The NRA, Mental Health Stigma, Blame, Services and the State
Filed Under (Activism, Disability Finances/Benefits, Discrimination, Government Services) by Estee on 19-01-2013
Do you need autism services? Here’s a thought on the NRA and their blaming (and stigmatizing) of people with “mental illness” (the term in and of itself is problematic). I strongly urge you (and applaud) Paul Applebaum’s response (he is from Columbia U). A psychiartrist himself, he notes that statistically, people with mental health issues are not inclined to violence. Yet, society seeks someone or something to blame and the NRA is leading the way.
On with my thought. If you have registered your child in autism services (think Adam Lanzer as I continue to write and that violence just a few weeks ago was blamed on autism) your child is on the state roster. If groups like the NRA succeed in having outside “experts,” who are never experts really, report to the state who is at risk of enacting violence, lots of bad things can happen to your child or adult family member with autism, as well as you as a parent. This is the complex situation with needing support for enablement versus how government support can turn against us.
Now on to more stigma and Margaret Wente of the Globe & Mail. First, why does she still have a job? On the cover of Globe T.O today is Chris Spence, the director of the Toronto District Board of Education who plagarized his speech. He was fired. Margaret Wente, also found out for plagarism, still has her opinion column job at The Globe. How do other hard-working journalists feel about her cheating? I for one have had enough of her naivete. She has written one too many comments on autism today in her foolish column on The Awful Truth About Being Single, mentioning that the only people who don’t mind being alone are autistic and asexual people. Another Wente blunder, not to mention a discriminatory remark that can further isolate people with autism who want to be social but find doing so with typical individuals often difficult. I think it’s time Ms. Wente get an education on disability rights and meets a lot of autistic people before she continues to write about things she doesn’t know anything about.
To end my little post today is a quote from the Court in the Granovsky decision:
“Exclusion and margainalization are generally not created by the invidiual with disabilities but are created by the economic and social environment and unfortunately, by the state itself.” (From Ena Chadha’s “The Social Phenomena of Handicapping” in Elizabeth Sheey’s Adding Feminism to the Law: The Contributions to Justice, Claire L’Heureux Dube, Toronto: Irwin Law, 2004)
ESTÉE KLAR
Excellent post.
I just heard about the potential for having therapists report having to report all talk of violence the other day…as someone who has worked with people with dual diagnosis of intellectual disability and mental illness, the prospect of this sort of thing becoming a law disturbs me greatly. Thank you for profiling it.
As for “The Globe and Mail” piece…speaking as a single woman, I found it terribly insulting and condescending in its generalizations, and the assumptions about autism and asexuality just made it even more infuriating. Definitely highly disappointing writing, coming from “The Globe and Mail”.
I’m glad to have found your blog and will definitely be back to do more reading.