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Two years ago, the Food and Drug Administration gave itself a deadline. The agency would eventually decide whether to ban electrical shock devices that have been used for decades to manage self-injurious behavior in people with intellectual disabilities and autism.
The deadline, pegged to the end of May, has now passed without a verdict, leaving disability rights activists and former recipients of these shocks worried that they will continue. The practice — dubbed a form of “torture” by United Nations officials and “punishing” by the American Academy of Pediatrics — has mostly fallen out of favor in the United States in recent decades but is still used at one institution: the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts.
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