Israel is a behaviourist who fits electrodes to the arms, legs and torsos of resistant autistic children — misbehaviour earns a painful electric shock. Typically, the Nine reporter was too witless to do enough research (and we’re talking Googling the guy’s name, for goodness sake) to discover that Israel’s practice isn’t “new” at all.

As Mother Jones reported this week in a story headed Why Can’t Massachusetts Shut Matthew Israel Down? , he has been shocking autistic, and more recently Asperger, children for at least 17 years.

In the same issue of the magazine he gave an occasionally disturbing interview to Jennifer Gonnerman.

Autism Diva had an extensive post on Israel earlier this year, and an Australian blogger with a child on the autistic spectrum responds to the Nine report.

Last year the Boston Globe covered a report by New York City education officials who visited Israel’s “school”:

The report, based in part on an inspection last month of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, portrayed a school in which most staff lack training to handle the students and seem more focused on punishing bad behavior than encouraging good acts.

The investigators said some forms of discipline, such as a device that delivers shocks at timed intervals, appear to violate federal safety regulations, and students live in an atmosphere of “pervasive fears and anxieties.” ….

There have been increasing allegations of abuse at the Rotenberg Center in recent months.

They include several assertions that students have been badly burned by the shock devices, known as graduated electronic decelerators. The Massachusetts Disabled Persons Protection Commission has received 22 allegations of abuse at the school since January, including 12 that involve injuries. Rotenberg officials have steadfastly denied the charges, but commission officials say that at least two have been substantiated.

The full report is here. Remarkably, the centre is taxpayer-funded.

The use of electric shocks as an “aversive” factor dates back to the 1960s, when one of the “fathers” of ABA therapy Ole Ivar Lovass (like Israel, a disciple of B.F. Skinner) used electrodes in therapy for autistic children. The practice was reported in a 1965 Life magazine article, Screams, Slaps & Love: A surprising, shocking treatment helps far-gone mental cripples.

It plays no part in the modern ABA therapy practiced in New Zealand.

And in case you wondering how strong these shocks are, here’s a video:

I was fortunate enough to have an excellent speech language therapist for a few short months when my son was 3 years old. She was constantly telling me that the way forward was not through intensive therapies and trying to hammer home ‘life skills’ but through our everyday support and interaction with our son and modelling the behaviour and language he needed to learn. She impressed to me that I must not ‘wear myself out’ with trying to find a cure or by dragging my son here and there for different therapies and medicines.

This approach has paid off well for our son. Instead of dragging him off to therapies he neither enjoyed or wanted to go to, we have done some reading and spent the time with him ourselves. We have included what we have learned into our everyday lives and this has done wonders for him. It has also taken the intensity out of it for all of us and hasn’t really cost us much except for the cost of a few excellent books.

It has always been my gut feeling that this has been the right approach for us. He didn’t want to be dragged from pillar to post to look for a cure, he wanted to be accepted as he was and allowed to make progress as he could and was able, and for us to rejoice in that.

We didn’t go hard out with all the advice in the books either, we read them and then made sensible and realistic choices about what we could incorporate naturally and easily into our lives so that none of us found it stressful. Nor did quit jobs or commitments to do them intensively either. This way the ‘therapies’ came easily to us all. As our son has made improvements we have changed or updated what we do to suit where he is at. This approach has been a great success.

In 2005 we did the excellent Early Bird course through Autism NZ and were thrilled to discover there was nothing new they could offer us because of the reading we had done, and that in fact we were doing all the right things with our son already.

Our son is mildly autistic with significant speech/language delays. He is adorable, really happy, low key, loving and intelligent. We are happy to embrace that about him and to let him be him. Without heavy duty expectations placed upon him due to expensive therapies he has been able to constantly surprise us – at his own pace.

Despite the great improvements he has made in his own time, I have imagined a parallel life where we did go to all the therapies and remortgaged the house to pay to do so, and I am guilty of imagining him being so much further along, so this article has taken that feeling of guilt away from me and really confirmed what I always knew to be true of my son and our family and the choices we have made.

I understand that everyone is different and has found different ways have worked for them, but this is our success story and I hope that it may be an inspiration to others who just don’t know what to do next.

The books we have found to be the most useful are:

More Than Words from the Hanen program – available directly from Hanen or from Amazon.

Engaging Autism by Stanley Greenspan also available from Amazon.