pezar wrote:
In the US, there is no system. Period. The disabled are on their own, apart from exhortations to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "overcome your challenges". Doing so is expected to be accomplished without any outside help. Even SSI is seen as govt interference in people's independence. The disabled are believed by many to be faking it for sympathy, and are constantly told to stop doing so.
Pretty much absolutely true, and stories like this are the reason I no longer try to make it any other way.
You can find compassionate individuals who will have some empathy for the fact that everyone's bootstraps snap from time to time, and some of us get upper than others.
My single greatest fear, both for myself and for my children, is falling into some system in which we are conditions and symptoms, not people.
It has happened to me before. Thank God the "system" was a local mental healthcare system, and by moving 150 miles north I was able to get out of it. Had the system in question been a national one, with the weight of the federal gov't behind it, I would have had no way out but death.
I have had the sort of "help" described in the article, the sort of help that reduces one to a disease, a collection of symptoms and behaviors to be studied and altered, without any personhood at all. If that's help, I don't want any, thank you.
LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!! !!
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"Alas, our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar." --TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"