Disability Futures

https://goo.gl/zFNHkT

Using a functional MRI in nine patients, the authors of the study conclude, "Our results show that ECT has lasting effects on the functional architecture of the brain." The result of these lasting effects is "decrease in functional connectivity" with other parts of the brain. In other words, the frontal lobes are cut off from the rest of the brain. The authors call this "disconnectivity." Does this sound familiar? It is a "lasting" frontal lobotomy.

This new study contradicts claims by shock advocates such as psychiatrist David Healy that ECT does not cause brain damage.

The report argues that this ECT effect supports the idea that depressive patients have too much activity in their frontal lobes and are returned to normal bv damaging the offending area of the brain. Psychiatry frequently takes this position. For example, antipsychotic drugs (which four of the nine patients were taking) also reduce the function of the frontal lobes, in this case by suppressing the main trunk nerves from deeper in the brain to the frontal lobes (dopamine neurotransmission). Proponents of the drugs then claim that the patients have an excess of activity in these nerve trunks, so that the patient is helped by damaging the region.

The word "damage" is never used in this study. But what else are these "lasting effects on the functional architecture of the brain," other than a manifestation of ECT-induced brain damage in the before and after shock treatment MRIs that were done? The study is so poorly reported that we only know that the MRIs were conducted sometime "after," presumably very soon after the ECT. We can only hope that these victims of ECT will recover with time, but the most extensive long-term follow-up study indicates that most ECT patients will never recover from the damage in the form of persistent severe mental deficits.

Convicted felons should have more rights, too...

https://goo.gl/bRhMPI

“I love being independent,” King explains. “Everyone needs a little help sometimes. I don’t know anyone who knows everything. But just because people need a little bit of help doesn’t mean they can’t be independent.”

What’s unique in King’s case is that his legal guardians — his parents — also want to terminate their court-ordered stewardship.

Not because they don’t want to continue living with him or because they don’t want to be responsible for him. And not because they don’t love him.

Susie and Herbert King, who are in their mid-60s, have a great relationship with Ryan. The three of them obsess about episodes of “Scandal,” they go on vacations together, and they split the cooking, shopping and cleaning in their immaculately decorated Northwest D.C. home.

But they also want to give him what all parents want for their children: independence, self-determination and control over his fate.

I remember that the HIV community made real progress when they embraced disability as a community....

http://goo.gl/GBR85F

Although I received accommodations from the disability services center throughout college, I didn't really start applying the label "disability" until my senior year, when I qualified for the Workforce Recruitment Program, a federal program that works with colleges to help students with disabilities get internships and jobs within the government. I looked at the ADA definition of the term: "a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity."

I immediately recognized my qualification under the term. Crohn's Disease has limited many major life activities at different times: the ability to eat, the ability to walk longer than the shortest distances. With this new word in my lexicon, I started unconsciously using it interchangeably. This became even more prominent when I realized how hard it is to get a job if you have any sort of medical issue, then began researching disability rights, and then when I found my passion and life goal of promoting the disability community. In discovering disability activism, I also found a very empowered community of people who use a seemingly negative label in a positive way.

As someone with a chronic illness, I sometimes still feel like I'm out of place, not because the disability movement hasn't accepted me, but because many others with chronic illnesses reject the label, despite getting short-term or long-term disability insurance, ending up in the hospital, or experiencing discrimination for their illness. While I respect anybody's right to use whatever label they choose, I feel like detaching oneself from the disability rights movement does more harm than good to our goals.

Always on the horizon....

http://goo.gl/SVkq9x

A few years ago, I was at a conference on language and evolution when an audience member questioned a prominent child language researcher’s thesis by raising a counter-example: One aspect of the development of children with Williams syndrome didn’t quite fit the researcher’s theory. The prominent child language researcher quickly retorted, “Oh, I’ve seen children with Williams syndrome. They don’t count. They’re not even human. They must belong to some other species entirely.”

With the wave of a hand, an entire group of people was erased from the human race. Without a contesting word, members of the human species were sacrificed — but a theory was saved. And what was the distinctly nonhuman behavior demonstrated by some children with William syndrome? It was their ability to develop a prodigious vocabulary, prior to developing the ability to extend an index finger to point.

In a more recent scholarly article, also written with the aim of delineating “the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species,” autistic people were again segregated from other humans and placed with great apes. After acknowledging that the empiri-cal literature demonstrates that “great apes and children with autism are clearly not blind to all aspects of intentional action,” the authors raised the bar (“understanding the intentional actions and perceptions of others is not by itself sufficient to produce humanlike social and cultural activities”), and continued to pound home their belief that autistic children do not “engage socially and culturally with others in the ways that human children do”; they do not “interact with other persons in the species-typical manner.” Their social behavior is just not human.

Why are humans dehumanized? According to Morton Deutsch, this year’s APS James McKeen Cattell award recipient, humans are de-humanized when they are perceived as a threat. What threat do humans with Williams syndrome and autistic humans pose to psychological scientists? A threat to the universality of the scientists’ theories, a threat to the scientists’ ability to accept human diversity?

Last fall, a Duquesne University sophomore violated his Catholic university’s code of conduct by posting on Facebook his opinion that homosexual behavior was “subhuman.” Shouldn’t psychological scientists be held to an equally high code of conduct? In addition to being required to remove his offensive comment from the Web, the Duquesne sophomore had to write a 10-page essay on respect for human dignity. I wish some psychological scientists would at least read, if not write, a similar essay.

We should do some thinking about how this idea might apply to our community...

http://goo.gl/pmEFqP

A recent ProPublica analysis of The Princeton Review’s prices for online SAT tutoring shows that customers in areas with a high density of Asian residents are often charged more. When presented with this finding, The Princeton Review called it an “incidental” result of its geographic pricing scheme. The case illustrates how even a seemingly neutral price model could potentially lead to inadvertent bias—bias that’s hard for consumers to detect and even harder to challenge or prove.

Over the past several decades, an important tool for assessing and addressing discrimination has been the “disparate impact” theory. Attorneys have used this idea to successfully challenge policies that have a discriminatory effect on certain groups of people, whether or not the entity that crafted the policy was motivated by an intent to discriminate. It’s been deployed in lawsuits involving employment decisions, housing, and credit. Going forward, the question is whether the theory can be applied to bias that results from new technologies that use algorithms.