Re “No more waiting — put a stop to skin shock therapy” (Letters, May 27): In an all-too-familiar exercise of blaming the victim, Sarah Barton demonizes me and other parents of children at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton who suffer from otherwise untreatable, life-threatening, violent, and self-abusive behaviors (eye-gouging, head-banging, hair-pulling, and worse) by claiming, without evidence, that parents agree to this preventive therapy, a two-second skin shock, “for all sorts of reasons — embarrassment, frustration, social pressure, financial pressure, and hopelessness.”
Not so. We love our children and have discovered that this therapy allows them to live as happy a life as possible. My own son has finally been freed from behaviors so self-destructive he would no longer be alive. Now he regularly visits his family, attends concerts, and walks through community parks, to say nothing of living a healthy life devoid of numbing, disorienting pharmaceuticals.
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Just why Barton believes she knows so well what’s best for my child that she can publicly pontificate about my motivations escapes my comprehension.
Paul E. Peterson
Wellesley
