Help change business practices toward people with disabilities!!
Many people with disabilities face challenges when trying to access everyday goods and services.
Ensuring accessible quality customer service to all is becoming a business and legal imperative.
PSN – Performance Solutions Network and LLR & associates are seeking your opinions. We want to understand the major barriers and issues you experience when attempting to access every day goods and services and quality customer service. We also are seeking your ideas and suggestions on what can be done to make your customer service experiences better.
Daily Archives: 26 April, 2010
Recommended Reading for April 26, 2010
As I’m writing this, I’m still on my trip, so again – very quick! [The conference has been awesome, y’all. Seriously – I met so many great people and had so many great conversations. And people liked my presentation!]
The Lady Thing I Won’t Talk About, Even With Feminists
So, I have been thinking (ahahaha, I know, right? I NEVER do that). And it was because of the Jezebel post about the MTV True Life episode, which I just watched, on Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
And, you know, it’s MTV, so it’s not the most tasteful or thoughtful show, but: I don’t really want to talk about reality TV. I was thinking about how being feminist and being aware of privilege makes me really struggle with my own BDD.
I was diagnosed four years ago. It’s definitely gotten worse as time as gone by, and exponentially worse after the rape. It’s also not a disorder that stands alone; it ties in to my bipolar disorder, my anxiety problems.
Autistic Teen Charged With Assault, Disorderly Conduct
Via Terri over at Barriers, Brigdes and Books comes news that an autistic teen was charged with assault and disorderly conduct a few weeks ago, after he became physically aggressive when there were four fire drills in one morning at his school. We do not know whether an appropriate behavior intervention plan was in place, as should have been the case.
I have written a manifesto. It’s short as manifestos go… and I think fairly low on scary ramblings (edit, edit, edit!!! 🙂
Here it is:
I believe in the Disability Rights Community.
That is to say, I believe that disability is a natural part of the human experience that is often misunderstood by our culture and I believe in the people with disabilities and their allies who recognize that human beings are undiminished by disability. I support these people who strive for respect, recognition and rights.
I came here to study at a university. I took a job from approximately 299 Americans who, presumably, could have done it as well as I did. (Interestingly, the other person on the shortlist told me that he believed hiring me was an act of discrimination and that I had “dogged” him.) I have brown skin. I married an American. I was told I was only into him for the visa. (Almost 20 years later, I still worry about whether I have to prove our relationship is genuine.) I use the health care system. I have paid my speeding ticket and been to traffic school. I pay my taxes. I very definitely pay my taxes; I have been audited and found to owe nothing. And a little while ago, I began the process to naturalize myself as a citizen.
If you live with a disability, I encourage you to speak up about your experiences. Make a YouTube video, start a blog, participate in a message board. And let me know about it.
I look forward to spending a moment with you.
Lean On Me
Lean on me, when you’re not strong, I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on.
I read a recent article in the Chicago Tribune about the increase of peer support groups as mental health treatment, rather than wholly centering on a physician or therapist to guide treatment. The article talks about how people with mental illness use these peer support groups to get
“a chance to discuss and maybe get help for problems that, all too often, their friends, families and even therapists didn’t seem to understand. How do you feel comfortable at social gatherings when everyone there knows you tried to kill yourself? Should you abandon your religious faith if you’re prone to thinking that you’re God? How do you handle your illness when your child has it, too?”
I obviously believe in the benefits of this kind of peer support and discussion, or I wouldn’t be writing about my mental health issues on a blog for people with disabilities. I have gotten invaluable support, information and insight from friends with mental health disorders. Not only the big issues, like reassurance that depression will eventually lift and the sky will not fall on my head. Some of the most useful stuff I’ve gotten is a discussion of which facial scrub best deals with the flaky dry skin caused by taking lithium. (I use Pond’s Fresh Start Exfoliating Scrub with microbeads! They do not send it to me – I buy it.) I also strongly support the centering of people with mental illness and their own experiences.
But I’ve also had a couple of times when being so close to friends with mental illness may have been a bad idea. My roommate and best friend in college also was struggling with newly diagnosed mental health issues of her own, and a crisis for one of us tended to precipitate a crisis in the other. I vividly remember sitting in the waiting room of the emergency room as she was being admitted, folded up in the plastic chairs in the waiting room, reading The Bell Jar while I waited for her to be processed. And going into an immediate spiral that ended with me checking myself into the hospital a few weeks later. Where, despite being strip searched and in a carefully controlled environment, I learned from my fellow patients how to find things to use to self-injure.
For me, the scariest thing about depression is how seductive it is. Just giving up, since nothing matters or will accomplish anything anyway, and letting myself turn out to be the failure and disappointment I know myself to be. (Says the depression voice.) And getting well, and staying well, and maintaining the wellness, can be so exhausting that it can be tempting to just chuck it all. So I can find myself fetishizing the experiences, the memories. The accessories – the things I used to self-injure, the dark rooms and shapeless clothes. The feeling of being insulated from the world, wrapped in cotton wool, removed.
That’s why these support groups scare me. I saw that article and I felt it in my stomach. I can close tabs and scroll past these things on the internet, but in a room, talking to someone, I can’t just put my hand over their mouth. Maybe this is something totally unreasonable, an unfounded superstition I have, but I feel like it might pull me back in.