Thoughts on “Disability Norm” and the Push Towards Community Living

Last week, Rachel Cohen-Rotenberg of Journeys with Autism wrote a post on visibility and human worth in the disability community, which discussed the overrated emphasis on achievements within a disability context, whereby people with severe disabilities or their carers/parents are ignored or outrightly silenced. Today, guestposter Claire posted about “disability norm” and some other problems [...]

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Dutch Autistics Receive Poor Care

According to a report by the Dutch Association for Autism (NVA), autistics often get the wrong care. Staff at residential care facilities don’t often know how to handle autism, hence causing autistics to end up on crisis wards or in isolation rooms. The NVA has been collecting stories from mostly family members of autistics about [...]

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Agricultural Communities for Autistic Adults: A Comparison to Dutch Workhomes

Yesterday, at the official Autism Speaks blog, there was a post about agricultural communities for autistic adults. These, in the Netherlands also known as “care farms”, provide housing and employment for adults with autism in a supported environment. They range in size from seven to thirty beds according to the article, so none are institution [...]

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Forced Institutionalization: Loopholes in the Dutch System

Yesterday, s.e. smith wrote a very interesting post at FWD/Forward about forced institutionalization. Specifically, ou discusses a recent legal victory for a woman whom Medicaid tried to force into an institution in 2008. From there on, however, s.e. continues to discuss the more subtle ways of force present in a society that devalues disabled people’s [...]

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Calling for Individualized Care for the Most Severely Disabled

Harold L. Doherty of Facing Autism in New Brunswick raises an important question: What do we do with severely disabled people when the institutions close? Harold advocates the reforming of the institutional system, so that those with the most severe disabilities can get quality residential care. He claims this opinion is based on a realistic [...]

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Calling for Adult Autism Services

Harold L. Doherty of Facing Autism in New Brunswick has written an open letter to the NB government on behalf of caregivers of autistic children and adults, calling on the government to establsih more residential care facilities for autistic adults. Now I could start a rant on how it is community services that we need, [...]

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Getting the CCE Involved

The CCE is the Center for Consultation and Expertise. According to its website, this is its aim: The Center for Consultation and Expertise (CCE) aims to make exceptional care needs manageable. An exceptional care need emerges when a client’s problems are so complex that their own care providers cannot solve these anymore. The quality of [...]

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Deinstitutionalization vs. Poor Care, Take 5,374

I couldn’t stop cringing when I read an old Autism Research Institute editorial calling for the reopening of instituttions for people with developmental (“behavioral”, argh!) disabilities. The editorial dates from 1997, but I’m skeptical that ARI has changed its view, given that it is still prominently displayed on its website. It’s the same old song [...]

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New York Ordered to Move Mentally Ill Out of Group Homes

A judge ordered New York to move people with mental illness out of group homes and into the community. This is a good thing. The state is ordered to open 1,500 supported housing units each year for the next three years, so that most of the people now living in the New York City institutional [...]

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Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization and the Premise of Cost-Effectiveness

A few days ago, the author of Lunatic Fringe commented on the closure of Pennsylvania state hospitals as a positive thing. On the same day, however, Crazy Mermaid commented on the shortage of psychiatric hospital beds as something negative. These are two rather opposite views on the very same issue: should we be keeping or [...]

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