Give our seniors care with dignity
September 20th, 2008
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Editor:
First, good for you, Stephen Pate, for pointing out that children with autism are being shuffled from disability support to early childhood development. And, yes, what does happen to those children? There are lots of them and more being tested or waiting to be tested. And the waiting time is long. What happens to them when they leave the day care or school system, or when they grow older? We want answers and we want them now, not to be shuffled again. That goes with all children with all disabilities.
Second, and also very important, some of our seniors are very ill in hospital and unable to return to their own homes for their families to take care of them. Why should they have to be moved to a nursing home 25-35 miles away from their family and friends just so the government, any government, can say, “we got everyone a bed in a nursing home”?
This is unacceptable and very unfair to our seniors. Remember we will be in their shoes one day, so look after our seniors properly and give them the dignity and respect they deserve. Nothing less.
Deborah C. Somers,
Charlottetown
Autistic adults very often end up either in institutions or similar settings or getting little or no support apart from what our families give us.
There is a sharp dichotomy made between people who are ‘too disabled to have a say in how they are treated’ and those who are ‘not disabled enough to need help’. They don’t recognize that high functioning autism still counts as a disability, and not just in social interaction. There are autistics living on the streets because they can’t get a job or they lost their home due to organizational disabilities affecting their ability to clean or pay the rent when it’s due.
Lower functioning autistic people have no say in how they are treated, and not enough effort is made to help them communicate and give them choices about how they live. They are at extremely high risk of abuse – some estimates put the rate of abuse of severely developmentally disabled adults at as high as 90% – and are powerless to do anything to stop it. Often abuse is not discovered unless it causes significant injuries, illness or pregnancy. Some people die from ongoing severe abuse. Even in the ‘best’ settings, minor choices like what they want to wear or eat are denied them and attempts to communicate are treated as ‘problem behavior’.
It’s important to note also that there is no clear divide between high and low functioning, even though people act like there is. Some people switch, depending on setting, from low functioning to high functioning or vice versa – not because their own skills are really very different, but the setting is. Autistic assisted communication (eg typing instead of speaking) users are especially likely to experience this limbo – I’ve heard of incontinent, severely disabled autistic people being denied help because their tested IQs are over 70 when using assisted communication. Others have had staff hiding their communication devices or contriving tests to ‘prove’ their communication is invalid.
Ettina
September 22, 2008 at 4:39 PM