Colored Spade

Little black girls in small Maine towns never do. Little black girls with white parents in small Maine towns are just confused. And little black girls with mental illnesses and white parents in small Maine towns are very confused.

I still don’t know my first mother, but I would like to. I know she has mental illness, like I do. I know I have a sister. I’d like to know them very much. I feel lost, drifting. It doesn’t matter how much the polar bear loves the panda cub, the panda cub will still never be a polar bear, even if she tries to bleach away her blackness.

“It”

So, me and my aide were at the park with one of my dog-walking clients. This lady and her dog come in (we are the only people there) and naturally we start chatting because her dog and my client are playing. She directs all of her conversation to my aide, who says “EVA’S a dog walker and SHE sometimes comes here” etc.

Bearing Witness

This story doesn’t surprise me. I hear from families with children with disabilities and my nephew also has a disability that requires equipment. Claims are denied and families scramble to keep the child involved in the community, using whatever they can afford. As a child grows into adolescence, he/she may find himself/herself in the same situation as the Orlando youngster- using equipment designed for babies and toddlers even when it’s not medically necessary. (There’s an important distinction there- I’m not blaming parents for using suitable equipment for safety or medical reasons. ) It can happen to adults too.

Transcript: Autism Women’s Network interview with Kristina Chew: The ABCs of IEPs

Here’s a transcript of Sharon daVanport and Tricia Kenney’s interview with Kristina Chew about Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) for the newly-founded Autism Women’s Network radio show.

…
The Autism Women’s Network mission statement is: “To provide effective supports to autistic females of all ages through s sense of community, advocacy and resources.” We also want to let everyone know, too, that our radio show is going to be supportive of all people on the spectrum, and today is a really good example of that.

We have Kristina Chew as our guest today. Kristina is a professor at Saint Peter’s College, and I believe, if I’m not mistaken, Saint Peter’s College is in New Jersey….

Personal Experience from Kate, who recovered from Anorexia

I am Kate, 31 and in recovery from anorexia. My experience of seeking treatment has taught me that often you have to fight the system and keep persisting until your voice is heard.
I first sought treatment for anorexia when I was in the early staged of the illness, aged 17, back in 1995. My family doctor weighed me and put me on a course of antidepressants. He told me that even Princess Diana had an eating disorder and implied that it was simply a phase. I felt like a fraud as I’d gone there hoping for help with my eating disorder and received nothing but medication.

Over a period of a year I saw my doctor monthly to be weighed and each time my medication was either increased or switched. Unsurprisingly, the medication had little or no impact on my illness. Eventually I was misdiagnosed again, this time with Chronic Fatigue and referred to a specialist who gave me yet more medication and put me on a graduated exercise programme to rebuild my strength. Looking back it is rather ironic that the very treatment of exercise was prescribed to an anorexic and years later my exercise addiction landed me in the EDU!

Human Dignity for People with Disabilities

You may remember that this past July, Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on behalf of the Obama administration. The disability rights treaty is a comprehensive promise made by nations across the world progressively promoting the human rights of people with disabilities.

The convention is revolutionary. Last year, on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ACLU Disability Rights Fellow James Felakos wrote that the convention describes disability not as “an individual’s condition but rather as the flawed interaction between that impaired condition and society’s lack of adaptation to it, departs radically from conventional thought and is a core concept of the Convention.”

Why I never expect to be right

And understanding language was only part of it. It seemed to me that everyone other than me was moving along to the pattern of music that I couldn’t detect. And that every time I tried to insert myself into the pattern, no matter how hard I tried the music turned dissonant and terrible and pushed me out again. So I would never have guessed that my ability to turn written into spoken words, or my general ability to find and memorize and analyze the world through patterns, had been impressive enough for a five-year-old to earn me a high score on a test that people believed all sorts of ridiculous things about. (Meanwhile the people who tested me thought those abilities meant so much that they would disregard my receptive language scores and all other scores that didn’t make sense to them. My guess is that my being white and middle-class also helped them forget.). I still remember the test and the manner in which I worked out the answers. I literally didn’t know the meaning of the word “test”. But my answers were apparently impressive for a five-year-old (not so much for a fifteen or twenty-two-year-old, but that’s another story.)

The Reformist The Radical

activists friends and i talk a lot about balance and energy. about how to work the system and how to do what we love (organize, create) but come to think about it, no, not everyone faces that problem. people who grow up as translators and bridge builders—folks who live in multiple communities, folks who had some privilege and were favored in some way by the system, mixed folks— are the ones who travel back and forth never knowing where they fit, what safe space looks like, when to switch up tongues. people say that both the reformist and the radical has to exist but no one feels the obligation to be both, to carry everything, like we do.

our communities fought so hard to be at the table, how could we not respect that & politely say no thank you to sitting there?…honestly our communities that we are working with don’t have the privilege for us to disengage, they need the resources, the funding, the connections that come w/ sitting at the table. (especially with disability and the daily things we need being so tied up in government). …we could spend a month with all our energy going to trying to fund something ourselves or we could use the dominant culture language skills we have to spend a day writing a grant application. …or these folks aren’t members of our communities but could be amazing allies if we put some time into it.

News:

Health Care Plan Could Cut Home Care

The impact of the legislation on Medicare beneficiaries has been a pervasive theme in the first week of Senate debate, which is scheduled to continue through the weekend.

Home care shows, in microcosm, a conundrum at the heart of the health care debate. Lawmakers have decided that most of the money to cover the uninsured should come from the health care system itself. This raises the question: Can health care providers reduce costs without slashing services?