Within earshot, my mother asked the doctor whether I would live or die. "You should hope he dies, because if he lives, he'll be no more than a vegetable for the rest of his life. How would you like to live in an iron lung 24 hours a day?" So I decided to be an artichoke...a little prickly on the outside but with a big heart. You know, the vegetables of the world are uniting, and we're not going away! -From Highlights From Speeches by Ed Roberts
And, of course, people with disabilities are viewed as easier victims....
A new Justice Department study shows that allegations of sex abuse in the nation’s prisons and jails are increasing — with correctional officers responsible for half of it — but prosecution is still extremely rare.
The report, released today by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, takes data collected by correctional administrators representing all of the nation’s federal and state prisons as well as many county jails. It shows that administrators logged more than 8,000 reports of abuse to their overseers each year between 2009 and 2011, up 11 percent from the department’sprevious report, which covered 2007 and 2008.
It’s not clear whether the increase is the result of better reporting or represents an actual rise in the number of incidents.
Complicated issue.....
The case is Harris v. Quinn. The program it threatens is called consumer-controlled personal assistance services. That program responds to a basic problem: Many people with disabilities are fully capable of making choices about how to live their lives, but they lack the physical ability to perform the necessary tasks themselves.....
Disability rights activists in Illinois and these other states agreed to support these collective-bargaining systems--but only on the important condition that the systems preserved the consumer control that is essential to promoting the independence and integration of people with disabilities. Collective bargaining with the state, over the terms and conditions of employment that the state itself sets, can serve disability rights interests by reducing turnover in the personal-assistance workforce--and the evidence suggests that that is exactly what has happened. But disability rights activists insisted--and the states agreed--that each individual with a disability who obtains personal assistance must retain the power to hire, fire, and direct the person who provides her services.....
If accepted, it would have devastating consequences for the people with disabilities who rely on consumer-controlled personal assistance services. States would be put to a choice. They could continue providing personal assistants with effective collective bargaining rights, but they would then have to abandon the principle of consumer control over hiring, firing, and day-to-day supervision. Alternatively, they could abandon collective bargaining and simply treat personal-assistance workers for all purposes as employees of the individual consumers they serve, but they would then have to abandon collective bargaining over wages and benefits--bargaining that has proven to reduce turnover in the personal-assistance workforce.
They launched a new lottery here in Illinois called Veteran’s Cash. It’s $2 a ticket and all proceeds “benefit Illinois veterans organizations.” It was unveiled with great fanfare. The governor flew around the state and held press conferences.
But I feel a sense of foreboding. Because maybe this is the pilot project that will develop into the new system of funding human services in the brave new world. You know how it works. The money generated by lotteries always has to go to support something “good.” That’s how we rationalize gambling. The Illinois lottery funds “education.” So if you’re pissing away your paycheck, it’s okay because you’re investing in our children, who are the future leaders of this great nation.
A little remarked upon requirement in the health law expands treatments for people with cerebral palsy, autism and other developmental disabilities. But some advocates and policy experts are concerned that insurers may find ways to sidestep the new requirement.
The health law requires that individual and small group plans sold on or off the health insurance marketplaces cover 10 essential health benefits, including “rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices.”
Health plans of all kinds typically cover rehabilitative services, such as physical, occupational and speech therapy to help people who had an accident or illness, such as a stroke, recover their ability to walk, talk and function in their daily lives. But before the health law passed, coverage of similar services for habilitative purposes — that is, to help people learn or maintain functional skills, rather than regain them — was often excluded.
I'm trying out a tool for aggregating disability justice issues into a weekly online newspaper called the Disability Justice Weekly. The tool is called paper.li. The current edition is at http://paper.li/f-1386765394?edition_id=82716620-7e9a-11e3-a65c-002590721286&utm_campaign=paper_sub&utm_medium=email&utm_source=subscription . Let me know what you think.
The unemployment rate for Americans with disabilities declined as 2013 came to a close, the government said Friday, but largely because many people stopped looking for work. The jobless rate dipped...
Invariably, the autistic behaviour is marked as less-than, called out as needing to change. So we adapt; we learn to keep our “abnormal” attitudes and behaviours to ourselves in the hope of blending in, and when we discover communities where, by chance, we fit in a little better without having to try so hard, we cling to those safe spaces like a drowning man clings to a lifebuoy.
I stumbled into my first such space when I was eight, and its name wasFidoNet. I didn’t think of myself as a programmer back then, just a girl who liked fractals and science fiction and BASIC on my IBM PCjr, but the virtual world of BBS message boards made orders of magnitude more sense than the everyday world of classrooms, sports teams, church groups and grade-school social dynamics.
The new rules specifically state, “home and community-based settings do not include a nursing facility, institution for mental diseases, or an intermediate care facility for individuals with intellectual disabilities.”
The rule clearly specifies that the setting must be an individuals choice, “The setting is selected by the individual from among setting options, including non-disability specific settings and an option for a private unit in a residential setting”
Cultural Scanning through TED. Thanks and a hat tip to Joe R........
The original set of 67 talks is here. Unfortunately it contains a lot of talks that mention disability only in passing, or in the sense of “disabling the security”. So I ended up removing quite a few (I removed Dave Eggers with a heavy heart – I liked his so much that I went to visit the project in San Francisco). The interface between disability and mental illness caused me a couple of problems, and I ended up removing a couple of (inspirational nonetheless) videos that were solely about depression (the list is already dominated by mental illness, which is interesting in its own right). I had to remove at least 10 from the top 20, which implies that there are far fewer than 67 in total. More to the point, looking at them as a group… it starts to look like TED has the same representation problem as Hollywood…
Each day, children are at risk of being injured and traumatized by the use of restraint and seclusion procedures in schools across the United States. These procedures offer no therapeutic or educational value, and have been shown to produce emotional trauma, physical harm and even death. Join in calling for an end to restraint and seclusion in schools.