New centre to be long-term home for mentally ill
A new long-term centre for sheltering the mentally ill is to open in Ahuntsic in a building that till now has been an old folks’ home. The city has not had such an institution since the 1970s when the trend to turn the mentally ill out into society became the fashion. People still fear the return to something like a 19th-century madhouse scenario, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to recognize that there will always be a small percentage of the population who need this kind of structure.
Alison Cummins 08:01 on 2011/09/29 Permalink
This sort of structure may fill a need, but it also has inherent dangers. (Which, when recognized, can be palliated.) If any person — disabled or otherwise — is unable to decide their own living situation, they are unable to escape from abuse.
A relative who taught at a public high school was frustrated by the integration movement which led to severely disabled individuals (he called them “vegetables”) being enrolled as students and wheeled around by support personnel who pretended to play with them. As a teacher, he felt this degraded the concept of schools and teaching. For myself, I thought that the advantages of having disabled people out in public view where they couldn’t be abused or tortured in private outweighed any assault on the dignity of education. (Which I didn’t see — still don’t — but I’m not a high school teacher and I assume he had to deal with problems of which I am blissfully ignorant.)
Anyway. Any form of institutionalization segregates the institutionalized. Segregation enables abuse. People who are both disabled and difficult are especially vulnerable to abuse to begin with.
The percentage of the population for whom these issues are relevant is not actually that small. At least eight percent of those of us who reach seventy will become demented, at which point we may require institutional care. While we may spend only a relatively small part of our lives demented, it hits a significant number of us.
Kate 08:49 on 2011/09/29 Permalink
True. By “small” I meant above that although most folks who need psych care can be seen on an outpatient basis, there’s a sort of irreducible minimum number who do need ongoing, resident care to be safe. Yes, we have to be very clear they’re being sheltered, not restrained – the process needs to have a feedback system built in where it doesn’t just become a memory hole of people we’d rather not see.