Hundreds protest electro-shock therapy at Judge Rotenberg Center

CANTON, Mass. - A large protest has ended at a local facility which uses a controversial form of electro-shock therapy.

At one point 200 demonstrators, many in wheelchairs, were at the Judge Rotenberg Educational center in Canton.

The protest was organized by a group called ADAPT, and those who attended held signs and blocked access to the facility.

“You see things like this in a Halloween House of Horrors, but they are the reality in JRC all year long,” said Nancy Hyson-Houghton, an organizer with ADAPT’s Massachusetts chapter. “Disabled people shouldn't be locked away in the JRC and similar institutions because they can’t get the services and supports they need to stay at home.  Disabled people don’t deserve to be tormented.  It’s time to stop the torture and free our people!”

Back in April, the food and drug administration proposed a ban on the use of electric stimulation devices to treat patients who have aggressive behavior or who injure themselves.

The Judge Rotenberg Center is the only place in the country that uses the treatment.

"We were dismayed by the tactics taken by these protestors. They aggressively tried to enter our school buildings and for several hours made it impossible to transport the students we serve home so they could relax after their classes and enjoy their dinner together in the homes they live in, in area neighborhoods,” a statement from the center said.

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Hundreds protest electro-shock therapy at Judge Rotenberg Center

Tonight on T.S. Radio: Ted Chabasinski: Barbaric Electroshock Still Used on Adults, Children

Ted Chabasinski is an attorney and human rights activist in Berkeley, California. In 1944, as a 6-year-old boy so intellectually gifted he jumped from first grade to third he was taken from his foster home in the Bronx to New York’s Bellevue Hospital where he was pronounced “schizophrenic”, because his mother had been labelled “schizophrenic”. There he began a series of 20 electro-convulsive shock treatments. The boy, Ted Chabasinski, was one of hundreds of children used in ECT experiments. Tests since condemned as barbaric. He remained an inmate in a state psychiatric hospital until the age of seventeen. Chabasinski survived and became active in the civil rights movement and ultimately an attorney.

Chabasinski led a successful effort to ban ECT in the city of Berkeley, California, in 1982, which voters overwhelmingly passed, only to be overturned by well-funded psychiatric interests.

In January 2007 Chabasinski acted as the attorney for the late psychiatric survivor activist and author Judi Chamberlain, the medical journalist and author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, Robert Whitaker, and the director of MindFreedom International David Oaks in opposing a motion by Eli Lilly to extend an injunction to conceal documents that revealed that the company had known for the previous decade of the potentially lethal effects of Zyprexa ( an antipsychotic )and had engaged in an illegal off-label marketing campaign.

As a patients’ rights lawyer, Chabasinski continues to champion human rights, and writes, speaks, and blogs on issues of individual rights and freedoms.

Most recently, he has organized an International Day of Protest Against Shock Treatment, being held on May 16, 2015. There will be demonstrations in many countries and cities around the world.

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