disorderly conduct:
...about 230 "clients" - full-time students at the Rotenberg Center - who are mentally retarded, developmentally disabled with diseases like autism, or have been diagnosed with ailments such as depression, schizophrenia, or conduct disorder.Jarrett Murphy/village voice 10.Oct.06
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One thing you won't see at the center is traditional psychological counseling. While students do meet with clinicians, there are no regular appointments or group therapy. School literature states that counseling is done "as needed," but not when it could be seen as a reward for bad behavior, and adds: "The purpose of the counseling is to enhance the student's cooperation with, and progress within the program."
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In a few cases where a student is suspected of being capable of an extremely dangerous but infrequent behavior, the staff at Rotenberg won't wait for him to try it. They will exhort him to do it, and then punish him.Even the people watching the screens are themselves on camera.
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Michael P. Flammia, the lawyer for Rotenberg, defended the practice in an interview.Leslie Kaufman/NYT 25.Dec.07
“People want to believe positive interventions work even in the most extreme cases,” he said. “If they did, that is all we would use. Many of these kids come in on massive dosages of antipsychotic drugs, so doped up that they are almost comatose. We get them off drugs and give their parents something very important: hope.”
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...encourages employees to file anonymous reports about their coworkers’ lapses.-
The Milgram joystick. It seems pretty obvious that technicians like B.F. Skinner and his disciples have some kind of autism-like disease, its cause likely as complex as its manifestation. But that there's something wrong with them can't be denied. But they don't think so, and they serve a purpose. It's like arguing with a different species to confront them.
Saying it gives "hope" to the parents is placed against accusations of inhuman behavior as a rebuttal without being a response. This is a common strategy for the immoral - rather than justify the means let the outcome do it. That same logical road follows the killing of the same "clients" as it would bring the parents "relief". Well, possibly some grief too, but relief. There should be some grief here, as well.
The problem's traceable right back through the electrodes. The values and norms of the skeins of human culture that program the behaviorists, who then program the patients to a template of right living that isn't right at all.
It isn't all black and white and there are a few chilling testimonies of other last resorts for the socially disabled, warehouses of the dysfunctional and dangerous. Somebody's got to deal with it all, and it takes more money and more heart than most people have, and even then. But this is not the way to go.
What's exposed is the flaw in the passive morality that wants everyone to live happily ever after, but doesn't want to expend the energy necessary for that vast and bizarrely unnatural undertaking. So the less fit slip through the cracks on down to where there's fewer and fewer choices and these fiendish behaviorists have a freer hand.
And that ghastly ominous "conduct disorder". That's exactly where you'll find kids who can't speak their wounds. It says right there they get kids with "conduct disorder" and it says right there they don't have traditional "counseling". How much genuine affection do you think they see, or get?
Probably a lot of the clients are hopeless cases. But what the Rotenberger Center's doing can't be justified. Not to a human being. Not to someone whose heart and mind are still connected.
Helen Keller would be appalled, and outraged.
American boot camps for rebellious teenagers are a different brand of the same snake oil, and those places still make bank off desperate parents. Because they get results, at least temporarily - in the short term.
Results. Nothing else works.
It's still wrong.
