An Enquiry Into The Judge Rotenberg Center & ABA Therapy

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http://www.judgerc.org/

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/200 ... hool-shock

http://www.asparenting.com/2012/02/19/a ... -analysis/

Edited to add a third link, and also, these links are meant to be used as learning tools on this thread. The first link takes you to a short introduction video produced by the Rottenberg Center. Please watch this and read the entire six page Mother Jones Article before participating here. The third link is optional.

the intent of this thread is to discuss in depth this center from the perspective of-how we personally do or can relate to it from an interactive angle--how it affects our responses and how our own responses affect do or do not affect what is happening there.

It is also about psychological spin and bias.

I think this subject deserves its own thread. I got the link to the Mother Jones article posted on the Autism In France Thread by WorldsEdge yesterday..Thanks..I would discuss it there, but I think it is a topic in itself, and also, it will be more likely to be linked to search engines if it is approached as a separate topic, so if people want to stop the shock treatments at that center, this might be more effective better.

My personal aim is to use this topic as a learning tool for enquiry about autism and human brain function. If people want to discuss this center from other angles that is fine, but I will probably be responding to your replies from my own perspective.

I also may be discussing some aspects of this topic on another recent thread about Autism Speaks a link to a video depicting a shock treatment was posted. You can also find the link to this video and other material posted on the site of the second link I have given here.

Again, the function of this thread is to understand ourselves better. This is the primary aim, but if people want to do a project such as try to affect what is happening at The Judge Rottenberg Center, it is possible for that to happen in conjunction with understanding ourselves better.

Well I have no idea what is going on at the JRC now, there was a court case which resulted in the boss having to take early retirement.

I think that he should have been put on trial for his deeds.

_________________
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.

I look forward to your elaborate rationalizations on why calling what JRC does "torture" is harmful and wrong.

Hey, don't get antagonistic right away, Verdandi, it'll just start a flame war and no reasonable discussion will happen.

The goings-on at the JRC and similar places where aversives are used remind me mostly of my animal psychology class.

There's a branch of psychology called "behaviorism". Aspie-lecture ahead. Behaviorism started out because people wanted to make psychology more scientific, to turn it from an art into a true science by focusing on testable propositions and observable phenomena. Behaviorism took this to an extreme: Anything you could not observe was taken to be irrelevant. The animal's mind--and the human mind--were called a "black box", with the contents unknown, unknowable, and invalid to consider in psychology. So behaviorism focused on stimulus and response. You present a stimulus to an animal, and the animal responds in some way, by doing or not doing something. Like--if I rattle a treat box, my cat will approach me. A behaviorist would object to my saying that my cat is "waiting for treats" or "anticipating a treat", or that she is "happy" or "hungry", because those are mental states, in the black box and irrelevant. The only statements I can make are about behavior. When I present the treat box to my cat, she approaches me. When I present her cat carrier, she withdraws from me.

The JRC is using behaviorist psychology on humans. This used to be a lot more common, but now autism and developmental disorders are pretty much the only fields of human psychology where behaviorism is still common--we've learned enough about behavior to understand what we need to about humans, without also needing to ignore things we cannot directly observe. In modern psychology we study things like attitudes (one's opinion about an object or idea), emotions (physical/mental states), memories, and cognition. We still focus on measuring things precisely and using experiments and observation, but we no longer believe that the mind is irrelevant because it is unobservable.

(There are a few specific situations where behaviorism has resulted in useful therapies. For example, someone who is trying to stop drinking might take a medication that nauseates him when he drinks alcohol. Or a child who wets the bed might lie on a pad that rings a bell to wake him when he starts to wet the bed, teaching him to wake up when his bladder is full. Both are example of conditioning. But behaviorism is not enough to teach complex skills because it does not take emotion, attitudes, and cognition into account.)

Using behaviorism--especially involving aversives--as a global teaching strategy for a human being is a way of saying that the human's feelings and thoughts are irrelevant because they cannot be observed. If the child stops stimming when we shock him, then obviously the shocks are desirable. If a teenager keeps his room clean when we feed him barely enough to survive and make him "earn" the rest of his meals, then obviously that is a useful way to teach him to clean his room. If the token economy in a mental ward forces patients to behave in a certain way because the rewards are so extremely desirable that losing the reward is painful for the patient, then we should use the token system. If the patients begin to resent doing the things they need to do to earn the tokens, that doesn't matter, because feelings are irrelevant. Only behavior matters.

That is behaviorism. It makes sense when we're doing experiments on animal behavior, because an animal can't answer a survey. But even with animals, we have to realize that the same behaviors can be related to different internal states. With humans, using behaviorism primarily and near-exclusively is a way of denying their intrinsic humanity. And, what's worse, it doesn't work.

Use punishments, and people obey out of fear. Use rewards, and people obey out of desire for the reward--but begin to resent the task. If you do not teach why a task is important, if your student does not begin to do the task for its own sake, you have not succeeded in teaching. You have only forced one behavior or another.

Is it such a wonder that people still use behaviorism to conclude that shocking an autistic child is a reasonable way to control their behavior? One of the chief stereotypes about autistics is that there's nothing inside--the child is an empty shell, without emotions, without the capacity to love, without empathy. If there's nothing to an autistic child but the behavior, why not change the behavior, and forget about what the child may be thinking, feeling, hoping for, or fearing?

In the short term, it works. But in the long term, it makes things worse. It's like trying to recover from depression by constantly staying drunk--after a while, not only are you depressed, but you're an alcoholic too. Well, not only are those kids autistic, but now they have PTSD, prompt-dependence, an inability to initiate their own actions, and a belief that their feelings are invalid and irrelevant.

You want to help kids with severe autism, behavior problems, et cetera? Don't ignore their thoughts and feelings. Focus on communication. Don't force them into behavior that's meaningless for them; guide them into behavior that they can see is useful. Don't try to turn them into people they aren't.

This is an obsolete way to teach children. It's abusive, and it doesn't work. Not even as a "last resort" is it justified--it's less effective than other techniques that don't hurt, and help more. But some people seem to think that the more desperate they are, the more extreme the technique, the more likely it is to work--even when that's not true.

So if someone does the same thing on eight different threads it is wrong to conclude that they will do the same thing on the ninth thread?

At what point is it okay to say "I can no longer give the benefit of the doubt?"

I like the fact that one mother said "How's about TALKING to my child about his problems?" and the school's reply was "Oh, we don't do that here".

Can't imagine a better name for the place. It IS "Rot[t]en".

I had never heard of that place. I opened their web site, it was enough. Phrases like "behavior modification programs" or "reducing [the] inappropriate behaviors" just make me cringe. Here is my theory :
- Any medical condition can be defined by suffering and/or degradation of the functions of the organism.
- Any form of healing or therapy can be defined as an activity with the goal of relieving suffering and/or restoring the organism to his healthy functioning.

Those simple definitions seem quite universal to me ; they work for things as diverse as flu, depression, AIDS, bruises, bad cough and ASDs. You treat flu, bruises and bad cough so the body is healthy again and the sick person doesn't suffer. You can't cure AIDS but you would if you could, instead you relieve the pain and you try to help the organism cope with it by helping it hold on with drugs. You treat depression with therapy and/or medication and try to relieve the mental pain and help the person sort out the problems which made him make a depression. You don't "cure" autism since the organism is not "degraded" as much as simply working in a different way, but you help affected people live with it and avoid the pain resulting from living in an alien environment.

So in my eyes, any place that overtly focus on things like "inappropriate behaviors" and not on taking care of patients just can't claim to be doing any actual healthcare or medicine work.

Yes. Autism isn't an "out of balance" sort of medical condition like the flu is--that is, there's no healthy state to return to; the autistic person is a healthy autistic person, not a sick neurotypical, because they have been autistic from the beginning. It's kind of like how a short person is a healthy short person, not a sick tall person--but they might still need a step stool to reach the top shelf.

Schools and hospitals should not focus on making an autistic child 'easier to handle' or 'cooperative', or making them look more NT without improving their ability to cope with the NT world--or refusing to teach useful coping strategies because they make the child look less NT.

BTW, we seem to be focusing on children here, but autistic adults are vulnerable too, and some people at the JRC aren't children. For autistic adults there's less treatment available, but sometimes that's a blessing in disguise, considering the useless and worse-than-useless treatment that many autistics are subjected to.

The JRC is just the highly-visible tip of the iceberg. If it were just one institution with a particularly flashy and well-known form of abuse, that would be an easy problem to solve, but they're not; there are other schools and institutions, group homes, even nursing homes and special education classrooms, that are just as bad; probably some are even worse. Closing the JRC can't solve the problem, but I certainly wouldn't object to it if it could be done--it would at least give the forty-some students there another chance to find a place where they might be treated with respect.

If we did succeed in shutting them--or any other abusive institution--down, that would only be the beginning of the job. There would be students and patients who would need a place to go. Some institutions are bad enough that even being homeless is preferable, but I certainly wouldn't want to be homeless, especially while probably recovering from the psychological effects of institutionalization. We'd have to find them places where they would be listened to, and perhaps even taught that it's okay for them to say what's on their minds. Some would be safe at home with family; others wouldn't. Some don't have family. It's a big job and a messy one, though that doesn't mean it's not worth it.

It's a huge job. Institutional reform is a necessary thing, but it won't be easy or quick.

The alternative - allowing it to continue as-is - is not particularly desirable after all.

Like it or not, people use cognitive shortcuts. Things like "institutional abuse of autistic people" are big, complex topics, and it's hard to think of all of it at once. We instinctively attach a handle to big topics, so we can mentally pick up the topic by the handle. That's why the President becomes a symbol for the entire government; we can talk about this familiar, noteworthy individual, rather than a big faceless web of bureaucracy and politics.

We need to be able to think of the whole topic, and we need to be aware that it is a complex topic. But because it is hard to think in terms of large numbers of people, we use the JRC as the face of the problem, kind of the way people use an image of a single starving child as the face of a famine. Statistics are useful and necessary, but remember your roots--it hasn't been long since we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. We're not used to thinking of more than about a hundred people at a time, and this is a problem that definitely involves much more than a hundred people.

Not that this means the JRC is only a symbol--it's one of many abusive situations in which an autistic or developmentally disabled person might land, and it's worth fighting.

The only risk I see with using the JRC as a symbol of a bigger problem is if people don't realize that that's what we're doing and assume that the problem is solved when we shut the place down--kind of the way people might blame the President for something the government in general is doing. Shutting down the JRC will be a victory, sure, but to really solve the problem it'll need to be only one of many victories, and there'll be a lot of boring logistical work to do.

I was driving through southern connecticut with my family recently and listening to contemporary rock stations to keep my daughter happy.

Suddenly an ad came on for the JRC. They were saying what a great place it was for kids with ADHD, bipolar, depression... PTSD. It made me very sad to think of the kids who will be hurt there.

My mental process when I hear of this place and read accounts from former inmates and staff is to remember a time when I was younger and felt that I was often alone in a hostile world. I think of my son and the idea that some people might think he could be improved somehow by this "aversive conditioning" I think of other people I know and imagine them being subjected to painful attacks by people in authority.

I suppose part of my reaction has to do with my own memories of abuse. In some way, when I see that others are being treated this way it reminds me of those situations when I was powerless and mistreated. These memories are a source of incredible rage and perhaps some of that gets attached to the people I read of at JRC who abuse their authority.

For what it's worth, I think skinnerian behaviorism is idiotic in its extreme reductionism. It is offensive to my concept of humanity and the framework for my ethics.

I am not sure that exploring my own thought processes about the JRC and the terrible things they do is all that important. I think there are objective reasons to regard what they do as morally wrong and unacceptable. I hope legal means can be found to shut them down. I believe that alternatives can be found for those who would be treated there.

I have done a bit of research into the place and will share that here, if appropriate. I am curious to read the views of others on this (in my view) evil institution and the immoral theory behind their practices.