Posts by Joe Wylie
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. . . mental health dilemmas
:)
i just think that there are people who need sanctuary in this world. And it's cruel not to provide it. There is a place for independent living and one for shelter too. As for "institutionalisation" - how many of us work in hospitals, schools, tertiary education, govt departments, etc etc? They are all institutions. It's not the building and routines that make it a bad thing. It's always how we go about running them.
Beautifully put.
There's a "community house" in my area that provides pretty much that kind of facility. While I wouldn't criticise the quality of care the residents receive, for all the interaction they have with the local "community" they might as well be in one of the historical psychopaedic institutions. These are people who are unable to catch a bus or even visit the corner shop without protective supervision.
While many of the residents are in touch with family in the wider community there are a number who wouldn't receive Christmas presents if it weren't for volunteers from the community. Some might be surprised how many of these good samaritans are former psychopaedic nurses, often very elderly, who know and care enough to help where it's needed.
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Re Kimberley. The Donald Beasley Institute in Dunedin was contracted to do some research on the effect of the closure. While their research on the attitudes of staff who worked at Kimberley might support Joe's theory, some other aspects of their research strongly refute this.
For the last time, Hilary, "theory" has nothing to do with anything I've posted here. I'm not claiming any professional expertise. All I'm doing is expressing opinions drawn from my own experiences.
Right now I have an issue with a close neighbour who's recently moved in after being released from jail. From my experience of such people I believe that it's a tragedy that someone like him should ever have been imprisoned. The poor guy is friendly, perhaps overly so, and is being taken advantage of by some very unpleasant associates, leading to daily visits from the police. The kind of petty pilfering that's been taking place in the neighbourhood is either done by or at the behest of these people. For example, he told me he'd like to start a garden. I gave him tomato plants, but soon after others in the area lost garden tools and equipment, which were quickly traced to and recovered from the hapless jailbird. He offered the excuse that he couldn't afford such things, and a "mate" had put him up to it.
I have enough experience of the Kimberley centre - precisely what form of experience is, as 81st Column would say, a story for another day - to know that my unfortunate neighbour would have received a degree of protection there that he simply doesn't have in the outside world. For example, at one stage Kimberley's Villa 8, for mature and capable male patients, had a magnificent aviary. I remember the pride of one of the patients as he gently lifted the lid of a nest box to show me a fantail pigeon on a clutch of eggs. My poor neighbour may be exercising his right to live in the community, but I truly fear that there's little I can do to stop him returning to jail by Christmas.
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Joe Wylie - have you tested this theory on people with lived experience of being locked up in institutions? There are many around who can tell you what it was like including NZer Robert Martin who spoke to the UN as the head of global self-advocacy NGO Inclusion International during the work on the convention.
Hilary - I'm not theorising - carrying out social experiments on the intellectually disabled is something I'd find reprehensible. All I'm doing is drawing on my own experiences of what I've been privileged to witness and experience. To be "locked up" in an institution sounds pretty unpleasant, and I've no doubt it was.
It's misleading to imply, though, that all former institutions for the intellectually disabled were places of incarceration. Levin's Kimberley Centre, for example, provided a real sense of community which, for people with certain needs, nothing seems to have adequately replaced. My concern is that people who might have once found a pleasant home in such a place, or just an opportunity to prepare for life in the wider community, have been effectively reclassified as criminals.
Sofie - thanks for that. One of the wittiest people I've known is classed as having an intellectual disability. There's often that grey area, though, of whether you're laughing at or with. Whatever, it's an aspect of life that's full of surprises.
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81st:
The first battle was getting the student to consider anything other than a person in a wheelchair . . .
Like, to consider disability in its widest sense? From your later mention of a special ed school I'm guessing that you mean intellectual disabilities.
Hilary:Earlier this year NZ was presented with the FD Roosevelt award for international leadership on disability issues at the UN (the Governor General led the party which included some distinguished disability activists) but TVNZ's Tim Wilson who was in New York went to a film premier instead, and didn't cover it. In the DomPost it was briefly mentioned in a column entitled 'Junket watch'.
But watch out - those activists are organising.That sounds commendable and well-deserved if it was for achievements with the physically disabled. Here in NZ though we routinely imprison people with intellectual disabilities. Thirty-plus years ago many of these vulnerable people would have been institutionalised in the sort of facilities that once existed at Mangere and Levin. In my humble experience of such things this was preferable to their being semi-abandoned to form an incompetent borderline criminal underclass. It's an international trend throughout the developed world, which has more to do with short-term economic considerations than the welfare of those involved.
Anyway, are we ready to be entertained, even motivated, by an intellectually disabled comedian? Should we?
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'Boof-head' is a term I first heard from an Australian colleague when I worked on a gardening labouring gang.
He used it a lot, and I always understood it to be a sort of Australian equivalent of 'bogan'.Bogans are generally boofy, but not all boofheads are bogans. Dropkick is a closer synonym IMHE.
Boofhead the comic strip:
http://poparchivesblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/boofhead.html -
. . . a laugh you could really wrap your mouth around.
Or, to borrow the title of an old album by Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments, A Meal You Can Shake Hands with in the Dark.
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Here's Philip:
Cool.
Loved the Riverdance - funny though how their style involved being pretty much motionless from the waist up.Dealing with disabilities - or differences - whether they're intellectual or physical - really highlights just how much personality matters.
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If there's anything living around difference teaches you, it's how we're all different.
Yay.
Never heard of Mr. Patston until now, but I like the sound of him. Thanks. -
Tish-boom!
Meanwhile, over in the Field Theory: The Return thread, there arelines such asOnce we get the monkey off our backs in a WC . . .
just going begging.
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"Amy" Brooke used to be known as Agnes-Mary Brooke: I have a kind of mild hatred for her because of an extremely ill-informed review she once committed of one of my books, and an on-going - I think she thought of it as a vendetta - I thought of it as a sandfly- attack of myself. She is a Roman Catholic bigot who is a very poor children's writer. Her impertinently self-written (mostly) self-published 'magazine' "The Best" died after very few issues.
That jogs my memory - a shriekingly bizarre attack on author Tessa Duder back in the early 90s. Unhinged by her naked envy of an award Duder had received, Brooke shamelessly plugged her own largely unread work, while painting herself as the victim (again) of a PC conspiracy.
Surely Brooke must be telegram from the Queen material - even way back then she came across as some kind of reanimated unholy relic.