A Graduated Electronic Decelerator (GED) delivers electric shocks as punishment to a person in order to control his or her behavior. The device was created by Matthew Israel, the founder of the Judge Rotenberg Center, as part of his behavior modification “utopia” school for children in Canton, MA.

     After an investigation into the device by  independent human rights experts working for the United Nations, the U.N. human rights agency condemned the use of Israel’s GED as “torture.”

     In 2011 the FDA ordered the Judge Rotenberg Center to stop using the GEDs because they were not FDA approved. Matthew Israel ignored that order and continued using the devices on his residents until the FDA finally and officially banned their use for behavior modification in 2020. The center was the only institution in the country using the GED for its harsh aversion therapy protocol.

     The Rotenberg Center has been a controversial institution for its ongoing behavior modification programs that include punishments of food deprivation, long term restraints, and sensory deprivation to control its young residents’ behavior, as well as the GED electroshocks.

     The GED was used on residents as young as seven or eight years old and reports have surfaced of children receiving as many as seventy-seven shocks at a time. GED  devices were worn in the daytime, during sleep, and even during showers, and shocks were administered at any of those times to the resident youth there, diagnosed with severe emotional and behavioral disorders or developmental disabilities.

     A 2006 report by the New York State Education Department found that the shock device was regularly used for minor infractions such as failing to be neat, rapping one’s foot around the leg of a chair, stopping work for more than ten seconds, using the  bathroom without permission, urinating on oneself after being refused the right to use the  bathroom, and screaming while being shocked.

     Six residents have died at the center for other reasons since it was founded in 1971. Human rights advocates and autism and disability support organizations have tried unsuccessfully to shut down the center for decades. A year after the FDA banned its GED use, a federal appeals court overturned the ban, saying that the FDA had to ban the device altogether or not all, referencing the 2020 FDA ban’s limit to aversion behavior modification therapy alone.

     In 2022 the United States Congress then amended the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to expand the FDA’s authority to ban such devices. The FDA has stated that “the risks presented by electric shock devices are both psychological (including suffering) and physical (including pain), each having a complex relationship with the electrical parameters of the shock.

     The FDA is now preparing its case to again ban them, but still only for their use in controlling self-injurious or aggressive behavior. The FDA is not proposing to ban electric shock devices currently used for other “therapeutic” purposes, such as smoking cessation, obesity,  alcoholism, gambling, anger issues, and other unwanted lifestyle behaviors.

     The question then becomes, if there are “risks presented by electric shock devices” which are both “psychological” and “physical,” per the FDA, why is the use of these devices to be permitted anywhere at all?

     Even low voltage, electric shock collars for animals are banned in many European countries because of the cruelty of their use.

     And an even greater question arises, as well. If these electric shock devices are so harmful — even with relatively low voltage electric shocks — why is electroshock therapy not also banned when its electrical shock can be as high as four hundred volts?

     Apparently, per the FDA, if a “disorder” is listed in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, it’s fair treatment for electroshock as a legal “therapy.”