In The Politics of Autism, I write:
For those who remain at larger residential institutions, the horrors of yesteryear have generally ended. In 2012, however, a ten-year-old video surfaced, showing disturbing image of an electric shock device at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton Massachusetts. Staffers tied one student to a restraint board and shocked him 31 times over seven hours, ignoring his screamed pleas to stop. The Rotenberg Center is the only one in the nation that admits to using electric shocks on people with developmental disabilities, including autism. Center officials said that they had stopped using restraint boards but insisted that shocks were necessary in extreme cases to prevent officials insist the shock program is a last resort that prevents people with severe disorders from hurting themselves or others.
A coalition of doctors, lawmakers and advocates for people with autism has spent more than a decade trying to ban a medical device that is used to deliver painful electric jolts to people with severe neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Last year, a federal ban on the devices finally seemed imminent. But the upheaval sweeping the federal government during the Trump administration’s early months could further delay a resolution, allowing continued use of the controversial devices.
Wide-ranging cutbacks have been announced at federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, whose medical devices section had been working on the lengthy and convoluted process of implementing a ban.
Regulators determined that the jolts, delivered through electrodes strapped to a patient’s arms and legs, caused long-term harm and should no longer be used. Clinicians and relatives of residents at a treatment facility outside Boston defend the use of the devices, calling them a last resort for some of the facility’s most extreme cases.
The uncertainty over the devices’ fate has been compounded by President Trump’s chief health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has falsely linked autism with childhood vaccines. He recently called autism a preventable epidemic that destroys families and prevents people from living a full life, a characterization described as dehumanizing by many autistic people.
