Monthly Archives: June 2010

New VA Research Could Explain Lasting Effects of PTSD

Gentle readers! I come to you today with a delighted feeling that I do not believe is caused by the half life if a painkiller! Today I read an article in my paper version of Stars and Stripes that had to do with the intersection of disability and veterans and I was not instantly thrown into a bout of contemptuous paper shredding! I mean, really, I could make party favors and possibly go into business selling paper mache animals for children to beat with broom handles in hopes of gathering candy! But I am a slightly morbid person some days, especially when the painkillers aren’t working.

But in all seriousness, this article, about the long term effects of PTSD on the body, has some points which I will now discuss with you in a non-concise manner! Not the least of these details, relegated to two brief paragraphs, is the fact that the people at the VA are doing one study specifically aimed at women who served in the Vietnam War, acknowledging that while women did not serve in combat, that the war affected them in very real ways:

Women did not serve in combat during the Vietnam War but many experienced trauma while serving as nurses and care providers to the wounded returning from battlefield, Magruder said.

“No one has studied the mental health of these women,” she said. “Their experiences were certainly different than the men, but they had other experiences. Some of these women were the last people to hold the hand of an 18-year-old kid who was dying.”

Gee, their experiences were different from men, you say? No kidding? *ahem*

One of the biggest myths that I encounter, being the go-to girl on military matters in some social justice blogging circles is that combat veterans have the patent on PTSD, which is not only incorrect, but also erases the experiences of countless other people whose lives are destroyed by the ways that PTSD is still misunderstood. I’ll take two paragraphs if it means that the VA is finally getting around to accepting the idea that ladies might actually have what it takes to handle the VA being wrong (about ladies having PTSD, that is).

The VA is now trying to weasel out of the fact that they were ordered to look into this PTSD business a long time ago — a decade but who’s counting, amirite? — but decided to throw Congress the bird and a “Ah do what Ah WANT!” Eric Cartman impression. The National Vietnam Veterans Longitudinal Study, expected to help create new policies and effect changes for incoming veterans with PTSD by 2013 might have actually done some good for people who are already having trouble convincing doctors at the VA that their condition is real if the VA could have been arsed to get this show on the road back then. A decade ago they were one less war behind.

It’s nice that they are starting to get around to looking into things like the correlation between living with PTSD for years and developing other conditions. Things like cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, asthma and diabetes are common among Vietnam vets who have been living with PTSD for decades, and according to the article there are some who believe even the immune system is affected by years with PTSD. But you can’t help anyone when you aren’t doing the research to find out how.

As the VA is becoming sandwiched between claimants from war era veterans from major wars that have left physical and mental scars on so many, it is important that they get their act together and start doing what they were told to do a long damned time ago. Having the longitudinal data from Vietnam veterans will more than likely prove useful as more and more people come home from two fronts to their old lives and attempt to readjust, and it could lead to better services for more veterans from any war. I can’t say that I have a lot of faith in them to get it together. As Charles Trumpower, a disabled Marine who tours the country speaking to veterans about PTSD notes, not a lot has changed in the last 35 years.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to see this research and this effort going underway, but wow, readers, should this have been done a long time ago. I can’t help but think of all the people that this could have helped.

Recommended reading for June 8, 2010

Becky CK at Happy Bodies: Why do we apologize for our bodies?

Why do feel the need to apologize for our bodies’ needs and justify the choices we make about them? As I continue to incorporate body positivity into my life, I still find myself listing off what I ate all day to justify why I’m hungry now, or explaining, in detail, what made me so tired that  I need a nap.

IrrationalPoint at Modus dopens: The “what-it-is-like-ness”

Sometimes people, usually neurotypical people with no sensory impairments, don’t use these, almost invariably because it looks ok to them. They can read it, so they don’t understand that other people won’t be able to.

Cara at The Curvature: Rape Victims Tell of Mistreatment by the NYPD [Trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault]

And while all of the details of these women’s identities are not disclosed (and thus any or all of the following issues may have in fact applied to their stories), the accounts do not even begin to explicitly discuss the brutal and specific challenges faced by victims who are of color, trans*, disabled, poor, queer, and/or sex workers, due to the prejudicial hierarchies regarding who are “real” victims of sexual assault.

staticnonsense at I Am Not: “Exceptionally Creative”

Someone I know recently made the claim that Schizophrenia and “exceptional creativity” are “practically the same”.

This stems from a very common misconception that I see, regarding the understanding of Schizophrenia and other schizotypal spectrum disorders (Schizotypal Personality Disorder, Schizoid Personality Disorder, Paraoid Personality Disorder and in some cases Schizoaffective Disorder). Specifically, stemming from ignoring the negative effects it can have on ones life in favor of the positive, in order to try to paint the spectrum as nothing but shiny rainbows and glitter.

thingsimreading on Tumblr: i remain forever confused…

i remain forever confused by people who are condescending, derailing and offensive but think because they said it all in a “nice way” that the fault lies with the person who points out what was hurtful in what they said/wrote.

Adrienne Dellwo at About.com’s Guide to Fibromyalgia and CFS: New Diagnostic Criteria For Fibromyalgia

Until we have a diagnostic test that’s based on blood markers or imaging, we probably won’t have a perfect diagnostic test.  (This is true of many diseases, especially neurological ones.)  Still, researchers believe they’ve come up with something that works better — they say when the looked at a group of previously diagnosed fibromyalgia patients, the tender-point exam was about 75% accurate, while their criteria caught it 88% of the time.

Kids these days! The “Generation Y” panic, privilege, and erasure

Recently, I read this odd article, penned by Judith Warner, in the New York Times–one in a stream of many that detail how excessively awful the current generation of young people (read: young workers) is at putting its collective nose to the grindstone, sucking it up, and generally not acting like a bunch of brats, or something.

Many of us have heard about, or come into contact with, some of these bright young things. They are heralded — or, more commonly, blasted — as naive, entitled, too optimistic, and over-confident. In many of these articles, their numerous faults are listed: They don’t know how to dress professionally! They expect to march into the workplace of their choice and immediately start making a six figure-salary! They think they are perfect! They want praise all of the time! (Does no one who writes these sorts of articles stop to consider that many human beings want praise when they complete a task to the best of their abilities?) They have tattoos, dyed hair, and iPods! EVERYBODY PANIC, because the American workplace is apparently going to be dragged down by Generation Y’s entitlement, narcissism and laziness! This narrative, however, seems to apply mostly to a very specific subset of the population (and even the picture that accompanies the NYT article reinforces this): young, able-bodied, middle to upper-middle class, college-educated white people.

This erases, or conveniently ignores, a hell of a lot of folks who are not young, abled, middle/upper-middle class, and white. It erases young workers who may not have had the “expected” educational opportunities (such as college), or who had to take more than the expected four years to finish their degree, or who did not finish school. It erases people whose parents or family members may not have been quite so “involved” in their education, or in their lives at all. Of course, it also erases young people with disabilities — both those who cannot work, and those who want to work but who may be bumping up against various narratives such as that of the “entitled” Generation Y kid. Some of us have psychological issues or disabilities that put us completely at odds with the “overly-confident” and “entitled” stereotype that apparently befits the current generation — because we cannot stop worrying despite the fact that we are supposed to be totally optimistic and confident all of the time, always thinking that the roads leading to our perfect job will be lined with rainbows, fluffy bunnies, and gold.

Some of us have physical disabilities, chronic pain, or chronic illnesses that prevent us from working 40-hour weeks (or more); asking for accommodations or disclosing our condition(s), we fear, may make us look “entitled,” or like we do not want to put in the time necessary to work our way up — even if this is not the case. The fact is that many people, and many young people, with disabilities are already at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to the labor market and making a living. Not only are many people with disabilities, at least in the U.S., more likely to face lengthy stretches of unemployment and/or live in poverty regardless of age, but many face additional hostility, discrimination, and unreasonable demands, both in the workplace and from society at large because of their disabilities.

While I am not saying that these over-entitled Generation Y-ers don’t exist (I’ve had run-ins with quite a few of them, myself), I am struck by the fact that the narrative surrounding them is so dependent upon erasing or ignoring certain people whose bodies and experiences do not fit the “expected” attitudes about labor that have been traditionally upheld by American culture. Many of these attitudes, furthermore, rely heavily on binaries that reinforce who “counts” and who does not: You either work full-time, or you’re lazy. You’re willing to be mistreated in the workplace and do whatever it takes “for the job,” or you’re a wimp. Suck it up, or go home. If you’re not making enough money to live on or are poor, you just aren’t working hard enough. If you ask for “accommodations,” you’re asking for too much — just do your job! You have to work hard to “make it,” and if you don’t work hard enough, it’s your fault. If you don’t like your job or face daily mistreatment, you can always quit and find another one, right? But if you can’t, it’s your fault, and why did you quit that job, anyway? These attitudes surrounding work affect people with disabilities in a wide variety of age groups and generational cohorts, and this is a crucial part of why they are so important to critically question and examine.

The message for Generation Y, in general, may be “Get over yourself,” but the message for those who do not fit the characteristics of the “average” Generation Y worker is more severe — and ultimately more dire.

[Cross-posted at ham blog]

Recommended Reading for Monday, June 7, 2010

A yellow button reading 'people want jobs: employment equity now!
Description: Bright yellow button: Disabled People Want Jobs! Employment Equity Now!

PSA: Opt-Out Required to Prevent Your Yahoo! Mail Contacts From Being Used for Social Network

Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced a plan to try to leverage its Yahoo! Mail users’ contacts into a social network of friends who will receive your Yahoo! Updates. Once the most visited website in the world, Yahoo! now ranks fourth worldwide, reaching about a quarter of all Internet users each day. Like Google Buzz’s ill-fated launch using Gmail contacts, Yahoo! wants to jump start its social networking plans with the hundreds of millions of people who already use its email and messenger services.

While Yahoo! made some effort to avoid the worst aspects of the Facebook and Google Buzz privacy controversies, ultimately the plan conflicts with two principles of the EFF Bill of Privacy Rights for social network users. The program will begin a roll out next week, and Yahoo! users need to opt out if they do not wish to participate.

Prayer will not cure my blindness

In the last two months I have been approached not once, but twice by young men who want to cure my blindness by praying for me. I must first tell you that as a non-believer, this made me very uncomfortable. To be nice I allowed the prayers to take place. Both times the young man was surprised that my blindness had not been miraculously cured.

Princess in the City [Please note comment rules before commenting at Seeking Avalon]

And just as I was beginning to understand the level of boredom and lack of focus that might lead individuals to think getting drunk is an amazing idea – It occurred to me, that Sex and the City is a 21st century fairytale.

To be specific, a 21st Century Fairy Tale for white, cis, het, currently able bodied western, North American, Christian leaning/familiar women.

Should disability be funny?

Should we laugh at disability? I’d like to make myself clear… I believe teasing, taunting and mean spirited gestures have NO place in our world. But is there such thing as “good clean funny”? Sarah Palin was outraged at Family Guy when the character Chris dated a girl with Down Syndrome, but Andrea Friedman, the actress who voiced the girl has Down Syndrome herself and is an advocate for people with disabilities. Friedman said herself she felt a good sense of humor is healthy and that she positively portrayed a person with a disability.

You can’t come in if you are a wheelchair user!

We parked up and had a look about and decide on somewhere to eat, I couldnt find a dropped curb so my OH and the lad went in first and were being show to a table and the chairs were being pulled out for them by a waiter when I entered, the manager told me I couldnt go in because they didnt have room for wheelchairs but Im welcome to sit outside!

I ask him why I couldnt go in, we dont allow wheelchairs he said, I asked why again, we dont have much room , I asked if he knew that was illegal and he said so what and I lost my temper after about 5 minutes of disableist insults, he said my Oh and lad were welcome but unless I could walk to the table I wasnt and either I sat outside or we all do we wernt welcome.

Headlines:

US: L.A. Unified to shutter 200 classes, campus for disabled students: The schoolchildren will be transferred to other classes, sometimes meaning longer commutes to other schools. It’s part of the beleaguered district’s attempts to deal with a $640-million deficit.

The Philippines: DepEd laments failure of House to ratify Special Education Act The Department of Education (DepEd) expressed its disappointment on Saturday after the House of Representatives failed to ratify the Special Education Act of 2010 due to lack of quorum during its last day of session last Friday.

Canada: Margaret Trudeau open about disorders Margaret Trudeau does not seem like someone who suffers from bipolar disorder, as she jokes candidly about dinners at 24 Sussex Dr., and speaks openly about meeting Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and their life together.

US: E.C. Glass Graduating Senior Sees Past Her Disability Yes, this article is as bad as you think it is. The witty pun is totally because she is blind, and it’s so amazing that a blind person is graduating from high school. But I include it because people don’t really seem to think these articles exist.

Dear Imprudence: Thank You for (Proving) Your Service!

Slate Magazine’s Dear Prudie got one right this week, with a letter from a woman who’s husband is a U.S. military veteran, who recently lost his leg “due to a medical condition that was unrelated to his time in the military”. According to the letter writer, her husband has adjusted well to his recent amputation, however, it is the passers-by who seem to not be able to just let it go. She writes:

[O]ften strangers will pause to talk to him while we are in public, and these well-meaning individuals will ask whether he is a veteran. When my husband answers yes, it is inevitably assumed that he was injured in Iraq, and he is often thanked for his sacrifice for our country. One elderly gentleman hugged him with tears in his eyes! While my husband is a veteran and technically qualifies for the warm gesture, it seems deceitful to allow these people to believe he suffered a grave injury in Iraq. We don’t want to share my husband’s complicated medical history with strangers, but we don’t want to discourage people from giving thanks to vets in the future. What should we do?

Prudie’s response is pretty solid, in my opinion here. People with disabilities face nosy questions all the time. Everyone from children who can’t help but be unabashedly honest to grown-ups of the well-intentioned and otherwise variety. People with visible disabilities are constantly questioned about the whats, the hows and the whys of their conditions, as if they are under some obligation to share private pieces of their personal medical information. PWDs with invisible conditions are scrutinized by even their close friends when their health varies from day to day.

Veterans also face a barrage of these questions even when they are able-bodied, from people wanting to know about their service, where they’ve been, even if they have killed someone (hint: you should NEVER ask a veteran this question). Sometimes this line of questioning ends in tears and hugs and thank yous because people are grateful and some even want to share common experiences. Sometimes this creates tense situations. One place where I was stationed in California this actually resulted in people throwing their drinks on sailors and calling us “baby killers”, resulting in a lockdown on how and when we were allowed to leave the base or our houses.

The place where this intersects creates a wholly unique situation. Like Prudie says, people see a person of about the right age with a disability and presume that this person must be a combat-wounded veteran. Cue the questions and thank-yous, and demands for, once again, medical information that is none of their business. All based on presumption.

I agree with Prudie here. “Didn’t” and her husband are under no obligation to correct these people, no matter how well intentioned they may be in their demands for information or genuine their appreciation of his service. It is an invasion of his privacy, of their privacy, and it should be enough to appreciate the sacrifice that they made as a family (however much of that time was spent together) and he himself for his time spent in service, because it is a sacrifice of time and life. If these strangers want to assume that his loss of leg is related, then that is on them, but there is no litmus test of injury or illness that is required in order for your service to be appreciated.

Being patient and understanding that some of these people mean well is one thing, and it reflects well on Didn’t and her husband if they are willing to do so, and thank them for their gratitude. But when it goes beyond a thanks and violates their comfort levels they should feel no guilt over drawing a line and letting them know that they would rather not discuss it.

Signal Boost: Questionnaire about UN Convention on Rights of Disabled

The European Network on Independent Living (ENIL) launches quick questions to ask what’s happening with the UN Convention:

Do you think the Convention will make a difference in the next 12 months? What do you think could strengthen the Convention? Have you seen any changes by your governments? Have you seen any changes around article 19?

Questionnaire

Plain text copies are also available contact d.pearson@enil.eu

I took the questionnaire. There are 22 questions, two of which want your to type your thoughts. It’s focused on EU countries, and asks about how you feel about your government’s ratification (or not) of the UN Convention.

Chatterday! Open Thread.

This is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy.

What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in your part of the world? Got any questions for your fellow FWD commenters?

Today’s Chatterday is hosted by a Death Star watermelon.

Watermelon carved to look like the Death Star

A note to commenters: Please, as with other threads, try to keep the length of your comments down. A usual guideline, in the absence of extenuating circumstances, is to stick to around three pithy paragraphs or so, and to avoid making back-to-back comments.

Fighting To Get Back And Other Cute Metaphors

Moderatix note: This post will be United States Military centric, as that is the perspective I offer, and the broken system within which I currently exist and attempt to navigate.  Other voices are welcome and experiences appreciated within the context of the conversation, since I can not pretend to know every thing about every military experience from every branch in every country.

A while back I wrote a little bit about Permanent Limited Duty, or PERMLIMDU as we called it in the Navy. It is the status you are placed in when you are injured or sick enough that you can no longer perform your job to military standards and the military has a board decide how much you can do, how long you can do it for, blah blibbity blah.

I also get a daily subscription to the Stars and Stripes newspaper because I like to read while I am on the toilet. It seems appropriate.

So it stands to reason that I would come across this article from Stars and Stripes (the online and the paper may vary a bit, I haven’t matched them up side by side, but there is usually a slight variation if I can find them in both mediums at all) about servicemembers who are “fighting to get back”. Actually, in the online version the headline uses a cute joke “but results may vary”. I tried hard to laugh. *ahem*

Now, let me be perfectly clear: I applaud the efforts of the military members who worked through their injuries and fought to return to their jobs. I hesitate to applaud this type of story, because these always, always, especially when covered by the military, feel “inspirational” to me, even though the veteran in me applauds the veteran who is them, irrespective of the intersection of race, gender or other marginalization, for getting back to any kind of duty status. Because the military is an animal that will eat the less than perfect alive and shit them out and bury them, forgetting they ever existed.

According to the article, “200 soldiers, 58 Marines, 33 sailors [I would have been 34] and six airmen have petitioned for, and won, the ability to continue to serve even though the military has found them unfit for duty”, which is nothing short of remarkable considering the way the military has about tearing people down. What is interesting is this article and the way it highlights some aspects of this marginalization, and glosses over others altogether.

Most interesting to me is that of all of those people, they could not find one woman to highlight? Hmm… funny that. I can’t imagine that not one of those many people who came back to PERMLIMDU status was a woman.

Most aggravating to me was the story of Spc. Jake Altman, whose story was almost presented as a he-said, he-said, except that they casually dismissed Altman’s feelings of being mistreated. He mentions being put on patrol in a damned war zone without his prosthesis, because his superior said that it looked like it was hard for him to see others doing it better than him. So, what? Was it Sgt. O’Brien’s job to teach Altman a lesson in hard knocks? Because something tells me that Altman had already skipped ahead a few courses in that one and could happily give O’Brien the Cliff’s notes explanation. Not that I think he would listen. Because a good number of TABs tend to not really try to get it when PWDs try to describe their experiences to them.

Altman contacted the Warrior Transition Unit, a wonderful thing the Army has going on, and has eventually sought discharge. I can empathize.

Because at the end of the day, no matter how much you want to stay in and do the job, what others think and how they treat you matters. It matters enough to drive you out. I think that if someone did a study or a survey or wev, they would find that people who transitioned out of the military due to illness or injury might possibly have depression due to a crushing loss of the camaraderie, but that is my lay opinion based on my own experiences.

The dismissive air of the article over Altman’s attempt at returning to deployment, and the following segment, subtitled “Up To The Challenge” as if Altman somehow had a moral failing, as if the treatment of those around him, who judged him outright and convicted him of being less-than due to his injury.

My job in PERMLIMDU would have been much different. I am not even exactly sure what it would have been, to be honest, because… well, in my mind I still gave up. Getting injured in the military, or ill, or anything that makes you less than a perfect TAB specimen, eats you alive. It starts to kill you from the inside, knowing that you are a failure, because you have been conditioned that anything less than the best is unacceptable. The glimmer of hope that is PERMLIMDU gives you back a sliver of that self worth.

On Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter: It’s not ok for police to immobilise PWD for questioning

This post is not spoily for the Dexter TV series to date, except perhaps for the premise. It contains a very minor spoiler for an event that occurs at the start of Dexter By Design. Comments may contain spoilers up to the Chapter Ten of Dexter by Design, but no further please..

At the moment I’m reading Dexter by Design (2009), by Jeff Lindsay. It is the fourth book in the Dexter series, a thriller/crime series with a touch of spec fic, set in current-day Miami. Dexter Morgan and his foster sister Deb are both police officers working in homicide; Dexter a blood-spatter expert and Deb a sergeant. Dexter is also a serial killer, brought up by his police officer foster dad to follow “The Code”, to only kill murderers who have escaped justice, and to not get caught.

Last night I read the scene below, and it hit all my rage buttons. Coming on the heels of the Ayr incident where a police officer stolen a woman’s mobility scooter, and the episode in Colorado where a teacher duct taped a disabled 12-year-old’s only communicative hand to his wheelchair, it was all too much.

The scene is excerpted below the cut. Additional warning for lots of taboo language; NSFW.

Continue reading On Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter: It’s not ok for police to immobilise PWD for questioning