The Boston-area’s Judge Rotenberg Center educates and treats enrollees ages 3 to adult, all of whom are struggling with severe emotional, behavior, and psychiatric problems, including autism-like disorders. And for about half of the 250 students here, undesirable behavior means getting hooked up to a special machine and administered an electric shock.
Findings in the MDRI report include the center’s practice of subjecting children to electric shocks on the legs, arms, soles of feet and torso — in many cases for years — as well as some for more than a decade. Electronic shocks are administered by remote-controlled packs attached to a child’s back called a Graduated Electronic Decelerators (GEI).
Twenty-one years ago today I awoke naked in a seclusion room at Clinton Valley Center, a Michigan state psychiatric hospital. I had just managed to live through the worst night of my life, and upon regaining consciousness I thought that I had died and gone to hell. For three days I was in that little cell while my breast milk painfully dried up and I was overdosed by the attending nurses with Haldol, an anti-psychotic drug.