From the Orlando Sentinel, TCPalm.com:

Parents in Florida’s Orange County public schools are complaining that students with disabilities are physically restrained too often. They want the state to curtail the practice of restraining students.

School officials said students with complex behavioral problems are restrained only to stop aggression or injury, but some parents say the practices are dangerous and can result in injury or death.

The parents of 12-year-old Claire Lester produced school records saying that their 80-pound autistic daughter was forced to the ground and held down 44 times during the 2006-07 school year. “You step back a step. You don’t engage her in a half nelson and put her on the ground,” said Steve Lester, her father, who is an oncologist. “In this day and age? Didn’t we quit treating the mentally disabled like that 60 or 70 years ago?

(more…)

With no hope for recovery, death is the only way out

Ann Curry, on Dateline NBC, takes a film crew into Serbian institutions that look much the way institutions did in the U.S. a generation ago.

People with intellectual disabilities are shunned and warehoused, imprisoned without supervision under filthy conditions behind crumbling walls and rusted bars. They are given no treatment and meager care that may include being drugged or tied up day after day to control the anxiety and aggression that comes of being locked away. One man has been imprisoned in a crib for all of his 21 years. Among those shown are people with cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and other conditions.

Disability is a source of deep shame in Serbia, and parents are urged to put children with intellectual disabilities away in remote government institutions or risk financial ruin. Some surrender their children without ever glimpsing their faces.

Rasim Ljajic, a government official in charge of the institutions, acknowledged that the conditions are inhumane, but said the government does not have resources to fix the situation.

Said Laurie Ahern, associate director of Mental Disability Rights International:

The idea of being locked away and the idea that somehow these people, that their lives aren’t valuable, that they are less than human, because they were born with a disability. It’s horrendous.  And it’s awful. And it shouldn’t happen.

The video is here.

See earlier post here.

See also:

Reporter’s notebook, by Tim Sandler, NBC News producer

Shunned: Photos from inside Serbia’s mental institutions

From the BBC News Magazine:

Geoff Adams-Spink reviews a series of crimes that have been widely reported in the UK press, and attempts to determine whether they are isolated cases or evidence of intimidation and violence directed at people with disabilities.

Among the cases he examines:

• Christine Lakinski, a 50-year-old woman with disabilities who collapsed in the street near her home. She was set upon by a neighbor who covered her in shaving foam, urinated on her and filmed her on a mobile foam as she lay dying.
• Kevin Davies, who had epilepsy, was kept in a shed, tortured and eventually died.
• Brent Martin, who had learning disabilities, died after being punched, kicked and stomped on to settle a bet.

Writes Adams-Spink:

Whether it is “bullying”, “harassment”, “intimidation” or “hate crime” depends upon your perspective.

What is clear is that there are people who despise others for their difference and who behave in ways that make them feel victimized, excluded and afraid.

See earlier posts:

Columnist: Whether hate crime or bullying, it needs to stop

Columnist: We must protect disabled people from this wave of barbaric and hateful crimes

Writing in the [UK] Guardian, Peter V. Berns says the portrayal of a person with an intellectual disability in the film “Tropic Thunder” is offensive and shouldn’t be tolerated.

He says the use of the word “retard” and other insulting language in the film could spark abuse, bullying and violence against people with intellectual disabilities. An excerpt:

The oppressive power of these words has deep resonance for individuals with intellectual disabilities and for the disability rights movement. In the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, the use of the R-word in this film represents a serious setback. The portrayal of this character sends a clear message to the audience that the lives of people with intellectual disabilities are worth less and that it is acceptable to degrade and dehumanise them.

The history of people with intellectual disabilities in the U.S. evokes a dark time when these individuals suffered institutionalization, forced sterilization, segregation and other abuses. While the U.S. has made monumental strides toward including people with disabilities in the community, further progress will only be made if we speak out against bigotry, mistreatment and disrespect wherever we see it.

… We invite our colleagues in the disability rights movement, worldwide, to stand together and work to educate, inform and inspire people of conscience. Critics may try to dismiss our criticism as just some kind of politically correct talk, but that rejoinder is far too simplistic in the face of the suffering people with intellectual disabilities have experienced in their lives and throughout history. Individuals with disabilities should enjoy human rights on an equal basis with others without stigmatization, discrimination or prejudice. It is they who define themselves.

Peter V. Berns is the executive director of The Arc of the United States, the world’s largest community-based organization of and for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

From Variety:

DreamWorks has withdrawn www.simplejackmovie.com, an elaborate marketing website aimed at promoting Ben Stiller’s ‘Tropic Thunder,’ in what the newspaper described as a “preemptive” response to criticism from disability rights advocates.

A consortium of groups including the Special Olympics and the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles first contacted the studio Friday and set up a meeting with studio executives to express concerns about the film. The meeting is scheduled for this afternoon.

The site, which was aimed at teenage boys and garnered fewer than 35,000 hits, featured a poster with Stiller and the tagline “Once upon a time … there was a retard.”

… “We heard their concerns, and we understand that taken out of context, the site appeared to be insensitive to people with disabilities,” DreamWorks spokesman Chip Sullivan said.

Want to send a message to studio executives and disability rights advocates? Click here.

See also:

• Dreamworks: Simple Jack ‘Retard’ movie offended people so we took site down — Businesssheet.com
• Ben Stiller, Paramount learn that you never go full retard — FilmSchoolRejects blog
• ‘Tropic Thunder’ abandoning ‘Simple Jack’? — New York Magazine
• Tropic Thunder braces for retard backlash — Defamer.com
• Stiller movie in disablity row — Contactmovie.com
• DreamWorks goes no retard, yanks Simple Jack site disabilities — Popgrind.com

And here’s an excerpt from cinemablend.com, headlined Save Tropic Thunder:

Apparently “retard” is now worse than the N word, which seems to show up in every other film without the slightest complaint. That’s right, a word used to describe mentally handicapped people who for the most part don’t know or care anyway, is now worse than a word which was for hundreds of years a symbol of slavery, oppression, and hatred.

It started with some rumbling in comments sections and on message boards around the internet, now disability organizations are apparently starting to demand changes to the movie in order to water it down, lest it hurt the feelings of retards (yep, I said it), and they’re starting to scare off DreamWorks pictures.

New York Daily News, Associated Press/Houston Chronicle:

New York Governor David Paterson said this week he didn’t become fully comfortable with his disability until fairly recently. Instead, he said, he sought to hide his blindness over the years, rejecting a cane or seeing eye dog for fear of being beaten up.

“It was hard for me to get the social services people to understand that,” he said. “They said, ‘They’d never attack a person with a cane.’”

“I said, ‘You don’t know the folks in my neighborhood. When they see a white cane, they see that you can’t identify the perpetrators.’”

As he got older, he said he wouldn’t even pick up change if he dropped it because he didn’t want people to see him crawling around on the floor.

“These are the ancillary disabilities from which people suffer,” Paterson said. “It’s not just the physical disability, it’s how they make you feel as a human being. And that’s the reason that a lot of people try to hide that.”

An analysis by the Dallas Morning News of state personnel records finds that 72 employees from Texas’ 10 state mental hospitals have been fired in the last three years over allegations of physical abuse, including brutal beatings and sexual abuse. Hundreds more were terminated for other violations, from sleeping on the job to over-medicating mentally ill patients.

State officials say there will always be some reports of abuse and neglect in an institutional setting. And they say they take any allegations of mistreatment seriously. But the records show that as in other state-run facilities, abuse and neglect are systemic.

The state’s juvenile prisons, group homes for the disabled, and state schools for people with mental disabilities all came under fire last year for reports of widespread physical and sexual abuse. The state psychiatric hospitals, like other systems for vulnerable Texans, are chronically starved for cash, advocates of more state funding say, and services at the local level can’t keep up.

“You get what you pay for,” said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder. “When you financially dumb something down, you make services cheap, something’s got to give. Unfortunately, it usually ends up being a mentally ill or disabled Texan.”

See earlier posts here and here.