Jennifer Msumba is on the autism spectrum. For seven years, she was treated at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts, where she received painful electric shocks aimed at modifying her behavior. She describes being strapped, spread-eagle to a restraint board and shocked multiple times before she left the center in 2009.
"It's so scary. I would ask God to make my heart stop because I didn't want to live when that was happening to me. I just wanted to die and make it stop," she told CBS News correspondent Anna Werner in an interview at her mother's home outside Boston. "I thought, they won't be able to hurt me anymore."
Msumba provided testimony to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration panel in April. The panel met to discuss a ban on using electrical stimulation devices to modify aggressive or self-injurious behavior in people with severe emotional problems and developmental disorders such as autism at the Judge Rotenberg Center, or JRC, the only known facility in the country that uses them.News report on JRC here
Extended interview with Jennifer Msumba here
