State to catalog "aversive therapies" -- like shocking and denying sleep -- special schools try with troubled kids

By RICK KARLIN, Capitol bureau
First published: Tuesday, May 16, 2006

The state Education Department is surveying dozens of schools across the state and elsewhere in an effort to catalog "aversive therapies" -- painful, potentially harmful practices -- that are used on emotionally and psychologically disturbed youngsters.

The survey comes as the Board of Regents later this month is expected to start talking about guidelines for what kinds of therapies should be acceptable for schools to use to control and help change the behavior of such kids.
 

New York state and local districts spend millions of dollars annually to send troubled children to special schools, many of which are residential and use a variety of psychological and other methods to treat youngsters.

The survey cites as examples a variety of aversive methods, including hitting, slapping, pinching, kicking, hurling, using painful or intrusive sprays or inhalants, and withholding sleep, shelter, bedding or bathroom facilities.

It also lists chemical restraints and electric shock as therapies these special schools may be using.

It's not yet clear to what extent such techniques are used, because results of the survey still are being compiled, said Education Department spokesman Jonathan Burman.

The survey was prompted by complaints earlier this year that New York students who were sent to the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., were subjected to electric shocks when they misbehaved or hurt themselves. The shocks came from a backpack they were made to wear.

Rotenberg, a residential center for troubled youngsters with psychiatric or emotional disorders or for those with autism, has about 170 students from New York.

In addition to prompting the Education Department -- which has no prohibitions against aversive therapy -- to look at the issue, Sen. Marty Golden, R-Brooklyn, sponsored legislation that would ban such therapies. That measure is on hold, awaiting the Regents' findings, said Golden.

"There is still an open dialogue going back and forth on this," Golden said Monday after a meeting attended by parents and treatment experts to discuss the legislation.

The Rotenberg Center provides a case study on the difficulty of treating children with disorders such as autism. Some of the youngsters sent there constantly hit or bite themselves, or are so out of control that no other residential schools would take them.

"Their kids have been rejected from every program they applied to," said Ed Wasserman, a lobbyist for the Rotenberg Center.

"No New York schools would take him," agreed Trisha Moeder of Schenectady, whose 16-year-old autistic son is at Rotenberg Center, where he receives the shock therapy. Moeder likened it to a bee sting on the surface of the skin.
 

"It seems to be working," she said, adding that the treatment is not electroshock therapy in which the brain receives heavy electric shocks as depicted in the film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

"If I thought my child was being abused, I would go up there immediately and take him out," she said.

Still, Rotenberg Center has been criticized for having too many kids receiving the therapy.

According to the state Education Department, New York state sends more kids than any other state to out-of-state facilities. About 1,000 New York youngsters go to special schools outside New York, at a cost of about $170 million a year.

Even then, treatments for disorders such as severe autism aren't adequately regulated or standardized, said Kristin Christodulu, director of the Center for Autism and Related Disabilities at the University at Albany.

"There's not a lot of consistency," she said.