“I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to let this happen to another mother'.”
—[TW: murder of an autistic person]
Nicki Pecchenino, the mother of a 15-year-old with autism, IN SYMPATHY WITH A MURDERER OF AN AUTISTIC PERSON.
If anyone wants to know why I fight so fucking hard, it’s because news stories like this exist. Because the only way this is a sympathetic story is to sympathize with a FUCKING MURDERER. Someone who murdered their own son because he was autistic.
Because the real tragedy is on the part of the murderer. FUCK YOUUUUUU.
(tw ableism, suicide) The Paralympics
(tw ableism, suicide) The Paralympics
I’ve been planning to add some paralympic content this week, and I’ve not gotten to it yet. If you have anything you think we should post about, please submit!
But
It brings back memories.
A few years ago, I was in a psych ward with a paralympian. We were talking about the olympics, and he was telling me about his experiences and how great it was, and eventually the topic became so, why are you here? like it usually does among fellow patients.
He was there because he was isolated by society. He was there because he was refused reasonable living conditions by the government, because he was unable to use public transport and unable to afford private and thus homebound, because his aides treated him like a job to be done, because the assumption everywhere that he turned, despite his “inspirational” olympic accomplishments, was that he was not worth it.
This isn’t meant to be a reminder for other disabled people, I know you know, just like I knew, and I think it’s important for the paralympics to be something positive for us. This is a reminder for the abled people who stare with open maws at the paralympians, who talk to their friends and co-workers and families about how inspirational they are, who complain about the lack of coverage, and post on facebook about how strong they must be because they could never live
“like that!”
This is for the people who do this and in every other way are complicit with the societal attitudes that lead to disabled people being unable to live
“like that!”
with deadly results.
(tw: abuse, institutionalization, ableism, neglect, death: please note that this article is very difficult to read)
(tw: abuse, institutionalization, ableism, neglect, death: please note that this article is very difficult to read) Dark side of a Bain success: A for-profit health company bought by Bain — that Romney profits from — has exploded in size and tales of neglectIt seemed a world away from the executive suites of Bain Capital when Dana Blum, a recent widow living in Portland, Ore., made the fateful decision to send her son Brendan to Youth Care, a residential program for troubled teens located in the suburbs of Salt Lake City.
Brendan, a 14-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome, had been extremely aggressive for years; he was even arrested a few times after attacking members of his family. Local therapists hadn’t helped, and six months after her husband died, Dana was frantically casting about for solutions. A consultation with UCLA’s neuropsychiatric unit convinced her that Youth Care’s therapeutic and educational program would finally make a difference.
Four months into his stay there, Brendan had earned a reputation as a temper-prone student who tried to shirk his obligations. So on the afternoon of June 27, when he complained to medical staff that he felt very sick, as if something were “crawling around” in his stomach, his concerns were dismissed. After 11 p.m., he woke up, complaining of stomach pain, and defecated in his pants. The on-duty monitors took him to the Purple Room, a makeshift isolation room used to segregate misbehaving students. There, he suffered a long night of agony, howling in pain and repeatedly vomiting and soiling himself. According to court transcripts and police reports, the two poorly paid monitors on duty did little more than offer him water, Sprite and Pepto-Bismol. They never telephoned the on-call nurse and waited until nearly 2 a.m. to contact the on-call supervisor, only to leave a voicemail. There was little else they felt they could do — Youth Care’s protocol on emergency services meant they were too low on the totem pole to call 911 themselves.
“They didn’t trust our judgment in emergency situations,” explains Josh Randall, a former Youth Care residential monitor, who wasn’t on duty that night. “If you’re working for $9.50 an hour on the graveyard shift, you don’t want to buck the system.” At any rate, the monitors had little expertise in how to respond — it was an entry-level job requiring only a GED, plus a CPR and safety course overseen by Youth Care itself.
When the morning staff arrived at 7 a.m., they discovered Brendan facedown on the floor of the Purple Room, his body already stiff with rigor mortis. The state’s chief medical examiner later determined that Blum had died of a twisted-bowel infarction, which requires emergency surgical intervention.
CONTINUE READING @ the source on Salon.com, written by Art Levine
Imaginary monsters: Why Bigfoot hunters are better people than Republican senators
patheos.comStill, though, as ridiculous as the Bigfoot-DNA-sequencers of Texas may be, I prefer them over the 38 Republican senators who voted last week to block the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. Those votes were cast because of imaginary monsters — because of mythical links to the Satanic baby-killer abortionists and because of fears of an “Antichrist” based on Fortean eschatology. U.S. senators are powerful people and their actions can have powerful consequences. When those actions are motivated by fear of the monstrous and the marginalized, then real people wind up getting hurt.
