All posts by lauredhel

About lauredhel

Lauredhel is an Australian woman with a disability.

What is “healthcare”? A tale of a murderer, a victim, and a tattoo.

[*** WARNING for detailed domestic violence description from the fourth paragraph on. ***]

My local paper has been abuzz with righteous taxpayer outrage over the State paying for a tattoo removal for a woman, who I’ll call JMN.

The story of JMN disrupts a number of neat stereotypical societal narratives about domestic violence, about victimhood, about killers, about the meaning of ‘healthcare’.

To go back to the beginning, at least to the beginning of the public part of the tale, JMN is a convicted murderer. She was found guilty nine years ago of murdering her “Internet lover”, MW.

According to published accounts of the trial, JMN’s husband MH, an abusive, violent gang member, found out about her relationship with MW, and “punished” her repeatedly. He violently cut off her hair, leaving her needing skin grafts to her scalp and hand. He beat her repeatedly, with fists, with pool cues, with a belt. He poured boiling water over her. He forced her to have a tattoo reading “Property of [MH’s full name]”. He punched her and choked her, leaving her needing hospital treatment.

And after all of this abuse and intimidation which left her in fear for her life, he visited and threatened the lover, then ordered JMN to kill him.

JMN shot MW under her abusive husband’s orders, backed by this violent intimidation, and she was convicted of wilful murder. She has been in custody ever since, with a minimum sentence of fifteen years.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, JMN now has mental health issues. (These are not described in detail in the press, nor should they be.) She was a victim of unspeakable violence (as well as being a perpetrator under duress), and is currently seeking criminal injuries compensation – which is what has triggered off the righteous-taxpayer-indignation. Her criminal injuries compensation was initially refused, and the case is now under appeal.

But the Righteous Indignant Taxpayers haven’t stopped there. The papers are now pawing over the rather insigificant detail that the State may partly fund tattoo removal for JMN. The Department of Corrective Services has committed to paying for half the cost of the procedure, which is expected to cost only $2000.

$2000.

The shadow attorney-general is outraged, he says, outraged! How dare the Precious Indignant Taxpayer be asked to fund “cosmetic surgery”! The Corrective Services Commissioner has responded in sensible and general terms, saying that he “was acutely aware he had to take into account many factors when making difficult and sensitive decisions in cases that involved complex social, psychological, cultural and physical health considerations”, and that he made a judgement call, as he does on a daily basis.

JMN is statistically at very high risk for mental health problems, self-harm, and suicide. She is incarcerated, and suicide is the leading cause of death in Australian prisoners. She has been the victim of horrific domestic violence, and victims of domestic violence are five times more likely to commit suicide than average. The Commissioner took into account psychological reports and his personal interview with JMN when making the determination that the State would fork out a grand or two to take off the tattoo she was violently forced to get, the tattoo that is reminding her constantly of her abuse and contributing to her mental health difficulties.

Let’s get a little perspective. One acute psychiatric bed-day in Western Australia costs just over $1000. The cost of this tattoo removal equates to around one weekend stay in hospital for a relatively minor psychiatric crisis. We’re not talking huge pots of cash here. We’re talking about a sum that is absolutely tiny in the scale of costs involved with healthcare and with the justice and corrections system.

We expect, as a society, to provide healthcare for prisoners. Western Australia is committed, on paper at least, to providing prisoners with the healthcare they need, including mental healthcare. The general level of care we as taxpayers have committed to equates to the level of care that people should be provided in the public healthcare system. Tattoo removal is on the proscribed “cosmetic surgery” list for State hospitals, but that list comes with one very important caveat – that the procedure should be denied State funding if there is no “clinically significant” indication.

I can’t think of any more “clinically significant” indication than a tattoo someone was forced to get at the hands of her abuser, a tattoo that is making her sick. A tattoo that reminds her around the clock of his attempts at intimidation and dehumanisation. A tattoo that states outright that she is the “property” of this violent man. A tattoo that contributes to her greatly increased risk of self-harm and suicide.

Cannot we, as fellow humans, can find enough shreds of compassion to be comfortable with spending this trivial sum on what is likely to be a cost-effective contributor to the health of someone we are, as a group, responsible for?

This case is a touchstone for a whole pile of prejudices. It makes people particular uncomfortable, I believe, because it disrupts the nice little myths that nice little Indignant Taxpayers like to indulge in. The neat little “innocent-victim” narrative of domestic violence is disrupted by the fact that this women is also a perpetrator. The neat little “evil-murderer” narrative is disrupted by the fact that she was the victim of horrendous abuse, and that she committed the killing under fear for her own life. The neat little “nasty slut” tattooed-woman narrative is disrupted by the fact that she was forced to get this tattoo in the course of her husband’s abuse. The neat little “adequate healthcare” narrative is disrupted by the fact that tattoo removal usually lies outside of what some of us might usually consider to be “healthcare”.

All of this is adding up to a situation where the Righteous Indignant Taxpayers want to wash their hands of it altogether, though it’s clear they’d rather have a set of public stocks and rotten tomatoes to throw. They shout in comments “Give her nothing but bread and water”, “Why am I responsible?”, and “This woman knew what she was marrying into – hard cheese, I’d say”. Revolting.

Australia’s National Mental Health Policy states that as a nation, our key aims in mental healthcare include the prevention of the development of mental health problems and mental illness, the reduction of impact of mental health problems, and the promotion of recovery from mental health problems. These aims apply no less to people in custody, who are at extremely high risk and have particular mental healthcare needs that are all too frequently dismissed or actively resisted by people in a society that wants nothing more than to inflict as much suffering as possible on prisoners.

There’s an interesting wider question here, which is about our definitions of healthcare, and about the fact that the determinants of health often lie outside the very narrow systems and procedures that we label “necessary healthcare”. For example, we know damn well, on a macro scale, that poverty and inequality is a more important determinant of health than doctors and nurses and public education programmes aimed toward “behavioural modification”. Could not a piece of marked skin be a more important determinant of health in a single person than all the psychologists and pills in the world?

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 puggle. Born at the Perth Zoo, this wee girl is one of the first to undergo a new genetic test to determine its sex, which will hopefully lead to more successful breeding programmes for the endangered varieties of echnidna.

teeny tiny long-nosed spiky puggle in a person's hand

A note to commenters: Please, as with other threads, 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.

Chatterday! Open Thread.

This open thread is brought to you by this sushi cake, via Epicute.

round aqua-iced cake with fondant imitation sushi and chopsticks on top
see more

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?

Carer hits PWD on the head in public; World points and laughs

No, it is not fucking ok for carers to hit people with disabilities on the head when they don’t do as they’re told. NOT. OK.

Why does this need saying?

At a football game at Saltergate, groups of Chesterfield fans “invaded” the pitch joyfully as their team defeated Bournemouth.

The Sun described the scene thus:

Supporters dodged stewards to pay their parting tribute to the League Two side before they move next season to a new ground in the town. Among them was a man on crutches and the young man wearing a baseball cap and dressed in the club’s blue and white colours in his wheelchair furiously pushing his wheels and speeding across the pitch.

Moments later an older man dashes on to the pitch and grabs the wheelchair and pushes it back to the stands. And as the youngster is shoved back across the pitch the older man gives him a playful clip across the head.

A spokesman for Chesterfield said: “It was a good natured pitch invasion resulted after the goal. To everyone’s amusement one youngster in a wheelchair got twenty yards on before being rushed off by an embarrassed helper.”

[WARNING for video footage]

This footage has been called “heart-warming” and “comical”, “legendary“, “hilarious” and “brilliant”, “touching” and “a joy”, “fantastic” and “priceless“.

One forum user said “The clip round the ear after is the best bit.”, another “The clip round the ear, pissed myself.”; another said “The slap on the head is great”.

I just want to cry. This footage is horrifying – assault and battery of a PWD who cannot get away, perpetrated by a carer, in full view of thousands. Assaults like this happen every day behind closed doors, as abusive carers and healthcare workers who have PWD trapped and dependent hit them and neglect them and rape them. And people around the world are laughing at this assault.

What is there to say? What is wrong with the world?

Grey’s Anatomy Ableism: “How Insensitive”

Spoilers for Grey’s Anatomy, up and including to episode 6×21, How Insensitive.

Grey’s Anatomy, a sudsy USAn medical drama based around a Seattle surgical team, is one of those showers which I can love or hate. On the one hand, they have a cast of fabulous and complicated women – Miranda Bailey! Cristina Yang! Callie Torres! Arizona Robbins! It not only passes the Bechdel test in every episode, but the people of colour Bechdelesque test in most episodes – and, which is considerably more rare on popular television, the women of colour variant.

Disability, however, it’s not so good on. There’s a main character (Owen Hunt) with PTSD who is portrayed in fairly interesting and complex ways (though he’s a white man whose PTSD was acquired entirely “conventionally”, in battle), but as a show which is focused on experimental and heroic cures of ‘broken’ folk, there are also major issues. And the fat hate. Oh my, the fat hate.

The most recent episode swung wildly from a scene I absolutely loved, to a scene that was so full of ableism that I was barely able to get through it. So I thought I’d share.

Background: a disabled, very fat man, Bobby Corso, has been brought in to hospital with abdominal pain for investigation. Bailey has attempted to offer “sensitivity” training to the residents, who are pretty much failing across the board. The residents are sitting eating lunch together; the woman who comes in is Mrs Corso (do we even learn her first name?), who is pregnant.

Transcript:

Yang: Let’s say [picks up a skinny chip] this is the wife.

Meredith Grey (looking horrified): No! Don’t do that.

Yang: And this… is him! [picks up large hamburger, bursts out laughing]

Karev: So I won’t be eating that now.

Yang: She’s gotta be on top.

[Lexie Grey smiles.]

Karev: She’s gonna get altitude sickness. [bursts out laughing]

[Mrs Corso, a slim blonde white women, is walking past. She stops and looks at the gang.]

Lexie Grey: [notices, suddenly looks serious] Guys.

Yang [looks at Mrs Corso]: Uh. Sorry.

Mrs Corso: It’s alright. I get it. [approaches table] You’re trying to figure out how my husband and I managed to get a baby in here. [Gestures to abdomen, smiles.] There are some logistics involved. Do you want me to tell you?

[Lexie and Meredith look abashed.]

Mrs Corso: [still smiling] But first! How about you tell me how you like to do it with your husband? Or your girlfriend? Any favourite positions? Or kinks! [wide smile] Let’s talk about that! Because I know you all must have a freakshow of your own goin’ on! Who wants to go first?

[Yang and Karev look abashed.]

Mrs Corso: No. Nobody? OK. [more serious] Well it’s probably none of my damn business anyway. [long look. Walks away. All the residents look abashed.]

[Cut to Bobby Corso lying in a hospital bed. Ex-chief surgeon Dr Richard Webber is standing with Mirand Bailey by his bedside.]

Webber: The fat under your skin has become necrotic. Has – has died. And the infection is eating through your skin.

Corso: Huh [wry semi-laugh]. I suppose it had to come to that. I’ve eaten everything else.

Webber: The operation is extremely risky. You have a higher than normal chance that a surgical complication could kill you.

[Karev enters the room.]

Corso: If I don’t have the surgery – I die? [Webber and Bailey look serious.] How long will I have, do you think?

Webber: Mr Corso, you want the surgery. You want to try

Corso: I’ve tried. Everything. High protein, low carbs, drugs, pills, hypnosis. I’ve tried everything.

Bailey: You have a baby on the way. Think about that.

Corso: Who do you think I’m thinking about? You dream of having a kid. [sentimental piano/strings music starts up in the background] You picture yourself playing ball with him. You picture her standing on your feet while you dance around with her, you know? You don’t picture them bringing you food and [disgusted look] cleaning you up. I can’t walk four steps to go to the bathroom. You tell me – who deserves that guy as a father?

[Bailey and Webber look at each other, as if to say, ‘He has a point.’]

Corso: I just wanna be gone before the kid has a chance to know who I am. Don’t – tell my wife about this, ok? Just tell her it’s too risky. Let me go home.

[Mrs Corso enters.]

Bobby Corso: Hey, peanut.

Mrs Corso: What’s going on?

This video clip starts off great. Someone is finally speaking up and telling this rude, obnoxious residents exactly what is and isn’t their business when it comes to their patients’ behaviour and bodies. She’s rocking my world!

But then, it all comes crashing down, with the treatment of Bobby Corso’s disability. I felt like his little speech reflected the ideas of the writers: If you can’t walk and dance, if you can’t independently wash your own body, no child ‘deserves’ you as a parent, and you don’t deserve to be a parent. Especially when your disability is, in society’s fucked-up opinion, your own damn fault. It’s only sensible to think that you’d be better off dead, that your children would be better off never knowing you. The tragedy is not your acute infection and your possible impending death, but your very existence. Doctors understand this, though they may go through the motions of challenging it (in paternalistic ways that include telling you what you ‘want’).

There’s a further rage-inducing scene where Mrs Corso scolds Karev, saying “You don’t know that inside all that is the same man I’ve always known”. I think the writers are making it clear, again, that like so many people in our culture, they don’t see fat people and disabled people as full humans at all. They want to believe that there’s a “real person inside”, meaning a thin abled person; while the actual person, the actual body, is a facade that can be dismissed and pushed aside in disgust. Disabled bodies are not real. Not authentic. They don’t really count, and we’d rather not think about them. The only way some people can value PWD as humans beings is to pretend that “beneath” their disability, there is some other person that doesn’t make the person with the abled gaze feel uncomfortable. With this cognitive sleight-of-hand, abled folk get to pretend that they’re oh-so-terribly accepting and magnanimous, while lovingly maintaining the care and feeding of their disgust and hatred of the disabled body.

Later in the show Karev abandons his sensitivity training and yells at Corso, calling him selfish for planning to “leave a 700-pound mess for your wife to clean up”. Corso has surgery and survives the operation, in which he is serendipitously found to have a perforated diverticular abscess on his bowel; his presenting abdominal pain had been misdiagnosed as being due to his subcutaneous infection. He pledges, with the badgering of his doctors, to diet. The take-home message? The only way someone who can’t walk or clean themselves could reasonably be a parent is if they go to strenuous efforts to cure themselves, and succeed, first.

An aside-ish sort of a question: Can anyone think of any TV shows or movies (or books, if you like) which pass a disability Bechdelesque test?

1. It has to have at least two people with disabilities in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides an abled person.

Or please feel free to discuss the clip and the issues raised in it.

Slam after slam for people with disabilities in Australia’s new Budget

The Australian Federal Budget is out, and it’s being feted in the media as a sober, sensible fiscally reasonable budget in which there are no really big winners or losers. “No frills, no thrills, no spills”, says the ABC.

Except for people with disabilities. What has received a little bit of coverage is the fact that there is no improvement in funding for public mental health, despite lots of rhetoric in that direction from Rudd and his cronies. There is apparently nothing toward practical improvement for Indigenous health, and $380M in cuts for disability pensions.

$380M in cuts for disability pensions.

Applicants for the Centrelink disability pension who are considered “borderline” will be routinely denied, put onto Newstart (unemployment payment), compelled to stand in line every fortnight and job-search on an ongoing basis, and sent to “up to 18 months” of mandatory job training.

Let me guess – “borderline” means “the probably currently-nondisabled official making the assessment will decide that they can’t see the disability concerned”. I expect this to disproportionately affect people with mental health issues, fatigue based disabilities, autoimmune problems, chronic pain, and so forth.

And let me guess again: if PWD are too sick to get to their training courses but can’t “prove” that to some random douchebag’s satisfaction, they’ll get breached (decreed as being in breach of Centrelink requirements) and, in the absence of substantial family support and the ability to organise themselves through a litany of appeals and assessments, end up on the streets.

This combination of further increases in the already huge pension obstacles for people with “less clear” disabilities, along with no improvements in mental health and Indigenous health programmes, is, in my opinon, a recipe for a huge increase in homelessness.

But Treasurer Wayne Swan is spinning this as being for PWD’s own good.

The Sydney Morning Herald explains further:

New applicants will first undergo a ”job capacity assessment”, as they have always done. But the government is reviewing the impairment tables to make it a tougher assessment and harder to get to first base. After that unless people are manifestly incapable of any paid work, or clearly incapable of working even 15 hours a week, they will be put on the Newstart Allowance. Then they will be sent on a training course, either with a special disability employment agency or a regular one. The training is meant to increase the numbers who can work at least 15 hours a week, thus disqualifying them from the pension.

Efforts to curb the growth in the numbers going on the pension would be admirable, given people mostly stay on the pension for life. But the move is not admirable in the absence of an increase in the level of Newstart Allowance, or a loosening of its income test, which exacts harsh punishment on those who get a little work.

On the disability pension a single person can live a frugal life on $350 a week. On Newstart a single person is plunged into poverty on $231 a week. How many of the 25,407 people who might once have qualified for a disability pension will end up, not in work, but unemployed and in poverty?

The comments at the Herald, enragingly but unsurprisingly, are full of people flailing around about how people on disability pensions are big bludging fakey fakers.

Another slam for taxpaying people with disabilities is the change in the tax offset for medical expenses. There will be a big jump in the offset threshold and indexing after that, expected to take away from PWD almost much again as the funding cuts for disability pensions.

Lastly, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Australia’s mostly very good pharmaceutical subsidy and safety net programme, will be “reformed” to the tune of $2 billion in government savings – but we’re not told how.

In other news, there are huge boosts in funding for elite sports and for ‘border security’. So crips will be paying for Olympians and for the harassment and prolonged detention of immigrants – while many can’t afford wheelchairs, homes, or medication.

This budget, just to make my disgust even more perfectly clear, is coming from a nominally LABOR government.

On twitter I summed the budget up thus:

@ilauredhel Aust’s priorities: $237 M boost for elite sport; $1.2 B boost for ‘border security’; $380M CUT for disability pensions #budget

I’m still gaping. At the budget itself, and at the nodding, satisfied happiness of most of the political media at there being supposedly “no big losers”.

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 backcloth, a teeny tiny octopus, comes via I Can Has Cheezburger.

very tiny octopus on a person's fingers

BADD: A Screenshot’s Worth A Thousand Words

More for Blogging Against Disablism Day.

I just poked around the entry for “Ableism” on Wikipedia. On the Talk page, I found a box placing the Ableism article within WikiProject Sociology:

Screenshot: This article has been rated as Low-importance  on the project's importance scale.

“This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project’s importance scale.”

Ableism of low importance within Sociology? Erm, ooookay. Let’s have a closer look at their definition of “Low-importance”:

This article is of little importance to this project, but it covers a highly specific area of knowledge or an obscure piece of trivia.

20%, people. Disabled people form around 20% of the population in Australia and the USA (and similar numbers in similar societies). One in five. Discrimination is huge, it is institutionalised, it is very often legal. Disabled people are some of the most vulnerable, the most underemployed, the most abused, the most excluded, the most neglected, the most murdered people in our cultures.

“Low importance”? “Obscure piece of trivia”?

OK, so let’s have a look at some other big discriminations. Racism and sexism, are they categorised as obscure pieces of trivia too? (On Wikipedia, I wouldn’t be surprised…)

Screenshot: WikiProject Sociology (Rated Start-Class, High-importance)

Sexism is of High Importance. OK. I agree.

So, racism. I guess the importance of racism within sociology, according to Wikipedians, would be, oh, about similar to that of ableism?

Screenshot: WikiProject Sociology (Rated B-Class, High-importance)

OK, so racism is of High Importance also. OK. I agree with that too.

So why is Ableism of Low Importance? Why does the biggest encyclopedia on earth consider it to be of lesser importance than discrimination against other minorities? Why are sociologists learning and being taught that racism and sexism are The Discriminations, that all others are secondary or tertiary or not really worth bothering about? Why, when a person is both female and PWD, or of colour and PWD, or all three, and/or lesbian, trans, non-citizen, working class, and so on, is ableism automatically ranked as the least important discrimination they’ll encounter? Why are PWD losing this Oppression Olympics, a game we shouldn’t be playing in the first place? (“Intersectionality” hasn’t yet received a rating on the Importance scale at Wikipedia.)

Other topics considered more sociologically important than Ableism (not equal, but more), as far as Wikipedians are concerned, include:

est and The Forum in popular culture

Ralph Larkin

Wilhelm Dilthey

Vixen (comics)

Stay-at-home dad

Weddings in the United States

Truce term

Friendship Paradox

Heterophobia

Babywise

Boomerang Generation

eHarmony

Lavalife

OkCupid

Yahoo! Personals

Fritzl case

List of UFO religions

Greenbelt, Maryland

The Hapa Project

Biosocial criminology

Grand Tour

Speed dating

Blond

Schoolgirl

and Hooters.

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 backcloth comes, as it so often does, via The Daily Squee.

lion cub cuddling up under mama lion's chin