Shock Treatment

At the Judge Rotenberg Center, a private boarding school for special-education students in Canton, Massachusetts, kids with mental disabilities and mental illness (like schizophrenia and autism) get electrically shocked when they misbehave:

The only thing that sets these students apart from kids at any other school in America aside from their special-ed designation is the electric wires running from their backpacks to their wrists. Each wire connects to a silver-dollar-sized metal disk strapped with a cloth band to the student's wrist, forearm, abdomen, thigh, or foot. Inside each student's backpack is a battery and a generator, both about the size of a VHS cassette. Each generator is uniquely coded to a single keychain transmitter kept in a clear plastic box labeled with the student's name. Staff members dressed neatly in ties and green aprons keep the boxes hooked to their belts, and their eyes trained on the students' behavior. They stand ready, if they witness a behavior they've been told to target, to flip open the box, press the button, and deliver a painful two-second electrical shock into the student at the end of the wire.

Read the whole article. Personally, I think this is behaviorism gone horribly wrong, the logic of Skinner taken to its grotesque extreme. And you know what the worst part is? This kind of aversive training often works. In fact, the shock therapy reduces problem behaviors by 95 percent. Like rats in a cage, these disabled children can be "helped" by shocks that are increasingly powerful, so they never get used to them.

Here is how the Judge Rotenberg Center describes their shock treatment (aka GED):

The GED is a device that produces a temporary, painful (but harmless) skin-sting that is produced by passing electric current through a small area on the surface of the skin, such as on the arm or leg, for 2 seconds. It is applied as a decelerative consequence, each time a pre-specified problem behavior is shown. The stimulation is comparable to a 2-second bee sting.