So, to conclude, where what they do to themselves or someone else is worse than a little shock, I say yes. For when they are just being an inconvenience/unruley/noisey etc, I say no.

I agree to an extent. Basically there are things in place that aren't as cruel as shocks with help children / people who haven't the mental capacity to not hurt themselves in some way, such as scratch mittens, a version of what your mother did, because she needed to. There are existing ways of dealing with the behaviours mentioned in the article, such as behaviour therapy and more positive attention from the carers. Self-harm is usually (though granted, not always) a sign of unhappiness which needs to be dealt with, rather than treating the self-harm and ignorig the unhappiness.

I would need major convincing that a child who was being considered for any 'treatment' such as this had failed to respond to all other possibilities, and even then I still can't agree with it 100%, due to the contents of the rest of the article. A small shock used as a 'reminder' not to attack someone, yes, I can see the value in that. However the whole program is just far too open to abuse (such as using shocks for behaviours that don't put anyone at risk) and for that reason I don't think its use can be accepted or condoned.

Um, that was me agreeing with you mostly, but pointing out that there are plenty of other options in between 'hurting yourself in an uncontrolled way' and 'being given electric shocks when someone else decides to press a button'.