aversive therapy. This procedure sends strong electric shocks throughout an individual’s body with a device called a graduated electronic decelerator (GED). It is often used when patients exhibit unwanted behavior—which, according to those who have undergone the treatment—pretty much means not acting “normal,” a standard that the center defines loosely.
In fact, the movement against JRC, known online as #StopTheShock, gained traction in 2012, when partial footage of a Black autistic teenager named Andre McCollins being shocked thirty-one times in seven hours was made public. McCollins was allegedly forced to undergo the treatment for refusing to take off his jacket, while all but two of the shocks were for “tensing up” or “screaming.” JRC claims to only use GEDs in extreme cases, but, again, that deeply conflicts with the experiences reported by many people who have had to stay there.
Additionally, the only defense that JRC offers is claiming the GED is necessary to prevent self-injurious behavior (SIB) as well as aggression (AG) and saying that they have the most difficult cases in that regard. But the FDA strongly disagrees. The FDA’s 2020 inspection reported, “25,000 is a reliable, conservative estimate for the number of the more extreme cases of SIB and AB in the United States. We have no evidence establishing that, of those, JRC receives the most extreme or refractory cases,” additionally stating, “JRC has not established that its residents on whom ESDs [electric stimulation devices] are used are refractory to other treatments, and the evidence shows that state-of-the-art alternatives have generally been successful even for the most difficult cases.” JRC doesn’t need to be shocking these already-struggling people, it’s just not necessary.
To give you an idea of just how strong the shocks are, JRC’s strongest device, the GED-4—a type of electric stimulation device that is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration—shocks patients at 90 mA, which is nine times higher than a cattle prod and a around twenty-two stronger than an electric fence.
The fight to end the torture happening at Judge Rotenberg has been going on for nearly two decades, but JRC’s influence and funding has been an obstacle. In 2020, they received $84,108,326 in grants and other government funding. That same year, the FDA attempted to ban ESDs at large, stating the agency “has determined that these devices present an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury,” which could include “depression, PTSD, anxiety, fear, panic, substitution of other negative behaviors, worsening of underlying symptoms, and learned helplessness.”
But JRC reacted by suing the FDA, and in July of 2021 the ban was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, stating, “a use-specific” ban "interferes with a practitioner's authority by restricting the available range of devices through regulatory action."
But, due to the efforts of community activists, most vocally the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), that may soon change—the recently passed omnibus bill includes a provision that gives the FDA the right to ban contingent electric shocks used for behavior modification. Now the agency just needs to know that the public is against this torture and in support of the #StopTheShock movement.
We’d like to think that we’ve moved on from the days of treating people who can’t squeeze into a homogenized idea of “normal” as less than human, but in far too many cases, we really haven’t. As a neurodivergent person who’s had public autistic meltdowns—something that can get you put in places like JRC—this is a terrifying example. So, please, for the sake of the millions of neurodivergent people in this country, and especially those at JRC right now, please bust out that phone and start putting pressure on the FDA.
You can take action by tweeting @FDADeviceInfo and @US_FDA including the following message: “pass the rule banning the electric skin shock device without delay, #StopTheShock.”