“In reclaiming “cripple,” disabled people are taking the thing in their identity that scares the outside world the most and making it a cause to revel in with militant self pride” (No Pity, p34)

Eugenics:

•  Anyone in here who’s parents had an appendectomy before you were born?
•   You don’t exist. Why not?
•   What happens to the gene pool when we allow people who have appendicitis prior to breeding are saved by appendectomy?
•  The gene pool weakens. (To the degree that genetics is responsible for individual cases of appendicitis.)
•  Appendicitis was on it’s way out, until the appendectomy.
•  We have weakened the gene pool.
•  By allowing the weak, the feeble, the infirm to breed, we weaken the gene pool. Eventually, this will cause havoc.
•    And, according to the book : Aly, Gštz; Chroust, Peter; and Pross, Christian. CLEANSING THE FATHERLAND: NAZI MEDICINE AND RACIAL HYGIENE.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1994. 295 p.
•             Details are provided of German physicians profiting professionally and financially through the Nazi racial-hygiene program. Aly, Chroust, and Pross reveal stories of the T-4 euthanasia program and the killing of maladjusted adolescents, handicapped persons, foreign laborers too sick to work, and even German civilians who suffered mental breakdowns during air raids.

The Rise of Institutionalization
   For the first half of the century, Americans with mental retardation (called "idiots" or "feebleminded"), mental illness, cerebral palsy, and, until as late as the 1940's, those with epilepsy, were viewed as a menace that threatened to lower the health and intelligence of future generations. As a result, these people- with disabilities that were not fatal - were segregated in isolated institutions. There they lost control of their lives and their liberties, solely by virtue of their disability. Often they faced involuntary sterilization. Oliver Wendell Holmes may have been one of America's most distinguished jurists, but even he voiced the standard prejudices of the day. "it is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerative offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind," Holmes wrote in the 1927 Supreme Court majority ruling in the case of Carrie Buck. Doctors at the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded of Virginia, where the eighteen year old woman was a resident, had sought to sterilize her after she had given birth to a child. Buck's own mother lived in the same institution. (Both Buck and her daughter, and probably her mother as well, were of normal intelligence. But poor women thought to be incorrigible - like Buck and her mother, who both gave birth to illegitimate children - were often institutionalized and written off as "feebleminded.") Wrote Holmes: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!"
      Nazi eugenics experiments, however, largely discredited such thinking, and following World War II a new approach, thought to be more humane, emerged. Such disabled people were no longer treated as threats but as patients. They were considered sick people in need of help, education, and correction, not elimination.

Social perspectives changed, as did medical ones.

We were shamed out of the potential of eugenics by seeing it carried out on a massive scale.
  An arguably good idea, with impossibly evil complications in it’s  application..

Movement shifted toward rights, civil rights legislation, inclusion.
       Sit in: read No Pity pgs. 127-128, 130
            (Context: Jennings is a rehab. professional. Bob Kafka is a paraplegic and founder of ADAPT, a civil rights group.)
 
 

Read No Pity, Pg. 64-65. "legislative afterthought"

Along with the Civil Rights Movement, the Humanistic perspective that came to dominate psychology and spread it's influence on the popular psyche as well helped with the idea that we should treat people as people regardless of individual characteristics that might be labeled: skin color, sex, disability, etc.

Paradigm Shifts:
definition:  "a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which  theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated."
  (Merriam Webster's' Collegiate Dictionary 10th Ed.)
 

• Shifts:
•  From the demonic model,
•  to the medical model,
•  to the independent living model.

• Basic Assumptions of the Independent Living Model:
•  People with disabilities are foremost PEOPLE.
•  All people use and benefit from "accommodations" (car, glasses, etc.)
•  People w/ disabilities are valuable members and resources in the community.
•  People w/ disabilities have a fundamental right to full participation.
•  Disability is one aspect of a person, just like any other label.
•   People w/ disabilities. need accommodations which not all others need (though we may all benefit from "inclusive design")
•  Others?

David Robinson's Independent Living Philosophy
(Mr. Robinson is Executive Director of The Whole Person, Inc.)

While it is easy to voice the assumptions and values or the new paradigm, it is another thing to embrace it, to own it, to live it.

How do we give up the standard ways of thinking?
How do we abandon our "culture" and  transition to another?

• Questions in shifting paradigm:
•  Is it possible?
•  Is it realistic?
•  Is it going too far?

Stages of Change:

 We don't change except in response to pain and discomfort. Pain Motivates.
 

•  Pre-Contemplation "Huh? What do I care, never heard of it"
•   Ignorance, no thought of need or desire to change.
•  Contemplation - "Oh, that's what it is, that's why I should care"
•   Resistance & overcoming resistance.
•   "Maybe I should do something about it."
•  Preparation - "What do I need to get ready?"
•   Decision to change & making shifts in thought to change.
•  Action - "Here I go, I'm ready to try it out."
•   The actual change of behavior occurs. May not totally buy into the identity of the type of person who..."
•  Maintenance - "I'm a _____ type of person" - Keep on keepin' on.
•   Refresh, identity changes, new way becomes natural feeling.
•  (Relapse) - backsliding, fall off the wagon, oops, old ways creep up, etc.
•   Normal part of the process of change.
•   Opportunity for growth, self-evaluation, better Preparation Strategies.

National Defense Act of 1916
    Focus on training disabled vets of WW I so they could compete for jobs.

National Rehabilitation Act of 1920
    Created a cost sharing policy between states and federal government to pay for the National Defense Act of 1916.

Social Security Act of 1935
    Established permanent public assistance for the elderly, blind persons, and children with disabilities.
    In 1956 Congress enacted the SSDI (social security disability insurance) to pay out depending on a person's prior paying into Social Security fund.

Rehabilitation Act of 1973
    Eliminates "Creaming" for services - ALL people with disabilities get services.
    Creates IWRP - Individualized Written Rehab Program - ensuring consumer input.
    Section 503 Required all entities contracting with the Fed. Government. in excess of $2500 to establish affirmative action programs with regards to disability.
    Section 504 Set foundation for ADA of 1990 - guarantees employers contracting with Federal  Government cannot discriminate against persons with disabilities.

The Equal Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1995 (or IDEA: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act)
    AKA: by it's original number: PL 94-142
    Stipulates education provided for ALL children 3 through 21, individualized, appropriate for need, free to family, least restrictive environment, w/o stigma or discrimination.
    Provides for IEP - Individualized Education Program

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 - The ADA
    Landmark Civil Rights Legislation
    Readings addressed much of the materials here.
    * ADA Amendments of 2008 - Broadened some of the definition of terms within the definition of Disability.
        (if you are interested, see the Job Accommodations Network article on updates at this link: http://www.jan.wvu.edu/bulletins/adaaa1.htm 

DISCUSSION:
Ashley's Treatment - Source Article: Ashley: Treatment to Stunt the Growth of a Severely Developmentally Disabled Girl.  

Interesting Internet Sites