Shock and Au

Danger High Voltage

Waves have gone through the Autistic community this week as electric shock of disabled adults, and more appallingly, children has been deemed legal by a US appeals court. Here’s a bit of backstory. Recently, in the US, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) had banned the use of a device called the Graduated Electronic Decelerator (GED) that is commonly used at the Judge Rotenburg Educational Center on Autistics of all ages to shock them into obedience. This week the ban was overturned in court and lifted. The use of this dreadful device is continuing at Rotenberg in Canton, Massachusetts. 

Now while I am tempted to go on a rant on “How in the world is shocking someone considered education?”, I am resisting, for now. Before I get to that I’m addressing some misnomers that are going around about the use of electricity and it’s validity in medicine. Let’s start with the good stuff that can be done with electricity in medicine!

It’s Aliiiiive!

Electricity sounds scary as a medical treatment however it does have some useful applications. I’ve seen a few that are mislabeling the GED as Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) but it’s not. ECT is a powerful emergency or last resort type of treatment for those with severe and untreatable depression and it has up to a 90% success rate. I know a small handful of people that have had ECT. They are forever grateful for their ECT treatment and how it relieved them from their debilitating depression. ECT is done with a patient’s consent under a doctor’s supervision. 

The patient is sedated with general anesthesia and given muscle relaxers to prevent convulsions, their vital signs are monitored during the procedure. An electric current is applied to the patient’s temples via electrode until the doctor sees the patient’s fingers and toes twitch. This let’s the doctor know the treatment is now complete. While no one knows exactly how ECT works, it works! Theories from changing the polarization of the brain to the stimulation of neurotransmitters exist but no one has pinned down what goes on in the brain during the procedure that alleviates depression. ECT has saved lives and, when performed under general anesthesia, is a humane and effective treatment. 

Another application of electricity in medicine is the defibrillator. The Automated External Defibrillator (AED) can be found in many public places like malls and in airports. The AED is an emergency tool that is used in the event that someone is experiencing sudden cardiac arrest. 

The AED electrodes are applied to the chest and can diagnose and treat or prompt the user to treat the heart by administering an electric shock to the heart to get it beating probably again. The AED is a modern miracle and has saved lives. It can be used by both the average person and trained professional to stabilize a situation until help arrives or until they can get the patient to the hospital. The AED is another application of electricity that is relevant in medicine. 

I do acknowledge that these two treatments are while people are unconscious and if I am to continue on to make my point I need to have some experience in the matter. Do I have any experience in medicinal use of electricity? Why, yes, I do! I have been fully conscious while given a shock and it wasn’t pleasant. Thankfully it wasn’t an emergency or a GED that I experienced! Instead it was a test that read my nerves to diagnose Peripheral Neuropathy called an Electromyography (EMG).

During the Electromyography my doctor placed an electrode in the form of a needle into my upper calf then he shocked my foot. The needle would read the shock as it traveled up my leg and tell the doctor how much of the electricity was making it through my nerves. The doctor said it would be a little sting or pinch or other inadequate saying they use to not tell you it’s really going to hurt. The shock hurt my toes, my foot, and made all the muscles in my leg jump. It was extremely unpleasant and my leg was sore for that day.

I’ll make it hurt!

The sensation was stronger than the one you get when you scuff your feet on the carpet and then touch the door knob. It was stronger than the static in the blanket. Yet, I have a feeling that the medically sound shock to my foot wasn’t as strong as the aversive called the GED that is being used to torture disabled people into submission in school. They say it feels like a bee sting, have you ever been stung by a bee? It is painful!

I’d like to point out that Rotenberg is not a medical establishment as it claims to be a “school” and a place of “education”. It’s the only school in the United States to use shock treatment on disabled adults and children alike. The GED is worn by the victim while the control for the device remains in possession of the “teacher”. When the so-called “student” does something that the teacher disapproves of, the teacher then shocks the pupil until the pupil complies with the demand. These demands are as petty as not taking your coat off within an acceptable amount of time which is decided on by said teacher. Students are even shocked for crying because they were shocked. Self-stimulatory Behavior, which enables Autistics to produce necessary neurotransmitters to process the environment and release anxiety in the body, is punished by shock. This is not medicine, this is not education. It’s senseless abuse and it should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. The GED needs to be recognized as such under the Constitution. 

There is no medical or educational application for the GED when there are more humane ways to help someone that is disabled. Care, Patience, Time, Repetition, Respect, and many other methods exist to teach. The GED does not teach nor treat, the GED scares people making them live in fear of doing the most human thing of all and that is making mistakes. No one should be punished for that. 

More on: 

GED (Graduated Electronic Decelerator)

ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy)

AED (Automated External Defibrillator)  

EMG (Electromyography)

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Till Death Do Us Part

Photo by Josh Willink on Pexels.com

Today, I am compelled to the keyboard with a heavy heart. We once again have “mercy killing in the name of love”. A mother, to use the term loosely, killed her son because she was stressed and overwhelmed by his Autism. In the past years, there have been increased news reports of parents killing their Autistic children. Why?

Now I’m not one to simply say it’s just an increase in occurrence, just like I’m not one to believe that “compassion murders” haven’t happened before now. They always have happened but the reported frequency has been increasing in recent years. I would like to say this is because we have more awareness of this insidious behavior but the responses that have always been the same from the ableist, typical, non-disability crowd have proved otherwise. That is overwhelming compassion for the murder(s) because they had it hard as a parent or caregiver. Nevermind the fact that the disabled person is the victim of abled egoism and homicide! Oh, think of the horror to perish at the hands of the only person you trust on the planet! The general public romanticizes unsolicited mercy killings, but at what cost?

In a very tongue in cheek way, I am going to say it’s my Autistic Empathy that reasons that when a person engages in consenting acts of sex with the intent to reproduce, the lack of concern if they are to conceive offspring because they feel that they are ready to be parents or even just accepting you are pregnant and choose to keep the pregnancy, you enter a covenant with the child/ren that you have conceived (or adopted in some cases). It’s an eternal agreement with nature and whatever higher power you may believe in, whether moral, ethical, the universe, or religion, that you help that child thrive. In times where the child is born disabled, it’s a covenant that we all should honor until we leave this Earth.

We have an entire section of society that frowns on terminating viable pregnancies even if there is a disability found prior to birth, however, this pro-life outrage is often absent in the wake of a mercy killing. If one is not for terminating a pregnancy on the basis that it is still a human why are we okay with killing a postnatal 10-year-old with a disability? The answer is simple and can be explained with the boiled frog metaphor.

A “Cliff Note Explanation” for those who did not click the link! There is a myth, or fable if you prefer, that if you put a frog into a pot of hot water then that frog will jump, fight, and try to flee for its life but you put a frog in a pot of frog friendly tempered water and gradually heat it up the frog will allow itself to be cooked to death.

This is exactly what is happening with society in regard to mercy killings! We relate and feel bad for the first one we heard that made national news, often it’s a romantic expose on a husband that killed his wife “out of love” and not being able “to see her suffer”. The next one, well, it’s not as bad as the first or it may be worse than the first, either way, you reason, they were under stress as well and people act out of character under stress. You understand how someone would kill an adult child that was afflicted such as theirs was. The disabled adult is in a better place now. Soon, we learn of another carer snapping under duress and murdering a loved one, a child, and we feel for them, relate, empathize. You reason that the other two were acceptable and so this is as well. You can see yourself in their position and your heart aches for them, that they had to make that decision.

Years, go by and we keep hearing of these heart wrenching decisions. All of the abled society deems it necessary that these are acceptable murders that should be forgiven. You’re consider yourself pro-life and against abortion and assisted suicide but thoughts turn to the disabled in your own family. The last time you attended a March for *Insert Hypocritical Cause Here* or convention your Autistic child made it impossible to be there. They were clearly in extreme distress and you just “can’t watch them suffer anymore”. Instead of doing what is rational and logical in the name of love which is adapting to them being in your life by adjusting your lifestyle to enable them to thrive, your mind turns to murder for mercy. You’re a martyr in your plight and God and society would understand! You focus on your perception of quality life, you don’t consider that this person, this human that loves you and trusts you to cherish them and help them live may not even perceive themselves as in need of death to escape. All they know is that when you enter the room their heart soars. 

I will end this entry there because without saying the people that have allowed themselves to be peer pressured into seeing the murder of the disabled as acceptable are incorrigible monsters. We may have a disability but at least we aren’t morally inept.

Until Death Do Us Part may we all join hands and enable each and every human to survive regardless of life circumstances.