Autistic man's care renews shocking debate

updated 6:49 p.m. ET March 14, 2007

CHICAGO - Bradley Bernstein’s parents say an electric cattle prod is the only thing that stops him from banging his head and violently punching his eyes, nearly blinding himself.

The Illinois couple’s fight to continue shock treatment on their severely autistic 48-year-old son and the uproar over a Massachusetts school that uses similar treatment, have pulled back the curtain on this extreme form of behavior modification. Critics call it outmoded, barbaric and unethical.

Even a leading supporter of the technique, Harvard-educated psychologist Matthew Israel, acknowledges, “The natural reaction is to be horrified.”

“It always has been very controversial and is not politically correct, and if you want to advance your career, you try to stay away from it,” said Israel, founder and director of the Judge Rotenberg Center, a residential school in Canton, Mass. The institution houses children and adults with autism, mental retardation and other behavioral and psychiatric disorders.

The school is under legislative and regulatory scrutiny for routinely using skin shocks on about half its 230 students to stop serious behavior problems, including self-injury.

Electric shocks and other painful or unpleasant treatments known as “aversive conditioning” were accepted more a generation ago. But mainstream psychiatry relies on new drugs and other methods that have proven effective.

Using this form of shock therapy is “cruel and unusual punishment,” said Dr. Louis Kraus, an associate professor of psychiatry at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center. “The concept of doing that is frightening.”

Some states, including Illinois last year, have banned or severely restricted use of electric shocks in mental health treatment.

Backpack 'decelerator'
But Israel favors the technique over psychiatric drugs that he says make students too drowsy to learn and says most critics “have never seen children who have blinded themselves, or banged their head to the point of brain injury, or bit a hole in their cheek.”

Israel developed a device he calls a graduated electronic decelerator. It’s carried in backpacks students at his school wear, and elicits shocks through electrodes strapped on their arms and legs.

“The beauty of it is there’s no side effects,” Israel said. “It’s a temporary painful experience for two seconds.”

M. Spencer Green / AP Fran and Robert Bernstein, parents of Bradley Bernstein.

His school’s techniques are the subject of a bill pending in the Massachusetts Legislature and complaints including a lawsuit by a New York mother who says the shocks traumatized her now 18-year-old son.

The device used on Bradley Bernstein is a cattle prod. It used to be a long electrified rod, but the newer model is a handheld shocker about the size of a portable phone, with two short metal prongs.

Fran Bernstein, his mother, says it delivers a shock about as painful as a bee sting. Critics say it’s considerably stronger, akin to sticking a finger in an electric socket.

Often just seeing the device was enough to make Bradley stop hurting himself, Mrs. Bernstein said.

Bradley Bernstein only says a few words and sometimes hurts himself in frustration or opposition to his caretakers’ demands, his mother said. He is allergic to several drugs that could calm his behavior, she said.

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