FDA banning use of electric shock devices on students

In a rare and sweeping decision, the Food and Drug Administration announced last week that it was banning the use of electric shock devices to correct self-harming or aggressive behavior.

The practice presents “an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury,” the agency said in a statement Wednesday.

The ban is national, but it is targeted at a single school: the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Massachusetts, which serves students — both children and adults — who have intellectual disabilities or behavioral, emotional or psychiatric problems.

It appears to be the only school in the United States that uses painful electric shocks to discipline students, and the practice has been in place there for decades.

Those students who have been approved by a court to receive the treatment wear a backpack with a battery inside. It has protruding wires that can deliver shocks to the skin when triggered by an employee at the school.

The practice was meant to condition the behavior of students by causing pain when they acted in ways that endangered themselves or others.

“Evidence indicates a number of significant psychological and physical risks are associated with the use of these devices, including worsening of underlying symptoms, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, pain, burns and tissue damage,” the FDA’s statement said. “In addition, many people who are exposed to these devices have intellectual or developmental disabilities that make it difficult to communicate their pain.”

The decision was a culmination of more than a decade of legal battles between the school and its critics, who argued that the electric shock devices were administered excessively and caused lasting damage.

Some of the students’ relatives have defended the practice — saying that it worked to change students’ behavior when nothing else could — and denounced the FDA’s decision.

Louisa Goldberg, 66, said that her son, Andrew Goldberg, 39, had brain damage and epilepsy, and that he showed severe aggression as a teenager. There were violent episodes, trips to the hospital, and psychotropic medications that left him sluggish.

His mother said he was placed in physical restraints for hours at a time. “His life was torture,” she said.

Andrew Goldberg went to live at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center at age 19 and began wearing an electric shock device. Louisa Goldberg said her son would receive two-second shocks as part of a broader treatment plan. He has since been weaned off the device and can do things he could not do before, like go to the movies.

“This treatment works, and I will stand by it, and I will fight for it,” she said.

In a statement on Thursday, the school said that the FDA had “made a decision based on politics, not facts, to deny this lifesaving, court-approved treatment.”

The FDA rarely bans devices, and this decision has been in the works since at least 2018.