The Standard Review

Political Prisoners Accused of Incompetence

Most of the people institutionalized in the United States have fallen victim to unfair rules that is the result of the corporate corruption in our political system.

This influences our law enforcement and judicial system in making determinations about our behavior to be based more on how what we do is profitable to corporations or not rather than a based on a common public view of ethics and morality.

Now that psychology is an industry that can use the law to demand people in the US to take mind altering substances and attend particular religious services, there is no separation between church and state. Therefore, class and your potential as a consumer is what determines your competence, character, and legal rights.

It is too often assumed that people who are part of what society considers a lower class are that way pursuant to being undisciplined, uneducated, and uncooperative. It is considered too rarely what people of a higher class are disciplined and educated to do and whom they are cooperating with.

Because psychology is such a large industry that is beholden to so many other industries as well as being so tied to our law enforcement, judicial system, and every aspect of a corrupt political system it can only further corrupt the relationship between these aspects of government and the disenfranchised public.

Psychology is in the business of defining character and competence, and they have almost no way to differentiate between the two.


The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) was established in 1992 by Congress as part of a reorganization of the Federal administration of mental health services. This did nothing to change the characterization and stereotype of recreational drug users. How could it? In order to do that they would have to admit that what are named the drug wars by the federal government are actually a way to enforce systematized oppression.

Instead, by joining 12 step programs, group therapy, anger management, etc. people diagnosed with anxiety depression and anything else on the ever-expanding DSM is also characterized as that of a recreational drug user. Since drug users are penalized in such a similar way as drug dealers and drug dealers are considered to be tied to terrorism, the original goal of drugging (using state sponsored drugs) and incarcerating the mentally ill to protect the valued public is furthered by the unreasonable assumptions of association.

The judicial system can demand the use of these psychotropic drugs produced by the major pharmaceutical companies who also have a big influence on the laws. They can demand people attend psychology oriented religious services(described as therapy and 12 step programs).They can incarcerate people based on the inability to care for themselves or suicidal tendencies. Anyone admitting to suicidal thoughts is automatically considered a potential murderer by agreeing to a statement that says they are a danger to themselves AND others.

It is unreasonable to believe that the reason so few disabled people are able to receive government-sponsored health care or unemployment benefits is due to the government wanting to encourage more people to be independent. The number of people who are incarcerated for crimes and yet return to criminal activity once they are released is very large. The number of people who are provided disability benefits who never return to work is very large for a similar reason. The reason for this is that government needs to make the division of classes strict enough to provide security for the already successful corporations who fund political campaigns.

When most of the public recognizes that their class and therefore, the assumption of their bad character is decided by law enforcement and a judicial system that caters to the same corporations that benefit from their every purchase and that there is little if any encouragement or provisions made for them to overcome their circumstances, they develop a sense of distrust for the values of law and those who are paid to enforce it.

This also discourages people from entering the legal system who has strong ethics and moral character, which allow for and even encourages more corrupt police, lawyers, and judges to get and keep those positions.

Since strict class divisions are beneficial to large corporations who want dominance through encouraging the development of mainstream consumer base and these corporations are the biggest influences on our laws the characterization of children as either valid or invalid is very important.

The ideals of eugenics have certainly not expired from our culture when you look at the way that the standardized tests under the false premise of No Child Left Behind act has been used so effectively as a tool for exclusion. This is the primary reason for what the ACLU calls the School to Prison Pipeline.

This says:

In the last decade, the punitive and overzealous tools and approaches
of the modern criminal justice system have seeped into our schools,
serving to remove children from mainstream educational environments
and funnel them onto a one-way path toward prison. These various
policies, collectively referred to as the School-to-Prison Pipeline, push
children out of school and hasten their entry into the juvenile, and eventually the criminal, justice system, where prison is the end of the road.
Historical inequities, such as segregated education, concentrated poverty,
and racial disparities in law enforcement, all feed the pipeline.
The School-to-Prison Pipeline is one of the most urgent challenges in
education today.

The United States school system was designed to follow the militaristic aspirations of the Prussian government. What the Prussian military aspired to do was to create a broad range of rules and teach people that the duties' of citizenship included evaluating and governing the actions of their neighbors. This makes everyone vulnerable to unfair government regulations at any given time, which gives the government absolute power. Teaching children to help with such enforcement based on how they are taught to evaluate their piers is one of the steps used to create a closed society.

According to John Taylor Gatto, the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991:

A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores.

He also says:

The modern public school curriculum comes right out of the Prussian system. Gatto says the American educationists imported three major ideas from Prussia. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children "to obedience, subordination and collective life." Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented "subjects," and school days were divided into fixed periods "so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions." Third, the state was posited as the true parent of the children. 

Over the years, various fads have seized the education bureaucrats of America, but those fads have been variations on a theme: The public schools are intended to create complacent "good citizens" — not independent thinkers — because political leaders do not like boat-rockers who question things too closely. They prefer citizens who pay their taxes on time and leave them alone to chart the course of the nation. The growth in government power since the advent of public schools is hard to ignore.

Creating conditioned responses are also very important to a government achieving absolute power, which always leads to corruption. Adopting behaviorism as the applied state-sponsored method of evaluation provides for that kind of power.

What is included in the bill HR 4247 (which is claimed to reduce abuses of restraint and seclusion) was originally used to promote the psychology of behaviorism in jails and facilities for the disabled. Once the turf wars for the advocates of Applied Behavioral Analysis are over such abuses as that of the Judge Rotenberg Center will be encouraged and HR 4247 will have paved the way for harsher punishments being justified by this brand of psychology.

The ultimate factor in deciding the fate of people with psychological impairment or developmental disorders is how many of the unfair and biased opinions that are taught to us by the government to give them more control and allow for more corruption we will accept and encourage.

The more humans are reduced by the evaluation of our behavior as being nothing more than a composite of conditioned responses void of free will the less value we will place on individualism and creativity that can inspire needed changes within our government.

No matter what is thought of any particular treatment or therapy for autism we can't afford to ignore how the  value system encouraged by the psychology of behaviorism will affect how autistics (who are thereby seen as having a behavioral disorder) being mistreated by those who are given this authority.

It's not just there being no cure for autism that is important in designing our future, but it is also how the efforts to cure it are tied to old bigoted notions that attack our character and justify how we are mistreated.

Encouraging people to recognize the voice of adult autistics and creating more services that will provide for our inclusion is not just something that needs to be added to early detection, early intervention, and the push to rid children with developmental disabilities of inappropriate behaviors, by the time they reach 18 years of age. Instead this type of encouragement is how we create opportunities for all disabled and differently-abled people and provide future options for all people who are otherwise negatively stigmatized by a government that cannot go unquestioned.

Autism is Against the Law

Autism is a disability and being disabled is a crime. How people think in different ways is especially vulnerable to the abuses of law enforcement.

Those who have the means to control the broadest part of the population are willing to use their resources to gain an even tighter grip of control over an even larger group. The corporations use their resources to buy the politicians vote so that laws will be made, which streamline consumers and voters in a way that enables mass production of less diversified products. In order for the average/normal consumer to be validated, they must seek an end to diversity and the inconvenience of a broad range of products and services. Ultimately, this means fewer numbers of people with a narrower range of interest.

Having fewer resources gets portrayed as having character flaws, which aid in motivating consumers to buy the popular products which they have been shamed into believing is a respectable practice. The threat of not needing what they mass produce is what large industries will advertise in terms of character flaws so that diversity is equated with shameful behavior.Shameful behavior ultimately translates into what an enforcement agent can claim is inappropriate and illegal.

An autistic person may have difficulty in communicating with someone either because other forms of communication may be better suited for how our brain works. We may present mannerisms that are awkward and uncomfortable for others as well as we may have need for open and honest communication that others are threatened by. We may be in an environment where the lighting, the volume of sound, and the number of distractions is all set at a level that the people who are accepted and appreciated can handle very well. However, this overwhelms our senses.

Others may have learned protective mechanisms of avoiding their prejudices and that protection may be offensive to us. That protection is a luxury that we cannot afford. Nor are we often afforded the luxury of expressing our discomfort about such things without consequences for it.

Honesty and justice may be much more important to an autistic person and yet treating us unjustly may be more easily justified because the offense done to us (which is met with an unacceptable reaction) is typically overlooked. While this dynamic is somewhat an issue with everyone it may be more likely to create unreasonable expectations for an autistic person which triggers an adverse reaction.

I rarely see a television sitcom where someone whose communication diverts from the very narrow and glorified mainstream be part of any joke that isn't at their expense. The subtly of this attitude plays a role in how society views atypical communication as the expression of someone who is abnormal and therefore, has a substandard character.

This character assignation of autistics is particularly counter productive because many(including me) will see the unfair rules and the boundary violations as a reason not to trust authority. At the very least it creates confusion, which leads to chaos. For some this will encourage them to violently rebel, which then encourages the unfair stereotype of autistics generally not wanting to co-operate.

Even more than entertainment encouraging drug use people are influenced to choose alternative or counter-culture lifestyles, which often include recreational drug use because the mainstream is so offensive to them. Because the economy is king, large industries exploit every opportunity to capitalize on the drug appetite in the US. Besides being trained by every public medium to escape reality and make purchases based on impulse, the government ushers the drugs they have deemed illegal into the US, registers the users with the least financial resources as criminals at every opportunity, describes using drugs not distributed by pharmaceutical industry as self-medicating and therefore irresponsible, expands the church of the 12 steps to be used as an unregulated government enforcement agency, gives increasingly more power to the Drug Enforcement Agency to be the enforcers of economic and class divisions, and makes institutionalizing misfits more common than ever.

Whatever tool is used in a class war(at this point the drug war is among the biggest and most effective) will spread to and affect every member of that class. In the same way that drugs are both encouraged and provided as well punishing those who use an unauthorized brand (non-pharmaceutical) ,all people with forms of developmental disabilities and delays as well as learning disabilities and psychiatric illness will be subjected to abuse based on a similar mindset. All differences, delays, and disabilities that affect how people think are considered maladjustments and character flaws worthy of punishment supported by the law.

Learning disabilities being viewed as cognitive problems support trends like the same drugs which are used for the maintenance of ADHD to also be most the popular and dangerous street drug. It also aids those who are allowing the federal government to make even more discriminatory behavioral demands of school children (known as Positive Behavioral Support) and prevent the public from reporting the abuse of school teachers and administrators.

The largest and the most powerful political mental health advocacy group in the US is the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) which supposedly advocates for the consumers of mental health services. However, they get 75% of their funding from the pharmaceutical agencies who are in command of the services. NAMI has helped to pass laws for forced institutionalization. These laws have mainly been used to aid in the class war that needs little to no reason to incarcerate minorities and the otherwise disenfranchised.

That also goes along with the size of jails being based on children's reading scores and IQ being used as a method for excluding people based on race and class distinctions. The standardized test from the No Child left Behind Act are what the ACLU sees as one of the main reasons for the problem they call the School to Prison Pipeline.

Of course Autism Speaks is the biggest influence of how autism is typically viewed and of course their focus is on genetic research. This serves the same agenda as that of trying control the rate of the population and encourage superiority based on who will follow the authority who is already in place rather than encourage innovative thinking. With this type of thinking people with disabilities are seen as not needing to be accommodated. Instead everyone is simply encouraged to trust that those who are already in power were divinely ordained to that position and only those who act and think like they do (as well as serve their current agenda) are divinely assigned the right to live.

The institutionalization of a standard for correct thinking is nothing more than a marketing tool that is used to exploit, discourage, and exclude people who think in ways that don't make profits for the industries that mass produce.

Grieving about your son or daughter not being all you had hoped for is clearly seen and felt by them and causes an environment of toxic emotion. When people see that their parents are following the standard beliefs and feelings of broader society that views them as a burden that the important citizens need protection from, it makes them the ones who actually carry the inconvenient burden of the bigotry that others don't want to acknowledge or deal with.

Neurodiversity isn't a threat to people wanting to help the most vulnerable part of the population. It is instead diversity of any kind that threatens the propaganda and lies that serves to maintain the current system of injustice.

We really don't need more tolerance and charity given to autistics. We instead need to protect autistics and everyone who is judged as having a disability (or inconvenient nature) and be less tolerant of those who are abusing their authority at our expense.

Links to articles and videos on this subject:

We're Beyond Product Placement Now: Here's Behavior Placement


Psycho-therapeutic interventions in learning disability: focus on cognitive behavioral therapy and mental health



Just Say No! to the War on Drugs



Read or Go to Jail



Sir Francis Galton - Father of Eugenics


Ewen Cameron, Memory Thief- Part 1



Part 2


School to Prison Pipeline: Talking Points



Kendra's Law (forced institutionalization)


CIA Drug Trafficking



CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US (note: What I call Regan's double talk)



Recreational Drugs FAR Less Likely to Kill You than Prescribed Drugs



Death from Ritlin The Truth Behind ADHD



Alcoholics Anonymous America's State Religion



The History of The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration



MDRI Alleges Torture Against Children and Adults with Disabilities in the United States



PBIS: Progressives Bullying Innocent Students (A better and more objective look at Positive Behavioral Supports PBS)


Pfizer Turned NAMI into "Trojan Horse" to Push Geodon Off-Label to Kids,Suit Claims



Trends in Institutionalized Populations



Quote from that page: The US has one of the highest prison to population ratios and one of the highest reported absolute number of prisoners in the world.

Restraining Failures

As more behavioral standards are being made official in the US for the sake of herding and objectifying children through statewide PBS, psychology is becoming more widely accepted as the standard for officially accepted behavior.

Psychology is a political means for social control. The abuses of psychology are hidden from the public by those in authority providing gifts to the most vocal advocates who then present this manipulative tool in a more positive light to the unsuspecting public.

One of the false advertisements presented to hide this abuse claims that we are moving forward in our fight against abuse and that those in authority have the best intentions for providing necessary services to the public.

There are several political events I'll point out here that have influenced the US government now wanting to demand a stricter set of behavioral standards in schools for the normalization of children. The justification for this set of standards is that behavioral problems in schools are becoming worse, children with behavioral problems deserve to be mainstreamed, and the teachers are untrained in how to restrain them when they are.

What we now call disability in the United States was first meant as a label for soldiers returning from the war who needed either training for different jobs and/or supplemental insurance when they couldn't work.

What the government has always been reluctant to do is admit how much posttraumatic stress is the result of war. This is one of the reasons that legitimate help for persons with psychological problems has been discouraged. People are more likely to be punished for having problems than helped. Many of the situations that people are faced with in society that are difficult to cope with are not exposed due to people with the means to do so hiding how they are unfair.

When you look at the most recent changes to how disability has been dealt with, what is absent from that picture is a change in attitude. The US government has failed to allow changes in laws that will prevent abuse of disabled people due to the way that negative attitudes toward this population are seen to serve as a way of isolating and disenfranchising those who are considered undesirable citizens.

In practical terms the use of mental retardation as a label is rarely a means for providing aid. Most people who receive this label are seen by the US government as destined to be a burden on society. When a psychological diagnosis is added to the label it is typically a way of describing how they may be more dangerous.

The goal of mental health has always been to protect the public from people who are considered less desirable members of society. The claim that it is a service to those people has always been a method of deceitful packaging.

At the height of commercialism and shameful greed in the 1980s addiction psychology also known as 12-step psychology and recovery were adopted by the government as a means of reform.

Mental institutions were accepting of dual diagnosis patients at any point after their initial withdraw period and judges were allowed to require 12 step meetings to ensure a defendant's parole.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration began in 1992 and tied even closer the jails, mental institutions, and schools.

The Independent Living Centers for people with disabilities and Protection and Advocacy worked to form a larger net which would cause an increase in people seen as threats to the community and sold their plan in the political arena as a way to save people from the horrors of institutions.

As it says here:


The Protection and Advocacy (P&A) concept was initially triggered by a series of local television news broadcasts, which Geraldo Rivera did for the ABC News affiliate in New York City. Rivera's investigative reporting exposed abuse, neglect and lack of programming at WilProtection and Advocacylowbrook, a state institution for people with developmental disabilities on Staten Island.


In the same way that the Protection and Advocacy agency became a way of preventing the report of abuse and silencing victims by posing as their defender and making all advocacy a matter of litigation for the elite and the convenient, the drug wars as a means of martial law against unwanted citizens was further encouraged by the first and biggest National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI) promoting forced institutionalization. The National Alliance for Mentally Ill is predominantly financed by the pharmaceutical industry who writes the DSM and makes the decisions in court about who will be institutionalized.

Of course minorities and those with the least financial resources are the main victims for how these laws are abused.

In an institution and now in schools the victims of harmful restraint and abuse are those who are clearly seen by the staff as having the least opportunity to retain counsel and file a complaint. This is how Protection and Advocacy aids in the abuse of those they claim to be protecting.

Protection and Advocacy along with National Alliance of Mental Illness have now endorsed HR 4247 and statewide Positive Behavioral Support, which will give the government even more unregulated power to seclude and restrain disenfranchised children.

Psychology is a political force. It is not neutral. The ages of people who are now taking psychiatric medication and labeled with behavioral disorders is lowering and the number of children taking them is rising.

Children are now being sentenced to harsher punishments at younger ages. Including Positive Behavioral Supports in the school systems will increase abuse and reduce the reporting of it. As more people can become labeled with psychological disorders due to broader and more vague definitions in the DSM, those children who are now being protected by parents and guardians will ultimately be subjected to harsher punishments and more punishments as the increase in behavioral problems become more well defined so that a more difficult situation is seen by the public as needing to be treated. This is the pattern that needs to stop.

It's important to be aware of how standardized tests from the No Child Left Behind Act and now a more standardized way of evaluating behavior will create stricter laws, which have traditionally led to more rather than less abuse.

HR4247

MENTAL RETARDATION: A SYMPTOM AND A SYNDROME 

SAMHSA

Independent Living Center

Protection and Advocacy against Institutionalization

Protection and Advocacy A History


National Disability Rights Network Protection and Advocacy of Person's with Disabilities


National Alliance of Mental Illness NAMI

Inquiring Minds are Inconvenient

After World War II the government of the United States was even more concerned about how to protect itself militarily from foreign enemies as well as the threats from within the borders.

Psychology is a political force that is too often justified as benign academic research. Those who fund this research have traditionally been interested in how it can be used for military purposes as well as how it can control masses of people who are seen as expendable.

Controlling the minds of others is demanding their compliance to a narrow set of standards that is not of their choosing. Mind control and behavior modification were not originally seen as mutually exclusive terms. Applied Behavioral Analysis gained popularity by the deceitful ways that terms were used for its justification.

The postwar era forced the United States to become increasingly aware, of how they were seen by other nations. The formation of the United Nations had provided global guidelines for what was considered humane treatment but from a military mindset the United States government leaders were mainly concerned with obeying those guidelines when to do otherwise would offend those they sought as allies.

This will give people a better understanding of how mind control/behavior modification has been popularized recently in the United States. I will copy several parts here that I feel are very important.

Mind Control: The Current Situation part one

Mind Control Experiments Conducted in Our Name

The U.S. government has conducted three types of mind-control experiments: Real life experiences, such as those used on Little Augie and the LSD experiments in the safehouses of San Francisco and Greenwich Village; experiments on prisoners, such as in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville; experiments conducted in both mental hospitals and the Veterans Administration hospitals.

Such experimentation requires money, and the United States government has funneled funds for drug experiments through different agencies, both overtly and covertly.

The Role of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration

(Reportorial Sources, Including the Washington Post) One of the funding agencies to contribute to the experimentation is the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a unit of the U.S. Justice Department and one of President Richard Nixon's favorite pet agencies. The Nixon Administration was, at one time, putting together a program for detaining youngsters who showed a tendency toward violence in "concentration" camps.

According to the Washington Post, the plan was authored by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch was told by John Erlichman, Chief of Staff for the Nixon White House, to implement the program. He proposed the screening of children of six years of age for tendencies toward criminality. Those who failed these tests were to be destined to be sent to the camps. The program was never implemented.

LEAA came into existence in 1968 with a huge budget to assist various U.S. law enforcement agencies. Its effectiveness, however, was not considered too great. After spending $6 billion, the F.B.I. reports general crime rose 31 percent and violent crime rose 50 percent. But little accountability was required of LEAA on how it spent its funds.

LEAA's role in the behavior modification research began at a meeting held in 1970 in Colorado Springs. Attending that meeting were Richard Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, John Erlichman, H.R. Haldemann and other White House staffers. They met with Dr. Bertram Brown, director fo the National Institute of Mental Health, and forged a close collaboration between LEAA and the Institute. LEAA was a product of the Justice Department and the Institute was a product of HEW.

LEAA funded 350 projects involving medical procedures, behavior modification and drugs for delinquency control. Money from the Criminal Justice System was being used to fund mental health projects and vice versa. Eventually, the leadership responsibility and control of the Institute began to deteriorate and their scientists began to answer to LEAA alone.

The Role of the National Institute of Mental Health

(Source: Court Records and US Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights)

The National Institute of Mental Health went on to become one of the greatest supporters of behavior modification research. Throughout the 1960's, court calenders became blighted with lawsuits on the part of "human guinea pigs" who had been experimented upon in prisons and mental institutions. It was these lawsuits which triggered the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights investigation, headed by Senator Sam Erwin. The subcommittee's harrowing report was virtually ignored by the news media.

AND IN part 4 there's this:


US Contempt for International Human Experimentation Protocols

In 1953, while the Central Intelligence Agency was still conducting mind control and behavior modification on unwitting humans in this country, the United States signed the Nuremberg Code, a code born out of the ashes of war and human suffering. The document was a solemn promise never to tolerate such human atrocities again. The Code maintains three fundamental principles:

1.The subjects of any experimentation must be volunteers who thoroughly understand the purpose and the dangers of the experiments.

2.They must be free to give consent and the consent must be without pressure and they must be free to quit the experiments at any time.

3.The experiments must be likely to yield knowledge which is valuable to everyone. The knowledge must be such that it could not be gained in any other way.

The experiments must be conducted by only the most competent doctors, and they must exercise extreme care.

The Nazi aviation experiments met none of these conditions. Most inmates at Dachau knew that the experiments in the pressure chamber were fatal. From the very beginning, control of the experiments was largely in the hands of the SS, which was later judged to be a criminal organization by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Despite our lessons from Nuremberg and the death camps, the CIA, U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps targeted specific groups of people for experimentation who were not able to resist, prisoners, mental patients, foreigners, ethnic minorities, sex deviants, the terminally ill, children and U.S. military personnel and prisoners of war.

They violated the Nuremberg Code for conducting and subsidizing experiments on unwitting citizens. The CIA began its mind control projects in 1953, the very year that the U.S. signed the Nuremberg Code and pledged with the international community of nations to respect basic human rights and to prohibit experimentation on captive populations without full and free consent.

Dr. Cameron, a CIA operative, was one of the worst offenders against the Code, yet he was a member of the Nuremberg Tribunal, with full knowledge of its testimony. In 1973, a three judge court in Michigan ruled, "experimental psychosurgery, which is irreversible and intrusive, often leads to the blunting of emotions, the deadening of memory, the reduction of affect, and limits the ability to generate new ideas. Its potential for injury to the creativity of the individual is great and can infringe on the right of the individual to be free from interference with his mental process.

"The state's interest in performing psychosurgery and the legal ability of the involuntarily detained mental patient to give consent, must bow to the First Amendment, which protects the generation and free flow of ideas from unwarranted interference with one's mental processes."

Citing the Nuremberg Code, the court found that "the very nature of the subject's incarceration diminishes the capacity to consent to ."

In 1973, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted regulations which would require informed written consent from voluntary patients before electroshock treatment could be performed.

Senator Sam Ervin's Committee lashed out bitterly at the mind control and behavior modification experiments and ordered them discontinued, they were not.

The New England Journal of Medicine states, that the consent provisions now in place are "no more than an elaborate ritual." They called it "a device that when the subject is uneducated and uncomprehending, confers no more than a semblance of propriety on human experimentation."

There is plenty more on the site you can read there, but I'll stop here to point out several more things.

The dates in what is written here is very significant to the creation of laws and how mind control experiments are used and promoted within the United States. Judge Rotenberg Center played a key role in all that.

Darwin's theories were used as the scientific basis not only for eugenic ideals but also to justify the incarceration and abuse of racial minorities as well as anyone else that could be seen as submitting to the appetites and behaviors of lower life forms.

Scientific research which describes the sophistication of primates has been used to bridge the gap between species and define a hierarchy of human worth whereby arbitrary standards suggest that certain people are less human and deserving of fewer human rights. This is certainly part of how research is justified among certain types of people. This attitude began in the United States to show how the tribal cultures of Indians and Africans define them as only partially human.

The Judge Rotenberg Center in the 1980s was an example of how behavior modification known as Applied Behavioral Analysis was meant to be used to experiment on and control prisoners and people who were considered inferior human specimens due to mental incompetence.

The laws that this research Center was described on one of my earlier blog posts

Models of Behavior and Institutional Thinking




Again Wikipedia says of JRC :


"The Center makes use of aversives as part of their intensive, 24/7 behavior modification program. Until the late 1980s, aversion therapy was administered in the form of spanking with a spatula, pinching the feet, and forced inhaling of ammonia.

Currently the Center administers 2-second electric skin shocks to residents using a Graduated Electronic Decelerator (GED), which was invented to administer the skin-shocks by remote control through electrodes worn against the skin."

And this is how Rotenberg earned the use of his name in the naming of the school:

"While this litigation was taking place, in late 1985 and early 1986, JRC brought one of its seriously self-abusive, autistic students before the Bristol County Probate Court for a substituted judgment hearing that was held by Chief Judge Ernest Rotenberg. After hearing testimony on both sides of the issue, Judge Rotenberg determined: (1) that the student was incompetent to make her own medical treatment decisions; and (2) that the child, if competent, would have chosen treatment that included the use of the aversives that JRC had been employing, prior to the decision by the administrative judge. This substituted judgment hearing was the same type of hearing that was required in Massachusetts for individuals for whom agencies wished to employ psychotropic medication (or other intrusive medical procedures) and who were incompetent to make their own treatment decisions."

And as I said in that post:

"Advocacy for the mentally ill from NAMI encouraged this "it's therapy for their own good, and they need to have others make decisions for them" when they helped pass laws such as Kendra's Law in New York and Laura's law in California, which encouraged forced institutionalization.

TASH and other such disability advocacy groups have corporate sponsors and are bound by the political compromises of lobbyists that continue to aid in the abuse and exclusion of the majority of disabled people. Many such groups recently supported HR 4247 providing more authority to bureaucratic agencies and again discouraging the voice of disabled people from being heard. This continues to encourage the "everything about us without us" traditional oppressive attitude about disabled people."

Claiming that behaviorism is being currently used in better and more humane ways in the US doesn't account for the history of Applied Behavioral Analysis, what it was designed for, and how it is typically used on the majority in places where the goal of treatment has no regard for the person's rights. Also, the purpose of the treatment has never been  so sophisticated that it was intended to do anymore than restrain people who are feared due to their differences.

The term Positive Behavioral Support is in keeping with the traditions of how behavior modification research has always used deceitful names as a means for justification. Whether or not certain individuals who have more vocal advocates are benefiting from certain teachers that have been certified in this discipline is not an indication of its intended use or how it will be most widely used.

Demanding that people comply with narrow standards serves to prevent them from thinking and questioning creatively and exploring how they are being oppressed.

What is most important to the future of autistics and anyone else who is victimized by this research is that politicians be held responsible for what they endorse. Humans are capable of change and should be given an opportunity for doing that. When policies continue encouraging the misbehavior of bureaucrats and not holding them accountable that misbehavior is at the expense of those who are being fraudulently described as the beneficiaries of those policies.

From the Circus to the Zoo

One of the worst results of an irresponsible society is the number of animals we have that are neglected and abused. It shows that our appetites are so out of control that life is only viewed by what is practical and convenient for any given time or place. We pay a big price for that attitude of objectifying animals and it is how too many view humans as well.

Behaviorism is based on how human nature is related to that of less sophisticated animals. It explores our motivations from the viewpoint that we are either effectively providing for ourselves, or we are using ineffective methods for doing that. However, animals other than humans are not as conflicted in the ways they treat each other. Humans are the only animals who kill each other for no practical reason.

Complicated mental manipulation is also only used among humans. This is part of the reason that behaviorism being applied to large groups of people provides some people the opportunity to be abusively controlling. Rules are never enforced without some attitude so the attitude of the enforcer plays a major role in what gets enforced and taught by the enforcement.

While physical walls and closed doors provide more of an opportunity for someone in authority to use physical force to demean others, the lack of them often allows for more subtle abuse that leads to the most destructive forms of it due to people's mental conditioning (or what may otherwise be called behavior modification). It's important to focus on attitudes and the environment those attitudes create when fighting to protect the rights of the most vulnerable part of the population. Abuse begins in the mind and most of the physical scars that result from abuse don't last nearly as long.

It's also in the mind where the vulnerability from emotions that result from having been abused become the catalyst for viewing the world in strict terms of survival i.e. control or be controlled, kill or be killed.

I accept that some people are born with a more aggressive nature. However, I don't believe that the inability to find methods for controlling that aggression and finding more assertive means is due to heredity or genetics. I believe that it's dangerous to believe that it is.

There are people who are confined to public institutions who were not bound by an institutional mentality. There are also people who are not confined to them who are. At its root, the institutional mentality is a means of control and manipulation based on instilling in people from a position of authority a false sense of guilt, shame, and fear.

The main reason for violence is people feeling that they need to protect themselves because no one else will. The way that the United States encourages an institutional mentality is due to how the elite in authority is unwilling to face the vulnerability that comes with trying to understand and empathize with diverse cultures. It promotes an attitude in law enforcement whereby people will either create adversity within an area that is more financially impoverished (and therefore, has a higher crime rate) or even accepts the murders which happen there as a means for population control and less enforcement needed.

The worst thing that can happen to the compulsory education system in the United States is to encourage an institutional mentality there. I see this is now being introduced to the school system by the type of Applied Behavioral Analysis known as Positive Behavioral Support. If a child is vulnerable either due to inherent sensitivities or abusive home environments having their behavior evaluated in such a way will encourage rather than discourage a heightened sense of being unprotected.

Feeling unprotected leads to people feeling anxious and depressed, but most of all it leads to an unhealthy dependence on authority and discourages creativity and self worth.

The Katrina storm that hit New Orleans several years ago was a natural occurrence. Of course the residents felt vulnerable pursuant to the storm's effect, but it was the mistrust the government had of the residents that led to the way the victims of that storm were mistreated. The way that we would have known that all cultures and all classes could feel safe that their government trusted them would have been shown by a completely different attitude than the one which was displayed.

Not only did the situation prompt President Bush at the time to assume more executive power and demand martial law in that area, but it also provided him and future presidents the means for that unlimited authority. FEMA who acted so poorly in that situation is now building camps that can potentially be used in similar unethical ways as were used in that response. HR 645 which is now being endorsed by President Obama will again give the government more authority and ultimately give more people reasons to feel unsafe and unprotected. This is what leads to institutional mentality which I have described.

People who are statistically at the highest risk for being unfairly treated and subjected to punishment based on arbitrary rules and regulations are feared by the elite who has the most authority to create them. The last thing that is needed to provide a more trusting atmosphere is the addition of behavioral standards, which are used to normalize diverse populations.

If we are a society that does nothing more than react to each others basic animal instincts we will continue to send the animals who don't perform well enough in the Circus to the zoo. Typically, when people no longer believe they can afford to maintain zoos the animals with the least market value are euthanized.

It's not the lack of rules and regulations that encourages rebellion and uncompromising behavior. It is instead the absence of people being in an environment where they are trusted and can trust others. Trust is very contagious but so is distrust. It's important to everyone's survival that we are all careful of which one we encourage.

At Risk of Being Disruptive (more on HR 4247)

Federal laws in the United States are always sold to the voting public as answers to difficult problems. Empowering and enlarging the federal government is typically encouraged by the most effective tools of oppression; fear and shame.

Waging war against race and diversity and institutionalizing the survivors of that war was how this nation began and how the federal government continues to establish dominance and control over, and dependence from, the masses of people who are seen as inconvenient and obsolete.

This government owes its allegiance to the corporations that support it and government leadership is always chosen by how well they will serve those corporations. In this way, most of the public becomes pawns in a self-destructive game.

One example is how, with the passing of the recent health care reform bill, we found that ultimately the insurance industry will be given even more power and that the new regulations will actually prevent health care to many people who don't have it now.

In order to see more clearly how the corporations who run things in the US are dependent on how laws made at the federal level will secure their oppressive power, it helps to see how many other options there are to the establishment of federal control and ask yourself why other options weren't chosen. If, as is typically the case, it's obvious that the fundamental purpose of the law is to support large corporations, then it's easy to understand how oppressive standards will be encouraged by it.

What the House of Representatives has done this week by passing the legislation known as HR 4247 is maintaining security for the agencies that typically suppress information about abuse in the public school system. The partnership between bureaucrats and politicians, agencies that certify behavior specialists to meet the standards that protect the bureaucratic and political system, and the now the solidified band of disability advocates who have been taught the art of compromise through their obedience to this system, is an example of how the US political arena is a marketplace where the rights of the least valued citizens are bought and sold.

The division of the classes is very important to maintaining the current political structure. Both the Republican and Democratic party's are equally guilty of supporting this oppressive structure. What has always been the deciding factor in maintaining this division is everyone not being subjected to the same laws. A justice system based on equality is the biggest threat to an unfair class system.

The way the Democratic Party has shown their commitment to maintaining the class divisions is by the way they have encouraged identity politics and a greater dependence on the federal court system that prevents any coalition from the most oppressed class.

The federal laws claiming to reduce violence in schools during the last two decades have primarily been geared toward:

1)the increasing violence in the school systems which is described as a reflection of broader societal trends.

2) the safety of "all" students and teachers

The claim of rules and regulations needing to protect all students and teachers has always been the most effective tool for exclusion and segregation of students with the most difficulties. In the same way that so many people are not provided opportunities based on the claim that they are willfully uncooperative and lazy, our school systems expel (or exclude in more subtle ways) students who can be labeled as not wanting to be there.

This is also how violence in schools is almost exclusively blamed on the students. This encourages trends of more children being diagnosed as mentally ill and put on psychotropic medications at earlier ages as well as promoting laws that have more children and younger children being given harsher sentences for crimes.

This was the standard that Sen. Dodd of Connecticut began promoting after tests were performed in his state to determine how the federal government could take control of how restraints and seclusion were administered throughout the nation. Medicare accepting institutions are asked to follow the guidelines developed from this study.

Schools would not typically have people that were using Medicare insurance. HR 4247 is a way to broaden these federal regulations to deal with more people who are considered to have operant behavioral problems and violent tendencies in schools beginning at an earlier age. Once labeled with this supposedly at-risk condition (which is a very common misperception in today's society) the federal system will have a much easier method of moving disenfranchised youth into a more confined and regulated institutional based life. In this way, they target the disenfranchised disabled population at a younger age in the typical way the political system encourages them to eventually be institutionalized adults.

Neurodiversity is a threat to the narrow standards that the federal government believes they must set and maintain. They show their nervous reaction to independent or critical thinking by:

1) building the military with independent contracts

2) enforcing the irresponsible containment and unreasonable demands of citizens with the encouragement of paramilitary police forces

3) using the regulations on food and the enforcement of the law against dangerous drug activity as a means for arbitrary judgments against peaceful citizens and the building of the pharmaceutical industry

4) serving the pharmaceutical and medical insurance industries with so-called health care reform bills and laws that prevent businesses from providing employee benefits

5)adding video cameras and metal detectors in schools

6)using standardized test to introduce more who are stigmatized as less likely to succeed to the penal system,

7) encouraging the drugging of children and the harsher penalties of children at younger ages

8) and now by setting stricter narrower federal standards of behavior in school systems

The way you will know that TASH and other disability advocacy groups who are trying to establish and maintain ADA laws are being responsible to the members of the population they claim to be serving is by seeing them disassociate themselves from groups like Protection and Advocacy, keeping courtrooms from being the only place that disabled people can attain the right to be treated justly, and most importantly when you see that autistics, intellectually disabled, or anyone diagnosed with learning disabilities or psychiatric illness are being encouraged to report abuse.

If you see parents of autistics and other mainstream political voices attempting to silence autistics and other neurodiverse individuals and preventing them from thinking and discussing the issues that concern them, it should be apparent that the acceptance of more neurodiversity in the mainstream will not be easy to attain.

The reason you will find alternatives to mainstream political advocacy on this website is that there are fewer reasons here to compromise the thinking and questioning liberties of people who have traditionally been denied a voice.

As long as everyone is seen as having the same motivations to achieve the same objectives in life the abusive forces that create standards of typical behavior can be used to subject everyone who is non-compliant, neurodiverse, or targeted for differences of race, religion, or cultural beliefs to the same unreasonable penalties.

It has been made very clear over the last couple of decades that minority leaders, advocates, and advocacy groups who encourage diversity and encourage civil rights for disabled people and others will be courted by those who have an interest in using tokens to show the voting public that they have support for their agenda. This is all too prevalent in the disability community. To show strength as a group we must show the value of including people who question and even criticize typical mainstream politics by being those individuals and setting an example for others.

Models of Behavior and Institutional Thinking

Being responsible for the welfare of others can make people really anxious. When people are less inhibited and less predictable responding to them requires creative thinking and for some people in authority the creative state of consciousness is a vulnerable place. Not being in control has led to them being abused so as they struggle for control and dominance of a situation, they inspire this anxiety based consciousness in others.

When children grow up eating dinner in an environment that is overly restrictive, they often have digestive issues as adults. Digesting food has become associated with an anxious state of mind.

Mental digestion is also impaired by an over emphasis on restricted performance. When school teachers experience the anxiety from that sense of vulnerability which they associate with being abused, they risk losing control of a classroom because they aren't thinking creatively about the kinds of responses to students in a given situation that would encourage a relaxed and trusting environment.

When control and manipulation are the root cause of the vulnerability that leads to abuse, more of the same (which is how American bureaucrats typically attempt to protect the reputation of a broken system) will not produce different results.

As I have written about in my last two blog posts,( here and here), creating better control over students is what's behind the goal of demanding state school systems to train teachers in the experimental philosophy of behaviorism. Behaviorism as it has been defined by Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) has been rebranded as Positive Behavioral Support (PBS).

Trained supporters of Applied Behavioral Analysis have recently sought to be absolved of their bad reputation by obtaining the endorsement of parent and disability advocacy groups. The legislation which claims to be providing regulations so that school systems can be held more accountable for their abuse HR 4247 will instead further establish schools as an  environment for using brands of psychology.

The acceptance of neurodiverse people and classifications of people must include a broader perspective of how humans adapt to their environment than can be described as a means for stigmatization and control.

Behaviorism is one such method that cannot be integrated with the ideals of accepting a broader group of people with different ways of thinking and therefore, responding to their environment. The goal of behaviorism is one of exploration and experimentation into how masses of people can be controlled with a narrow view of their identity as the sum of their primal reactions.

In the 1990s the school systems in the United States overwhelmingly endorsed the pharmaceutical industry and the diagnostic statistical manual (DSM) as an effective method of behavioral control by classifying a large percentage of students as having a chemical deficiency which prevented them from being able to behave and pay attention in the classroom. The diagnosis is known as ADD/ADHD and the supplemental therapy provided by the pharmaceutical industry came in the form of stimulants.

Today methamphetamine (a similar drug as the one used in this therapy) is thought to be one of the leading causes of murder, theft, and other drug related crimes as well as causing the death of many who use it.

This is one example of a behavioral therapy for school children that has encouraged even worse problems than it was originally treating.

The comprehensive understanding of what the problems in the system really are continues to be avoided for the protection of those in authority who made it that way. This is how the cycle of abuse in schools continues.

There has been a progressive merging of the U.S. school systems with the reform and rehabilitation industry. This merger is part of a tradition in the US for having an institutional approach to handling large masses of citizens who are seen as uncooperative and disposable.

Dependence on the federal government as regulator of all behavior is a convenience too often used to disguise oppressive methods of control. Too many of what are considered "necessary evils" become seen as necessary when there's too much emphasis on everyone following a narrow set of standards.

Statewide Positive Behavioral Support is an effort to promote a single set of specific ideals for standard behavior by a public institution where compulsory attendance is demanded for impressionable children.

Once such a merger is created with the companies that train people in Applied Behavioral Analysis, there are fewer opportunities for independent advocacy and as the dependence on such a system is reinforced more otherwise benign behaviors can be defined as inappropriate or unhealthy.

The support for ABA becoming more widely used in our society has been greatly encouraged by Matthew Israel at the Judge Rotenberg Center.

Wikipedia says here about JRC:

"The Center makes use of aversives as part of their intensive, 24/7 behavior modification program. Until the late 1980s, aversion therapy was administered in the form of spanking with a spatula, pinching the feet, and forced inhaling of ammonia.

Currently the Center administers 2-second electric skin shocks to residents using a Graduated Electronic Decelerator (GED), which was invented to administer the skin-shocks by remote control through electrodes worn against the skin."

The Judge Rotenberg Center was named after a judge who helped them in their legal battles to continue with their experiments. These inhumane experiments were first tested on animals on now used on humans who are seen as dispensable.

Matthew Israel describes here regarding the history of the Judge Rotenberg Center:


"While this litigation was taking place, in late 1985 and early 1986, JRC brought one of its seriously self-abusive, autistic students before the Bristol County Probate Court for a substituted judgment hearing that was held by Chief Judge Ernest Rotenberg. After hearing testimony on both sides of the issue, Judge Rotenberg determined: (1) that the student was incompetent to make her own medical treatment decisions; and (2) that the child, if competent, would have chosen treatment that included the use of the aversives that JRC had been employing, prior to the decision by the administrative judge. This substituted judgment hearing was the same type of hearing that was required in Massachusetts for individuals for whom agencies wished to employ psychotropic medication (or other intrusive medical procedures) and who were incompetent to make their own treatment decisions."

Advocacy for the mentally ill from NAMI encouraged this "it's therapy for their own good, and they need to have others make decisions for them" when they helped pass laws such as Kendra's Law in New York and Laura's law in California, which encouraged forced institutionalization.

TASH and other such disability advocacy groups have corporate sponsors and are bound by the political compromises of lobbyists that continue to aid in the abuse and exclusion of the majority of disabled people. Many such groups recently supported HR 4247 providing more authority to bureaucratic agencies and again discouraging the voice of disabled people from being heard. This continues to encourage the "everything about us without us" traditional oppressive attitude about disabled people.

Standardized testing in schools exclude most disabled students many of whom are later institutionalized in jails and mental institutions. If and when they enter vocational rehabilitation, the counselors are given incentives to provide the most help to the clients who need it the least. Again, this excludes the majority in the same ways as public schools.

A dependence on the litigation process which is dominated by people with the most political and financial resources is an essential aspect of protecting the bureaucracy and the way they do things. People with disabilities who are in the most need of protection are served the least by this system. The stricter and harsher rules that can be incorporated into this system provides a way for it to become even more exclusive so that there is always at least some regulation that can be used to exclude anyone they choose.

The Protection and Advocacy agency provides litigation based on what they need to show in order to maintain their funding. They are more than willing to provide aid for any client that can help create or change a law that aids the objectives of the agency. In this way, they have no authority to defend the public from the bureaucracy at all. This keeps all resources and legal aid supporting the bureaucracy and hiding their abuses.

When enough of the public began to understand the realities of the abuses within state mental institutions, the problems with bureaucratic self-regulation became apparent to many people and there was a request for independent investigations into the matter. However, changes were made from within the system to prevent very much of this from occurring.

The changes to the institutions were minimal but what changed much more dramatically was the development of more effective methods that were used to discourage people who were being abused from reporting it. The bureaucracy in the United States is defined by government contracts and informal mergers with private industries and by their ability to create documents to be used for litigation.

It's not responsible or reasonable to expect that the bill HR 4247 will provide protection for the public. It was designed within a self regulating system that protects itself from the public who is seen as unworthy of protection.

Restraint and Seclusion are Encouraged in the House (H.R. 4247)

Yesterday the Washington Post ran this story of propaganda: House approves bill to limit physical restraint of students. I wrote this more factual based blog post several days ago: The Exclusive Rights to Restrain and Seclude. Joe opposed the suggestions made in the post as well as in the comments about how restraint and seclusion could be reduced. His responses were typical of the widely believed myths about what disability actually means in the United States and how it has traditionally been dealt with.

What is behind many of these myths is the view that the government just isn't doing enough for disabled people in order to support, encourage, and protect them. If the problem was just that it could have been easily overcome a long time ago. The alternative view which exposes that myth is typically met with a misleading conditioned response that is polarizing to any discussion about it.

This polarization lends the discussion to the very problems that civil rights activists are supposedly trying to fight against. What happens is that the discussion is limited so that the person with the least established power(power of course being established by the compliance of mainstream objectives and their rationale) has the least opportunity to have their argument validated. This is how abusive cycles are protected.

If America was as free as the privileged who surround themselves with(and protect their illusions with) the mythical images from the commercial media claim then the "love it or leave it" attitude in politics would have some validity. Since it's not that way at all it has no validity.

In the past 200 years since the United States was declared as a nation very little has occurred in terms of establishing civil rights for its citizens in comparison to what is predominately reported. In the last several decades restraint and seclusion has increased dramatically for persons with disabilities. Based on the ways that these trends have been identified by how they are encouraged there is every indication that these abuses will increase a great deal more in the next decade.

This bill provides for stronger regulations and therefore, stronger penalties on the people whom restraint and seclusion are used on. It provides more leniency and government support to the people who use those oppressive tools. Unfortunately, it is advertised as being the opposite.

The reason for behavioral interventions which have included restraint and seclusion being encouraged in institutions (which now includes public schools) were based on the idea that disability is the expression of noncompliance and that disabled people are more likely to become violent. As Sadderbutwisergirl pointed out very well in the previous discussion:

"However, it is very easy for someone to convince people that actions that would be considered abusive on "normal" kids is actually beneficial for kids with neurological disabilities."

also, as Wayward pointed out very well:

"Let’s close ALL the bad schools. Be they the School of Shock or the School of PBS … who has greased all the political wheels but is just as insidious and harmful."


It's difficult for me to understand how anyone could believe that the same ABA philosophy which describes autism as a behavioral disorder and which is behind the abuses at the Judge Rotenberg Center will be helpful to autistics in an ABA/PBS classroom.


The United States has always had an institutional mentality and behavioral interventions have been designed based on the harmful bigoted views which are used to legitimize the abuses made by the staff who are in charge at institutions.

The establishment of institutions of every sort is very typical of how the American government displays its fear of independent thinking. From the first Puritan's war on the neurodiverse to the educational system based on military ideals and racist standardized tests, which were created by eugenicists, the United States has always had difficulty establishing freedom of religion or freedom from religion. The separation of church and state provides too much power to the majority of citizens for the most powerful to allow it.

Psychology is a public institution in the United States. Commercial brands of psychology are subsidized by state and federal funds. What this provides for the government is a state-sponsored morality (a different type of church) which can be used as to legitimize punishment on the least resourceful citizens. This is behind the way that the restraint and seclusion bill is designed to provide authority to teachers and school systems to use restraint and seclusion legitimately.

This bill is an example of the way that Democratic politicians seize power from the most vulnerable citizens by building their own political power base and creating more dependence from them on bureaucracy, which then becomes bigger and more powerful.

Support for this bill is the encouragement of a throw-up-your-hands-and-do-nothing, conspiracy-based, pessimistic outlook that has encouraged the problem that the bill claims to be targeting. State-sponsored religion has always led nations to become more oppressive of the majority of citizens rather than less, and it has led to the worst cases of abuse and even murder.

Since the people who are hurt the worst by this legislation are not being allowed to voice their opinion about it, it's obvious that they aren't who the legislation intends to help. What happens to the most vulnerable among us will eventually happen to everyone because abusing the most vulnerable makes us all weaker and therefore, more vulnerable also.

The laws governing the way that disabled people are treated (especially when mentality is defined as the basis for disability) have always been among the most deceitful, they have been supported by so-called disability activist, and they have led to the worst cases of abuse. For that reason alone every proposed legislation of this type should be seen as highly suspect for how it can be used in oppressive ways.

The Exclusive Rights to Restrain and Seclude

I would certainly hope that a civil rights group involved in the political advocacy of disabled people would be involved in campaigning against abusive behavioral treatments. Unfortunately, though,  TASH is one such organization that has gotten involved and is endorsing the use of Applied Behavioral Analysis in the form of Positive Behavioral Supports.

Positive Behavioral Support is a treatment program that was designed to promote political agendas that would encourage an exclusive and narrow philosophy of what normal/typical behavior is and how the demand for it should be implemented. It was meant to combat the disruption in institutions caused by lack of compliance. Statewide Positive Behavioral Support is a political agency designed to enforce their brand of discipline in schools, and other institutions who work with disabled people.

Parents have been upset for a long time when schools abuse their authority to punish and restrain children, and force them into seclusion rooms. TASH has been promoting PBS as an alternative to the abuses of the ABA in places such as Judge Rotenberg Center since the 1980s. It is reported here in Positive Behavior Support: A Paternalistic Utopian Delusion that:


"Peer review is the hallmark of scientific publication. This involves the review of research papers by experts in a given field prior to the publication to ensure that they meet standards of originality, validity and value to the field. These reviews are supposed to be based on scientific standards, not ideological ones. As early as the 1980s, The Association for Persons with Severe Handicaps (TASH), after passing a resolution banning the use of aversive procedures, began using an ideological standard for publishing articles in their journal and four papers presented at international conference."

It also says:

"TASH, as would be expected endorses PBS(TASH, 2000b). Then again, Lou Brown (1990) describe TASH is unique among disability organizations in, among other things, "addressing the ideological". True enough, and fair enough because TASH describes itself on its website as a "civil right's organization". (TASHn.d.). It does not follow, then, that publication in the journal are peer-reviewed in the same sense as articles in behavioral science journals, or as a result the articles in their journal can be cited in support of scientific assertions of truth. Yet, such as implied by PBS advocates in many of their writings. Alas, the newly established Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions published by Pro-Ed (2002) may not be much more scientifically defensible, but at least the title represents truth in advertising. The same players, however, publish in both places, may have difficulty differentiating their beliefs from reality consistent with PBS ideas, and will probably continue to wrap up reinforcement in fancy new clothes. It has to be hoped that the research this new journal will publish will not misrepresent aversive processes in behavioral analysis, other behavioral analysts, and see her efforts to help others when some element of aversive motivation is openly employed, as has categorized some TASH articles (Mulick 1990)."

PBS is a vehicle that is being used to promote a social movement. It is not new at all, but rather it is a new packaging on old ideals of social reform and discipline.

This paper relates the value systems described in PBS to the movements behind such ideologies as social Darwinism and the eugenics movement. The article warns against "deriving morality from science" which has lead to the death of millions in the 20th century. In the same way that the dangers of these movements have been suppressed, PBS and the agenda behind it has been completely misrepresented for political reasons. It says:

"The concept of ideology traces its roots to Marxist political philosophy, and refers to the social influences that both generate and sustain the way in which people come to understand their world and to shape their social agenda (Belkin, 1998). Values refer to the things people actively pursue, both for themselves and for others who may wish to influence. Thus, the novelty of PBS and the combination of science and value systems.



For those of you who are regular readers of this blog you may have noticed that it says at the top that this is a team blog with authors Ed and Wayward. Until now Wayward had not wanted her contribution acknowledged. She wrote to me yesterday and said that we could look forward to blog post here written by her very soon. I'm so glad. :)

I want to acknowledge and express my appreciation to her for her contribution with this blog. She helped with setting up this blog, naming it, designing it, and promoting it. She has help with editing some of my blog posts and consistently sends me valuable information including important websites. All that I know about the subject of Positive Behavioral Support, I learned from her. Thanks Wayward. :)

Wayward is a parent with dyslexia in Southern California, who has a teen on the autism spectrum. Her child was abused in a PBS classroom. She found that agencies such as Protection and Advocacy had no interest in listening to the abuses of PBS violations.

The following discussion occurred recently on LBRB. The post was dedicated to the federal investigation of Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC). What I've copied here is  the exchange between Wayward (commenting as wondering) and Nancy Weiss.



Nancy Weiss says:

So glad to see so many comments on this. I want to reply to a few. I did invite the ASA to sign on. They declined with a somewhat cryptic reply. In response to discussion here I just sent an email to them asking for more of an explanation. I will share more when I hear from them (or if I don’t!).

I am working now on next steps. I’m looking at setting up some meetings with DOJ and other DC officials to lay the groundwork for a successful outcome. While it’s clear that anyone reading the letter that was sent is going to be horrified (and that every word is documented), spend an hour with Matt Israel and the JRC parents, and that same person is going to come away realizing, at the very least, that this is a complex issue. Not that this minimizes our point or weakens our resolve in any way, but we need to make sure that the DOJ investigators aren’t snowed. Many a journalist has gone in there horrified and come out wondering. He is very convincing.

I very much value the support and suggestions of people who participate in this blog; if you have ideas about next steps, I welcome them. You can comment here and I’ll read or if you’d prefer, send me an email (nancy-weiss@comcast.net). I truly appreciate knowing there are others out there who keep this issue in their hearts.—Nancy

Posted on February 27th, 2010

wondering says:

Would this be the same Nancy Weiss, the MSW behaviorist, who lobbies for PBS - aka enforced ABA - in schools?




Nancy Weiss says:

Hi, all—Just wanted to respond to the question, is this “the same Nancy Weiss, the MSW behaviorist, who lobbies for PBS - aka enforced ABA - in schools”. I’m not sure if there is another Nancy Weiss or confusion about what I advocate for. I used to be the Executive Director of TASH. I believe in behavioral supports that are totally person (and family) centered and directed. I definitely don’t believe in enforced ABA or enforced anything for that matter.

My dear friend Herb Lovett once said to me, “Look here’s the deal. You’ve got to imagine that when you get to the pearly gates, everyone you ever helped with behavioral issues is going to be lined up. Some number of them are going to come up to you, shake your hand, clap you on the shoulder and thank you for helping to make their lives better. The rest are going to haul back and slug you in the jaw. Your job is to make sure you’ve got a line of people who want to shake your hand”. It is with this in mind that I’ve done my work for a great many years.

When I was at TASH I wrote an article called, “It May Be Non-Aversive But Is It Non-Coercive?: The Ethics of Behavior Change in the Modern Age”. A version of that article was later published (co-authored with Tim Knoster) in the Journal of Positive Behavioral Interventions.

Here’s a quote from the original article that I think gives a sense of what I believe about all this:
“Positive approaches are only those which enhance the lives of the people with whom we work; they are characterized by collaboration versus control. They focus more on illumination (or understanding the meanings and purposes of the challenging behaviors from the individual’s point of view) than on elimination (or simply reducing behaviors we perceive to be unacceptable). There is no question that some people with disabilities have behaviors that are dangerous, disruptive or otherwise difficult. I am not one who believes that because all people are to be valued and respected equally that all behaviors are equally acceptable. Some people (both with and without disabilities) exhibit behaviors that interfere with the quality of their own lives and the lives of the people with whom they interact. We have a responsibility to offer supports for people to change behaviors that are dangerous, disruptive, or interfere with their ability to achieve goals they have set for themselves. Our responsibility, however, is to do this in ways that value, enhance, and include people, rather than through the use of methods that are coercive and too often, come dangerously close to revenge.”

I’m happy to send the full versions of these articles or one I wrote recently on the future of disability supports. Here are a few quotes from that one (from a list of what I hope for the future):
— Society will be just as unwilling to tolerate the abusive treatment of people with disabilities as they are the mistreatment of others. I hope for a day when, if information became known about substandard treatment for people with disabilities, the public would rise up with the same energy and outrage as when the abuses of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib became public. Our tolerance of a different standard betrays the degree to which people with disabilities are still inherently devalued.
— It will be recognized that institutions and other highly controlled congregate settings are not good for people and they will become a thing of the past.
— We will finally figure out that it is not only unethical but downright illogical to respond to people’s desperate attempts to assert a degree of control over their lives by imposing greater and greater amounts of power over them.

Just write if you’d like the full text of any of these. I believe each person (and kids’ families) know better than anyone what’s best for them—the job of professionals is to provide supports that people want and offer opportunities for full, engaged lives as envisioned by the person who chooses to receive supports from that organization.—Nancy

Posted on February 28th, 2010

wondering says:

My child was physically abused at a school using ABA/PBS—in a district using mandated PBS…this is why I ask. Several of those on the list of signatories declined to help in any manner (to put it politely). It seems we all agree that abuse at JRC is terrible, but it can’t happen within a PBS framework. And, if it happens, it will be buried.

PBS can often be a stringent form of ABA—especially in the US school systems. It pervades all areas and restricts freedoms. Please see the three-tiered PBS model to be aware of what is being advocated for. The top tier is utterly restrictive.

Let’s close ALL the bad schools. Be they the School of Shock or the School of PBS … who has greased all the political wheels but is just as insidious and harmful.


Unfortunately, Nancy Weiss seems to be lacking in her recognition for how the behavioral treatments she endorses (with the backing of TASH) will affect the public who is heard from the least. The question has never been whether or not restraint and seclusion will be used or whether or not it will become seen as even more necessary. The goal is to promote PBS as a comprehensive behavioral approach for everyone.

The only request that politicians are making with proposals such as this H.R. 4247: Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act is that one particular ideology be awarded the title of absolutely correct and that one particular agency be given supreme charge of enforcing disciplinary action of societal misfits that challenge that correctness.

Tools

The public education system in the US was designed to create dependence on the system as being the ultimate authority. It is therefore, not necessary to have everyone be educated in the belief system they designed for it to be secured as a powerful tool. It is only necessary that those who are educated in this way to be the  best able to dominate those who aren't.

Once the tools of manipulation and domination are created compliance to a set of nationalistic goals is much easier to demand. Nationalism encourages laws that are void of reason. Nationalism is dependent on militarism so militarist virtues are what a nation with empirical aspirations will encourage the public to learn. Building an empire depends upon aggression so those who are deemed to be the most successful in a culture with these goals will be the ones who are best able to intimidate and/or manipulate the most people.

Many academics absolutely believe that they do and should own, regulate, and police the Internet and any other method the public may use to communicate. The purpose for understanding and helping others to understand has been completely obstructed by academic debates where the winner of the competition that academics design and regulate can reinforce their illusion of superiority.

Many of the so-called skeptics within the autism wars I find on the Internet seem to reinforce an ablest value system. Many are constantly using names to insult people's intelligence and attempting to show how autistic people already have superior intelligence based on typical standards. This is self-defeating and contrary to the goals of neurodiversity.

Insults that describe selfishness, ignorance, self-serving attitudes,etc., are also meaning stupid, dumb and retarded. These insults are typically used to describe someone who is thinking independently from the established norm. Therefore, using such insults in this way support the established norm, which ultimately restricts diversity and independent criticism so all the problems with the established norm are not only not solved but the evolution of intelligence is stifled.

As I said in my previous post Mindectomy, the control of the condescending and manipulative discipline known as behaviorism fits very well into further establishing the US public school systems as a military training ground. Using such a value system to train public students will further normalize or otherwise exclude any diverse and/or independent thinkers.

All the social programs that have been described as progressive in the public school systems have claimed to encourage inclusion. However, this inclusion is meant to promote socialization by way of either normalizing or excluding the students. This ideal is not contradictory to the encouragement of further institutionalizing dissidents and social outcast that could not otherwise be controlled.

The failure of our other forms of institutionalization are now encouraging a firmer control by the federal government on the behavior of school children so the children are taught early how to be obedient to the state.

As terrible as I'm sure the Judge Rotenberg Center is, it is not operating independently from how behaviorism is being practiced in other institutions. Using words of propaganda such as "positive" and "support"does not in any way show how the form of Applied Behavioral Analysis known as Positive Behavioral Support will use restraint and seclusion in any safer or more humane way.

Industry depends on repeat business and government contracts ensure industries the ultimate authority to create and demand the only rules that govern them.

In the same way that John D. Rockefeller created a monopoly of Standard Oil by controlling every stage of the production and distribution of its products the US government understands very well the importance of controlling every aspect of the industry of public education.

Science and mathematics are languages, which are created to understand the nature of our relationship to the environment. Since very few people are given an opportunity to understand these languages and therefore contribute to the expansion and depth of understanding these languages are claiming to promote, everyone's understanding of that nature is severely limited.

In the same way that industry in the United States has promoted institutionalization, behavior modification works as well at promoting consumerism as it does in neutralizing the progress of our educational system and making it more exclusive. Unless we want our nation to be nothing but an empire protected by a strong military, we need to consider other ways to engage people in learning that are less manipulative and domineering. If freedom and democracy are the goals then intimidation will not serve as an effective tool for accomplishing our goals.