Monthly Archives: August 2010

…And At This Point, I Don’t See It Stopping Anytime Soon

Courtesy of amandaw I bring you this stellar article that once again rubs in my face how brilliantly miserable the VA is scratching the surface of realizing what is wrong with they way they even see women veterans. If you read along carefully you can even see the lightly sugar-coated condescension artfully woven in TIME writer Laura Fitzpatrick’s story. It really is a piece of work, from the dismissive way she re-counts the testimony of the “presumed” treatment of a victim survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a medical professional (because they NEVER do THAT) down to the detailed description of the very girlie attire of the staff at the impressively mostly women-run facility in Palo Alto. I crave to read the way a man’s shoes click-clack on a hospital hall’s floors in such a manner. But it is a very cliche description etched in the halls of descriptive-writing history, INORITE, so who am I to argue with the laws of good writing. I am, after all, only an amateur.

The news isn’t that the VA is failing women veterans. I’ve known that for quite some time. Really, I have. I have encountered some of the treatment described to some degrees first-hand:

I remember having to hunt around for a toilet in an ill-fitting paper gown at my own exit screening, past several other open, occupied exam rooms. I was the only woman there. They had no sanitary napkin to offer me and it was an embarrassing scene trying to find a place where I could insert a tampon. I was fighting back tears when I finally found a (presumably) unisex bathroom.

So My Dear Friend Ms. Fitzpatrick’s dismissal of Anuradha Bhagwati’s story, the one she gave as testimony before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs is ill-received. It isn’t too far-fetched for me to imagine the way she recounts “the ham-handed manner in which a male gynecologist, upon being told by a patient that she had been sexually assaulted, left the exam room and — presumably to beckon a female staff member — yelled down the hall, ‘We’ve got another one!'”. I can easily see the inept professionals at the inadequate facilities just stumbling over how to even grasp a way to provide basic courtesy to a patient who isn’t like them. And failing. Miserably.

The news here is that they seem to have no idea how to fix it, and no set, immediate time line in mind for seeing progress. Sure, Secretary of the VA, Eric K. Shinseki recently, at a forum at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, has said that he hopes to have the VA ready to serve 100% of veterans in 25 years, but what is going to happen to this generation of women veterans who are already being ignored? To the women veterans of the wars past who have been fighting for help all along already?

Because their concerns are already being swept aside. You can already see as things like their urinary-tract issues being categorized as simple “gender differences”, because women react to the desert differently. Sure, possibly. I’ve seen this intimated a few times. People looking to explain away womanly behavior in high stress situations. Oh! They didn’t want to stop the convoy! Well, why is that? Maybe because we know that women are far more likely to be killed by their fellow servicemembers than by combat in combat zones that they learned defense mechanisms, as confessed to by Col. Janis Karpinski. Women tended to drink less water, as little as they thought they could get away with, to avoid using latrines or having to stop roadside alone with men out of fear of sexual assault. And it killed some of them. If you remember, though, Karpinski was even dismissed as a woman scorned because of the Abu Ghraib scandal, anyhow, so we can’t win for losing. She was just ratting out her old boss because she got in trouble.

Some of it is true, though. Most of the VA’s 144 hospitals do not have the proper facilities to even offer privacy to non-men patients, let alone provide gynecological care, or as I mentioned above, pads. The TIME article notes a hospital in Salt Lake City which announced that it delivered its first baby this past October (the article mentions that its average patient is 78 and male), but the day after the little girl’s arrival they didn’t know how much she weighed (I cringe to think how much more they couldn’t provide) because they didn’t even have an infant scale.

Women veterans are spiking in numbers. They, funnily enough, are not the same as men. That means they are not the same as the average patient, such as that the Salt Lake City hospital are used to dealing with, and their health care with be different. Even if you line up the matching parts, the treatment for heart disease and blood pressure, to my lay knowledge, is not the same. The numbers have been growing since The Great War, and surged after we had the need to call the next one World War II. It took until 1988 for the VA to start providing even limited care to women veterans.

Today, women veterans in need of help from the VA are of an average age far younger than the average male veteran (for obvious reasons) and have different needs. They are at least twice as likely than civilian women to be homeless (with only 8 facilities in all the U.S. available to help homeless women veterans with children). They are likely to be mothers when they are. Many of them returning from combat zones — yes, combat zones, why do you ask? — are coming home to families and are more likely than their male counterparts to get divorced following combat connected tours. They are really damned likely to get asked if that is their husband’s or boyfriend’s shirt they are wearing, or asked for their husband’s social by a thoughtless agent on the phone. They are the forgotten in war. Doubly so if they served in a branch of the military that isn’t on the forefront of the public’s mind as “really the military” (as slave2tehtink has said, Aircraft carriers tend to not be zipped around by civilians, yo). Extra-specially so if you had a thinkin’ job, like “nuke” or “spook”, and your Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or Military Sexual Trauma (MST) didn’t happen “In Country” (Iraq or Afghanistan), the only sanctioned places where these things can occur, you know.

It’s frustrating as hell. And while I don’t believe that the VA is intentionally forgetting about us, I don’t believe that they are doing everything that they can to make sure that it gets better faster.

And honestly, I don’t think writers like Ms. Fitzpatrick are helping. But maybe I am jaded and have been at this for too long. But the VA needs an overhaul, stat. Pretty words from the Secretary of the VA and promises that it will be better in a couple of decades just aren’t good enough.

Assistive Tech & Pop Culture: “Miss Smith, without your glasses you’re beautiful!”

If you ever want to confuse people, tell them glasses are assistive devices that assist people with lower-level vision impairments, and then compare these assistive devices to such things as arm crutches or wheelchairs. In my experience, they’ll often insist that people who wear glasses are normal. (Not like people who use wheelchairs or arm crutches or any other type of assistive tech, no no, those people are disabled. And everyone knows you can tell who has a disability and who doesn’t just by looking at them, right?)

I’ll often introduce people to the idea that our image of what “disabled” looks like is constructed by talking about glasses as assistive tech, just assistive tech that is generally accepted by society. For a lot of people I interact with every day, getting glasses is routine, and you’ll see glasses everywhere on the street – advertisements for fancy glasses frames! and for new types of lenses! Glasses for everyone! (For certain definitions of “everyone”.)

At the same time, media & pop culture still use glasses as “code” – either for This Is Serious Work, or This Person Is A Nerd/Geek (and a particular type at that) or a scientist/doctor, or a Serious Scholar. This is true whether the person uses glasses all the time, or if they just use them for certain things. On Leverage, for example, when “the bruiser” character Eliot puts on his glasses he suddenly becomes totally sexy and I’d totally hit that because I’m shallow it’s usually an indication that his persona for the episode is Egghead/Nerd or Expert on something. Neal, who is a “recovering” con artist, does something similar in White Collar when he’s doing close-up nerdy-type work on his forgeries, or when his persona is “doctor”. I also clearly remember Elle Woods putting on her Serious Glasses and getting into her Serious Clothes for when she wants to be taken seriously as a lawyer in Legally Blonde. Glasses = Smart!

What brings this back to Glasses As Assistive Tech is that glasses are very normalized to people watching the shows, and yet glasses aren’t all the common as just a Thing The Character Wears in the show. I know why this is – glasses cause light-reflections, glasses make it harder to read someone’s expression on the screen, glasses can be dangerous in fight scenes, if they have lenses they can get scratched up and cause more problems, and if you’re not someone who wears glasses all the time I’m betting they’re distracting.

But, of course, movies and television aren’t the only media we consume. Comics, novels, and video games don’t have these problem. You can give every character in a novel glasses if you want, and it doesn’t really matter. And yet, when I was reading romance novels & chick lit all the time, I can only remember one heroine who wore them, and she went through the whole “Oh, but no one will find me pretty! Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses!” (And, despite her glasses being a huge thing in this novel, the cover art didn’t show her with them. Not that this is surprising, but still.)

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, glasses are assistive tech that is very normalized, and yet doesn’t appear very often in our media. When it does appear in our media, it’s often a code for something. This person is Smart. This person is Studious. This person in Playing A Role. This person is Eliot and his glasses make him really really hot omg why are there not more episodes of him wearing glasses and being friendly? And if we can’t see this incredibly common type of assistive tech in our media being used as just a Thing That People Wear, it’s no wonder we so rarely see people using assistive tech in our media just because Some People Are Blind or Some People Uses Arm Crutches or whatever.

Commenting Note: Sadly, I am still on Thesis Time, and likely will be until the end of the calendar year. Comment-approval/responding to will be slower-than-usual on account of this.

Recommended Reading for August 10, 2010

Wheelchair Dancer at Feministe: On the Cover [trigger warning for discussion of violence]

Regardless of how disability plays out in Aisha’s world, the vast majority of readers of TIME live in a culture that understands disability as tragedy. As shocking. As among the worst things that can happen to you (bar death). Mainstream American culture thinks it knows disability and knows how to read it. Ms. Bieber has a history of photographing disabled bodies[. . .]But the work she does in the Real Beauty series does not come through in this photograph — perhaps because of the context and placement of the image. Here she (and or the editor) uses Aisha’s disability to trade upon the readership’s sympathies and their horror: this and other unknown kinds of disability are a direct result of the US departure from Afghanistan. This is not about Aisha; it’s about the message of the article.

Cripchick at Cripchick’s blog: tell me who i have to be to get some reciprocity?

don’t feel the way white supremacy creeps into your life and plops itself in the center?

in the last wk, white ppl have:

  • told me how to rearrange my words as to be more approachable.
  • made my need to have ppl of color time about them.
  • asked me invasive medical questions about my body.
  • thanked me over and over for teaching them about oppression.

Cara at The Curvature: Disabled Student Assaulted on School Bus; Bus Driver Watches and Doesn’t Respond [trigger warning for description and discussion of severe bullying]

Most readers here who have ever ridden a school bus will have at some point been on at least one end of bullying and harassment. Many will have at different points throughout their childhoods and adolescences acted as both bullies and victims — myself included among them. Big news stories since I stopped riding a school bus have left me with the impression that little has changed. School buses are places where bullies, harassment, and violence thrive. And as all current or past school bus passengers know, students with disabilities, particularly cognitive or intellectual disabilities, are especially vulnerable.

Daphne Merkin at the New York Times Magazine: My Life in Therapy

This imaginative position would eventually destabilize me, kicking off feelings of rage and despair that would in turn spiral down into a debilitating depression, in which I couldn’t seem to retrieve the pieces of my contemporary life. I don’t know whether this was because of the therapist’s lack of skill, some essential flaw in the psychoanalytic method or some irreparable injury done to me long ago, but the last time I engaged in this style of therapy for an extended period of time with an analyst who kept coaxing me to dredge up more and more painful, ever earlier memories, I ended up in a hospital.

William Davies King at PopMatters: In Defense of Hoarding

To be sure, a special label like compulsive hoarding seems required by many of the heart-rending cases they recount, people neck-deep in the slough of their despond, overwhelmed by more whelm than can be weighed. But sadness and dysfunction are hardly rare or new. What is new is the social imperative to ram open that front door. Bring in the wheelbarrows, the commanding case worker, and the camera—especially the camera, which enlists us all in the drive to evacuate these cloacal dwellings. Reality TV rolls up its sleeves, puts on the rubber gloves, and hoards the evidence while [authors] Frost and Steketee stand alongside the labyrinth, notepad in hand, giving that Skinnerian nod.

Recommended Reading for Monday, August 9, 2010

It looks like almost all of my links today (save the last) are mainstream media news stories or press releases. I haven’t looked at the comments because I like not being angry and hating people, but I have never found the comment section of these places to be awesome for nuanced discussion, so read with care.

Air Canada fixes ill boy’s broken wheelchair

A terminally ill boy whose specialized wheelchair was broken on an Air Canada flight from Toronto to New York has been given it back after the airline had it fixed.

….

Stratten said the Air Canada response has “so many lies it’s not even funny.

“They did not send an electric wheelchair last night, there was one sitting in the lobby this morning that was not adequate. We were never told it was there,” he said in an email. “They never called to say it, they never called after hearing it was inadequate and the replacement that just got here is a scooter people use to go shopping, and is worse than the first.”

Having traveled with AirCanada and helped Don deal with the subsequent broken wheelchair, I will just link back to this previous link round-up of ‘flying while crip’ fun times.

Canada: Provinces to Team Up on Drug Purchases

Canada’s premiers are joining forces to rein in ballooning health-care costs by pooling their purchasing power for drugs and medical supplies.

The premiers unveiled plans on Friday to set up a national agency that would be responsible for purchasing $10-billion in prescription drugs a year as well as medical supplies and equipment.

Having one entity responsible for drug purchases for all 13 provinces and territories would lower costs on a major contributor to the growing tab for health care.

I saw this as a good thing, Don saw it as a bad thing. What are your thoughts?

Canada: Access for Sight-Impaired Consumers Press Release:Access for Sight Impaired Consumers Board Backs Human Rights Complaint

In January 2008, the Access for Sight Impaired Consumers (ASIC) Board approved a motion to back the filing of a human rights complaint against the City of Richmond. The complaint seeks to resolve the City’s unwillingness to provide access to public information in an audio format – specifically street names at controlled intersections equipped with an accessible pedestrian signalling (APS)device.
While the City is refusing to provide what amounts to public information through this audio or voice messaging format, it is also refusing to use similar voice messaging at approximately 60 “special” crosswalks which are already equipped with pedestrian activated amber warning signals. Without an APS device at these “special” crosswalks, pedestrians who are blind or sight impaired are unable to utilize such crosswalks in a safe and independant manner. Given there is no universally recognized tone to indicate the amber pedestrian signals have ben activated (unlike the well recognized “cuckoo” or “chirp” at controlled intersections), voice messaging is emerging as the accepted standard by other Metro Vancouver municipalities. For reasons unknown, the City of Richmond is unwilling to follow the successful practice of neighbouring municipalities.

Australia: Disabled Australians subjected to hate crimes

Dr Sherry says thousands of Australians experience disability hate crimes each year.

“Some of it goes back to social Darwinist ideas about survival of the fittest; some of them talk about their images of disabled people being smelly or dirty or bad karma, possessed by the devil,” he said.

AM spoke to a former Australian adult guardian, the statutory appointee who oversees the affairs of adults with disabilities.

He said he had not encountered the issue of hate crime against people with disabilities.

Dr Sherry says that is “exactly the level of ignorance” that allows it to continue.

UK: New report: Council websites are getting slightly worse

Using websites is now second nature to over 80% of the UK population, with web users going online to browse, shop, book tickets etc. So why is it in our latest annual council usability report, looking at the top 20 council websites, that there’s been a slight dip in the usability of council sites?

Leading councils in this year’s report included South Tyneside with a 70% usability score, South Holland with 68% and Chichester with 66% – not particularly top scores given these are supposed to be the best sites. Areas of disappointment included navigation, error handling, calls to action and progress indicators to support users when conducting online transactions.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Race/Gender/Media: Considering diversity across audiences, content, and producers [via Ithiliana]

Purpose: The third edition of this edited reader will present an array of scholarship designed primarily to introduce undergraduates to considerations of race and gender in the media. Though written so that lower level students will be able to engage with the content, I want the book to be interesting and sophisticated enough to also appeal to juniors and seniors, who may be the largest consumers of the text. Some lower-level graduate courses (specifically those that also enroll advanced undergrads) also may find this of value. The text will emphasize critical and reflective thinking about these issues, and will encourage critical consumption of mediated messages. The first two editions contained mostly original work, but revisions of recently published works are more than welcome. To get a sense of the very wide array of material I want this book to contain, I encourage you to explore the tables of contents for the first two editions, and other information available on the publisher’s websites.

Sorry to link & run, folks. Hope your day is being slightly more under control than mine! *grin*

National Association of the Deaf Videos

When writing in my own space, I tend to make a lot of jokes about how much I enjoy doing “history in the future!”, by which I mean a lot of primary sources are on-line. Last year, for example, I randomly put the name of one of the people I was writing about into Google, and out popped a bunch of articles he’d written about his theories on Deaf people in the 1860s, which drastically changed my thesis.

For those of us who like to highlight disability related history, the internet can be a huge boon. Whereas as little as five years ago, reading Susan Burch’s description of the Hotchkiss videos for the National Association of the Deaf would have been my only way of learning about them, various video-sharing websites (especially YouTube) allow for us to see these videos, and get a better idea of their impact and importance, for ourselves.

Transcript, as provided by pdurr on YouTube:
Description: John Hotchkiss is an older white man wearing a suit and signing for the camera.

Excerpt of Hotchkiss discussing memories of old hartford from the NAD Motion Picture Project
translation of excerpt by P. Durr – NOTE translation’s accuracy is not confirmed.

“Another time Clerc called a boy who had passed by his house asking, “Please tell (name sign of bent L handshape going downward from top of lips to bottom of chin indicating a beard) S-T-E-W-A-R-D to please have wood delivered to me.” “My pleasure,” the boy replied and went on his way. But this boy completely forgot about this message as his mind was set on playing. Thus, it totally slipped his mind to inform Steward (name sign) of Clerc’s message of his need for wood and Clerc never received any.

A few days passed and again Clerc approached this boy, tapping him with his walking stick and holding him by the shoulders. “I told YOU to PLEASE tell Steward to bring me wood and you said, ‘Ah huh, Yes, Yes, Yes’ but instead you went off and completely forgot. Darn you for forgetting.” and he went off in a huff. As days went by, Clerc would continue to bump into this boy and would always say “Darn, you’re the boy who forgot” (hand at mouth) and stomp off.

The boy was embarrassed and became weary of Clerc’s insults so he decided to go to him and asking his forgiveness for having forgotten to deliver the message to which Clerc let out a joyful laugh and said “alright, you are forgiven, you are forgiven, be on your way.” And with that they departed.

Context, of course, is important. Hotchkiss is telling a story about Laurent Clerc, who is considered the father of the US Deaf Community – for certain definitions of Community, which I will get to in a moment. Dr. John Hotchkiss himself is a very important member of the Deaf community, having been part of the first generation of Deaf students to attend Gallaudet University. Once he graduated he took up teaching, and was a passionate advocate for the continued used of Sign Language in teaching Deaf children.

In the 1910s, the National Association of the Deaf began making several films of Sign Language masters such as Hotchins, and they toured the country. While they were mostly seen by Deaf students, there were hearing students who also saw these ‘silent’ films, exposing them to “the beautiful language” as well.

These films were created as a means of combating the oralist movement (requiring Deaf people to learn to lip read and articulate verbally, a movement that also attempted to ban Sign Language in schools), as well as recording the history of US Deaf people. Looking at the present, the increasingly easy access to video technology is leading to a similar growth in easily accessible videos by and for Deaf people, many of them on YouTube.

What is not obvious from this one video but would be if you went seeking out the rest of the National Association of the Deaf videos from roughly this time period is that “the beautiful language” that they’re preserving is pretty much the beautiful language of white men with the means to attend Gallaudet University. Gallaudet accepted one class of women pupils, and then refused to accept any more for over a decade. Even afterwards, women pupils were discouraged from attending, because they risked “stealing” jobs from more-deserving men. As well, there was a great divide between white and non-white/people of colour in terms of Deaf education. There was a segregated Deaf school system in parts of the US, and Black Deaf schools developed their own form of Sign Language. You can read a bit more about this at the Black ASL Project. Historians like Susan Burch make it very clear that there was no attempt by white Deaf leaders to support Black Deaf people, and only limited support in the non-segregated school system of the North and Western US.

I like to highlight some things in disability history because I find it frustrating that, if you want to learn about the history of disability in a non-specialized context, you’re probably only going to learn the tragedies. I’ve taken classes that have talked about forced sterilization and the eugenics movement, both in North America and abroad, but never had a class that dealt with the foundation of the Deaf press, say, or the National Fraternal Order of the Deaf – even in classes that were about Fraternal Orders in the US. I’ve taken classes that have focused on the resistance of marginalized people, but somehow fail to mention decades of resistance by people with disabilities, and often fail to mention even the success of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

We have a history that is more than tragedy, that is more than the last 20 years of fighting. It is not all brave plucky fighters, and it is certainly not all wonderful people who had no prejudices and only celebrated good things. People with disabilities are people, and I think talking a great deal more about this history is part of the way we fight against stereotypes and the boxes people put us in.

Commenting note: I am, as I said, on Thesis Time right now, which basically means I’m hardly at all around. If you decide to comment, please keep commenting policies in mind, and I’ll do my best to keep up with them.

Just

My beginning is like this: I was born a full three months before my expected arrival.

I apparently couldn’t wait the whole nine months to come into the world. This early arrival was rife with complications, however: a brain hemorrhage, one collapsed lung (I still have under-armpit scars from the surgery), and, the kicker — cerebral palsy as a result of premature birth. After they found the hemorrhage, the doctors did not expect me to survive.

The hemorrhage stopped on its own. No one could figure out why.

I was in the ICU for a long time after that — in a special plastic case to protect all three pounds of me from hospital elements.

My early birth was unexpected, as was my survival of the mysterious hemorrhage. Both of these things happened for no particular reason.

*

There are a lot of people who seem to subscribe to the “just-world” theory of events — that is, anyone who has anything bad happen to them has done something to “deserve” it. One sees this attitude thrown around quite a bit in relation to disability and illness — for the smoker who gets lung cancer, for some people who become severely disabled due to accidents, for the “angry” or “repressed” person who is diagnosed with a deadly illness. One sees it in so-called New Age “theories” of illness — that illness is a physical manifestation of bad karma or some other buzz-word often appropriated from a non-Western belief system.

But what of those who are “born this way”? What could they possibly have done in their “past lives” to have disability and/or illness be a feature of their current life? Could I have been, for example, a dictator or Bathory-esque ruler in a past life? I am not one for metaphysics, so I am inclined to think that the answer is no. Besides, were there definitive proof of past lives, it’s not as if every single New Age person could have been a saint in his/her/zie’s past life. So when these folks try to utilize my CP, or my depression, or my fibromyalgia as “proof” that I am or was a bad person and they are good people who inhabit a world of unicorns pooping glitter or somesuch, I tend to get a little upset and/or snarky at their pushing pseudo-enlightened rationales as making any sort of sense.

Disability is not proof of a “just world.” It is not a punishment, nor a tragedy for those of us who live with all sorts of disabilities, or whatever dichotomous thing that various social and cultural attitudes have constructed it as. It is one facet of human experience.

For many of us, disability just exists, or just happens. And for whatever reason, this terrifies many currently-abled people.

Signal Boost: US Conference on Abuse of Adults with Disabilities

(via email)

21st Annual NAPSA Conference: Healing the Culture of Abuse

WHEN: November 8-10th, 2010

WHERE: Westin Gaslamp Quarter, San Diego, CA

HOW: Go to: hNAPSA Annual Confernce Registration. NAPSA Members use code: MEM2010 for discounted rate

On November 8-10, 2010, the National Adult Protective Services Association (NAPSA), partnering with the University of California Irvine, Center of Excellence on Elder Abuse and Neglect, will host their annual national conferences at the Westin Gaslamp Quarter Hotel, San Diego, California. Other conference partners include Dr. Nora Baladerian and the California District Attorneys Association.

The Archstone Foundation has provided funding for thirteen $1,000 scholarships for APS professionals from California, and the Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, United States Department of Justice is also providing scholarships and other support to the conference (Note: Points of view expressed in this event are those of the organizers and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice).

2010 NAPSA Conference Registration Fees

Pre-Conference: $75 ($55 with NAPSA Conference Registration)

Members: $325

Non-members: $400

These rates are effective until 10/08/2010; after which the conference member fee increases to $400, the non-member fee to $475, Pre-Conferences to $100, and Post Conference to $120. Please be sure to note the refund policy on the conference registration site.

NEW! Post Conference* $95 ($75 with NAPSA Conference Registration)

*See details about National Financial Abuse Summit below

Four Pre-conference Intensives:

Monday, November 8, 2010 (8:30AM-12:00PM):

a.. “Too High a Cost: The Adverse Effects of Elder Abuse”
a.. “Cultural Jeopardy in Adult Dependency & Disability
a.. “Abuse of Deaf and/or Hard of Hearing Women”
a.. “Legal Advocacy for Persons with Developmental Disabilities”

NAPSA Conference:

Monday, November 8 (1:00pm) – Wednesday, November 10 (5:00PM):

Eight (8) breakout rooms Three (3) plenary sessions Over 45 presentations Over 70 presenters Expanded Exhibit area and Social/Networking opportunities

Keynote Presenters include:

Ollegario “Ollie” D. Cantos VII, National Disability Rights Leader; Member, President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities

Marie Therese Connolly, JD, National Elder Rights Advocate and Author

Bill Benson, NAPSA National Policy Advisor

The conference will provide many highly acclaimed speakers such as: Nora Baladerian Ph.D., Dean Hawley MD, Candace Heisler JD, Holly Ramsey-Klawsnik PhD, Mark Lachs MD, Scott Modell PhD, Laura Mosqeda MD, Robin Rose, Daniel Sheridan PhD, as well as many new innovative speakers.

Recommended Reading for 06 August 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Belfast Telegraph: Junior sports boys and girls tap into the Olympic spirit

Kevin Murray, PE and Sport Development Officer at Queen’s Sport said: “Through Queen’s involvement in this project we hope to challenge commonly held negative attitudes about people with disabilities and to inspire and encourage more disabled and non-disabled children to become more active in sport.

The Daily Femme: Sexual Assault and PTSD in the Military

But while the access and compensation for PTSD treatment has been expanded for those men (and women) who have spent time in combat zones, receiving similar compensation for women suffering from MST-induced PTSD is much harder. For instance, the DoD only retains records of significant harassment cases for up to two years, so by the time women come home and seek PTSD treatment, those records could have been discarded.

BBC Radio 4 Programmes: Court of Protection Cost Me £50,000 [Radio programme] (Thanks to Matthew Smith for the link!)

A special court system is supposed to protect the interests of the vulnerable and the elderly. It’s appointed thousands of ‘deputies’ – or guardians – to ensure their money is properly managed. The system was reformed three years ago – but have the changes worked?

There have been allegations the system is slow, bureaucratic and open to abuse. In some cases lawyers are appointed to oversee people’s financial arrangements – and families claim they charge excessive fees. In other cases, it’s a relative who’s appointed as a deputy – but are there adequate safeguards to ensure they’re not misappropriating the money? Fran Abrams investigates cases where the system has left some vulnerable people worse off.

(Transcript is in PDF form. Apologies for that.)

Interview here.

Disability Scoop: Chemical Castration Drug Peddled As Autism Treatment

Parents who believe that excess mercury is to blame for their child’s autism are turning to yet another unproven treatment: a cancer drug that causes the body to quit making testosterone and can lead to impotence.

Disability Direct News and Events Blog: England Blind Squad Unveiled

Dennis Hodgkins, regional development manager for the English Federation of Disability Sport, said: “The chance to support an international series between England and India’s blind cricketers is for us significant, it demonstrates the commitment made by the governing body of the sport, plus other partners.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com

Vulnerability Indexes, Homelessness, and Disability

(Note: this originally appeared in a modified form on my tumblr.)

Vulnerability indexing is a new trend in homelessness services. It started in LA and NYC but is now being used a bunch of cities and localities of all sizes around the country. Instead of traditional outreach services, these projects use a “vulnerability index” survey to collect data from street-based homeless folks (rather than people in shelters, living in cars, doubled up on couches, etc). The data is then used to rank the homeless people, in order, by their “vulnerability,” or likelihood of dying within the next 12 months if they remain on the street.
That ranked vulnerability list is then used as a priority list to provide the people with services, starting with housing.

In providing housing and services, these programs use a “housing first” model, which means that unlike the vast majority of homeless housing services, individuals are NOT required to be clean of drugs/alcohol or engaged in mental health services prior to moving in. Once they move in, they’re provided with all the supportive services they want, including substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, education and job training and placement assistance, etc.

I strongly support these programs and have been very excited to see them gaining traction in LA. (we have project 50 in downtown LA, project 30 in the San Fernando Valley, and others pending right now.) I also think these programs are of special interest from a disability perspective because of the extremely high prevalence rates of mental and physical disabilities among the long-term chronic homeless, and the way these disabilities make it difficult, if not impossible, for this group of homeless people to move towards stable permanent housing.

Here are some of the reasons I think this approach makes a lot of sense:

1. It targets the population that needs it the most, re-opens discussions about serving the chronically homeless
These projects target a subset of the homeless population – the chronically homeless. This group is defined as people who have been continuously homeless for at least a year. This is a minority of the overall homeless community (about 23% of all homeless), as most people cycle in and out of homelessness in periods of 3 months or so. The chronically homeless are generally single adults, not families, and generally have some kind of substance abuse issue and/or mental disability and/or physical disability. Most policy analysts believe that nearly every chronically homeless person has either a mental or physical disability.

This population is considered extremely difficult to serve, as lots have tried to engage with services in the past and not found it useful, so are considered “service resistant.” This is a nice way to say that most people and agencies have pretty much given up on them and don’t have any hope of bringing them into services, much less into stable housing. This is also a nice way to say that these homeless folks have correctly figured out that most homeless services aren’t appropriate or beneficial for them, so there’s little point in trying to engage with service organizations. This is partly because homeless services are not really set up for people with disabilities – getting necessary accommodations in a shelter is enormously difficult because of the already extremely limited resources available. If you have PTSD and need a door that locks in order to sleep, a shelter is not for you. If you have a service animal, shelters are not for you. If you need even a minimal level of nursing or medical care, shelters are not for you. (Not that the streets are better at accommodating disabilities.)

These chronically homeless people are, unfortunately but frankly, likely to die. the vulnerability index looks at factors that “place them at heightened risk of mortality,” including 3 or more hospitalizations or ER visits in the last year, aged 60 or above, cirrhosis of the liver or end stage renal disease, HIV+ or AIDS, or co-occurring psychiatric, substance abuse, and chronic medical conditions (tri-morbidity). When this tool has been used in communities, the most vulnerable person identified by the tool usually has all of those risk factors and has been homeless for 20+ years. Can you imagine how difficult it would be for a 62 year old man who is HIV+ and has a physical and mental disability and an active substance abuse problem to enter a shelter, especially after over 20 years of street homelessness?

Traditionally, this group of the chronically homeless is a group that people have given up on. Not just the public, but even homeless service providers. But the first iteration of this program, in the Times Square area of NYC, has produced before and after stories that are flooring. A woman who lived on the streets for 20+ years as a heroin addict is now housed and working as the concessions manager at the movie theater in Times Square. Looking at the before and after pictures seemed like she’d moved backwards in time – she looked 20 years younger. These are the people who we walk by on the street and feel like they’re beyond help and beyond hope. We just don’t think people can come back from that – and these programs are proving that assumption to be absolutely wrong.

Another benefit of focusing on the most vulnerable folks is that it communicates that same message – you are not beyond help or hope, there are programs that can provide meaningful and beneficial assistance – to the homeless community itself. If folks see that the agency promised housing to someone with a substance abuse disorder, a mental disability, and 20+ years on the street, and then delivered on that promise, they’ll be motivated to participate with the agency and trust them in a way they wouldn’t trust the shelters or outreach teams that hadn’t housed that guy in the past. These programs usually see a “tipping point” once the first few, most vulnerable, people are housed – then the rest of the community believes in the promise of potential housing and is motivated to cooperate with the service agency.

2. These programs make economic sense.
These targeted programs are usually seen as an alternative to simply ignoring the homeless and continuing to not spend city and county funds on them. Because there are not a lot of homeless services or programs targeting this group, the perception is that we are currently spending zero dollars on them, and any targeted program will be a dramatic increase in funds directed to the chronically homeless. This could not be more inaccurate. Actually, this group is consuming an astounding amount of public funds, through county health programs, police and jail funding, and public benefits such as food stamps or general relief funds. A recent study by the Economic Roundtable here in LA found that these most vulnerable folks are consuming over $8,000 in county funds PER MONTH, through multiple ER visits, jail time for quality of life infractions, and health care services received in jail. When these folks are moved into housing – even fully subsidized funding with inclusive supportive services – it’s a net savings for the government.

So this popular conception that we’re not already spending a bundle on these chronically homeless folks is simply inaccurate. We, as city and county governments, are already spending an enormous amount of county health funds, justice system funds, and social system funds on this group, with no discernible improvement in their quality of life or life expectancy. (This New Yorker article is a great discussion of how these costs can mount up for a single homeless individual.)

I know that cost savings is likely not the most important aspect of these programs for this audience, but these economic arguments are extremely powerful in persuading localities who do not understand why they would benefit from targeting funds and assistance at the chronically homeless.

3. The overall economic effects of the project help those homeless who aren’t directly targeted.
The economic benefits of these programs mean that there will likely be additional homeless service dollars available for use at other places in the homeless continuum of care – meaning that the program could generate benefits for the non-chronically homeless as well. This is much needed. Currently, in LA, it’s really hard to get into a homeless shelter. that’s because the “emergency” homeless shelters – where you’re supposed to stay for 30-90 days before moving into a “transitional” shelter – are backed up. Because all the transitional shelters are full. Because there’s no permanent housing available, so there’s nowhere to transition to from the transitional shelter. So the transitional shelter is serving as permanent housing and the emergency shelter as transitional shelter and the folks who need emergency shelter … sleep in their cars, or on the floor of a friend’s apartment. This system could benefit from some more cash to build permanent housing – money that might be available were we able to reduce the significant existing county expenditures on the chronically homeless.

4. Housing First and other harm reduction policies make sense.
Currently, a lot of housing placements require that the person moving in be clean and sober and, if they have a mental disability, be actively engaged in mental health treatment services. As you can imagine, this turns into a lot of chicken and egg problems. If you are a homeless person living in LA’s Skid Row, which is overrun with illegal drugs and alcohol, and have no money to afford rehab or treatment, you are never going to be eligible for that housing, even if you actively want to stop using. You don’t have anything to lose while living on the street – even going to jail gets you a bed and some food – so there’s absolutely no incentive to stop using. If you’re likely to die within 6 to 12 months, it’s likely that being high during the interim will be more pleasant than being sober.

If you’re placed in an apartment, though, you quickly learn that ongoing abuse is going to cause financial problems in affording the apartment and social problems in not disturbing other neighbors. There’s also an incentive – you don’t want to lose the apartment. The programs have found that people are motivated to enter treatment when receiving housing, even if it’s not a requirement of maintaining housing. There have been similar results with mental health treatment.

Even aside from the incentive effects, these Housing First programs are humane. I know a bunch of people who wouldn’t be able to get apartments if they had to show clean drug tests to get the apartment and to maintain tenancy, but they’re allowed to do that because they have money.

SO, in short: even though it sometimes feels a bit squicky to be ordering homeless folks in terms of likeliness to die and priority for housing, these programs make a lot of sense conceptually and have had amazing effects on the ground. Of the 50 most vulnerable in downtown LA, all of which had disabilities of some kind, 41 are currently in housing. I don’t see how this could have been done any other way.

Recommended Reading for 05 August 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Raising My Boychick: Vocally crazy: on privilege and the risks and benefits of being out

Openness, vocalness, outness are good for an invisible, marginalized group: we’re here, we’re [crazy], get used to it! It helps to replace highly distorted stereotypes with real faces, real lives, real persons. As more and more people in a group are out, more and more people not in that group know someone who is — and suddenly, they start caring. No longer is it just “those people” who have to worry about discrimination and hatred and violence and the loss of rights and dignity; it is someone you know, someone you might care about, someone you’re willing to stand up for. These are all very good, very important things.

But openness, vocalness, outness can be dangerous, even lethal, for an individual who is marginalized: when someone comes out as mad (or queer, or trans, or a rape or incest survivor, or any other oft-invisible oppressed way of being), they might risk losing their job, losing their children, losing their life. Outness cannot be dictated, imposed, or required. It must not be. It can only be chosen, based on an individual assessment of risk and worth, and the outcome of such calculations will change with each individual, and often with each situation.

Longwindania: PSA

One of my friends is working on a sexual education book for people with disabilities and their partners. Shanna’s very knowledgeable and passionate about responsible queer-positive, disability-friendly, kink-friendly sex education.

Disability on Dreamwidth: New licenses premises access law in Scotland

The Barred! amendment, passed by the Scottish Parliament as part of the Criminal Justice and Licensing Act, requires landlords to show how their premises can be accessed by disabled customers, when they apply for a license. The amendment is an important milestone in Capability Scotland’s Barred! campaign which aims to promote better access to pubs and clubs for disabled people.

Valley News: Temporary Custody

The unknown male subject found in the home? He was actually the 34-year-old African-American who owns the home and has lived there for four years.

And the part about taking him into temporary custody?

Hartford police neglected to say that in the process he was: blasted with pepper spray; struck with a nightstick; handcuffed, wrapped in a blanket and hauled — naked — out of his home, according to a neighbor and what the man says police later told him. When the neighbor tried to tell cops that the handcuffed man on the pavement was the homeowner — not a burglar — he said he was threatened with arrest for interfering in police business.

Moving Hands: Ashley Fiolek: a deaf motocross racer (Thanks to maxporter for the link!)

Today, I watched the final womens motocross race. I was about to fast-forward through it – I dislike motocross and I dislike racing, so it’s not a great combo. But then I noticed that someone was signing, so I hit “play.”

Turns out that the woman who was signing is named Ashley Fiolek. She is a deaf 19-year old who has won gold in the past. The segment that I’d seen was one of those special segments where they take a prominent athlete – usually somebody who is looking to repeat a previous victory – and interview her or him. In this case, they asked Ashley how she got involved in motocross and so forth. She communicates in ASL and uses an interpreter. (According to her bio on Wikipedia, she actually went to a deaf school as a child.)

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com