About Group Homes

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Hello I'm new around this forum and wanted to have everyone take Group Homes in general. What are the like/dislikes about living and tell us on about those kind of experiences. As for me, I would say just torture and just strip away my freedom of every doing everything to help myself be independent, to me I don't know that word independent really means to me. But I do want to hear everyone's take about it.

Thread moved from Adult Autism Issues to General Autism Discussion.

Group homes are intended to provide care for those who can not provide care for themselves. They're better than living on the street or locked up in some hostile relative's attic, basement, or garage.

I'm not sure what to think of them. I hear both good and bad. They are places where you will be surrounded by people. You won't have a lot of freedom but some, I hear, some are really bad about hygiene and care and are quite dilapidated while others are rather nice.

I don't know anything at all about them. My assumption on them is that if you cannot take care of yourself, or are a minor and your parents cannot properly care for you, they are the answer. I would imagine that they would be a lot like a psych ward in the way they function, except you have more freedom. Or maybe an assisted living place, that would be a better comparison.

They actually built one behind my house. It used to be woods back there but the guy who owns most of the land in town cleared and sold it. It's directly behind my house. I used to have a beautiful view there, and when we moved in we were told that land wasn't going to be developed. Now he's built a really large house right there where the trees used to be. He's also cleared more land around it and is going to build onto the subdivision. It's going to be a group home, that's all I know. I don't know for what. I'm sure it's not an assisted living place for the elderly, as there is already the nursing home here and the town is too small to support something like that. We don't have a decent hospital - 12 beds, no OR, and the ER can only stabilize and move patients by ambulance or chopper to the big hospital an hour away by car - so I doubt it's going to be a facility where advanced medical care is needed. We don't have much of a psych facility in town, just a satellite office of a bigger place, and they have a doctor come once a month and it's managed the rest of the time by one RN, a social worker/counselor, and techs, which makes me wonder what kind of support they can give in a home situation. I know for a fact that this man wouldn't have sold the land to a place that would have a halfway house for drug abuse or ex cons because he owns the land around it and that would lower the value. So, I'm assuming it's going to be for people with developmental disorders who can't live on their own, or people with psychiatric problems who can't live on their own but don't need hospitalization. I'll let you know when I find out.

It's a beautiful place though. It's built just as nice as one of the houses in my subdivision, and in fact looks like just a larger scale one, but there is no garage, the doors are different, they have windows with the mesh inside, etc. Everybody walked over and peeked in when it was done. The kitchen is bigger and has larger appliances too. It's not landscaped yet. It's been there for close to a year, empty, and it's all mud around it and mud in the land thats cleared. This is great fun for kids on four wheelers and go carts and dirt bikes, but not so much fun when thats my view out my kitchen and bedroom window. Plus their noise early Sat and Sun mornings back there wakes me up.

Thats all I know about group homes. If this is one that has AS/ASD folks in it, I'm definately going to try and get a job there, and if they aren't looking for nonmedical/psych staff, I'll definately volunteer. However, I won't mention the volunteer part until I know they aren't looking for someone with my skills (housewife) or lack of skills (everything else).

Why? Are you thinking you may end up living in one, know someone who may, have a child that one day may, researching them for a project, or just curiosity? Any of the above is fine, I'm just curious.

The truth is I am living in a group home right now, deep down I hate living here because I don't deserve to be here because of my benefits and my family members stab me in the back. My family put me in this situation and I trying to find a place to stay around here MD/DC/VA metro area. Through the economy it's really tough to find a place to stay on my $800 SSI income despite being new in the area.

No it's not the best interest on sending your disability child/adult to group homes nor working because the pay sucks ($9.00)everyone's a dick and no one's wants to put up with their BS.

That's what I thought. I have heard more negative than good about them.

Whenever it's been discussed in any context I've always understood it to be an option that should be avoided at almost any cost.

The thing is they want to create more of them where I live.

There are many group homes in the town I live in. Usually the people in the home are all around the same level of ability. If at all possible the residents are able to pretty much able to come and go as they please on the weekends, during the week they go to work or school. They basically are made to do as much for themselves as possible. For the most part they seem to all be pretty happy. The goal is to get them living on their own or living in an apartment with another person with someone coming over a few times a week to check up on them.

I live in Canada, and for the most part, all I've heard when it comes to group homes is how bad they are. There are documentaries about the state of group homes here, but for the most part, I consistently hear about how abusive the staff are (in some cases the stories remind me of the abuse I had in the special needs class in school in the 1990s in Timmins), and lately I hear that instead of trying to understand the people they deal with, and help them with issues, they just call the police, who then take them to JAIL, charge them, and haul them before a judge who'll just slap a probation order on them and once that happens the abusive staffs have full control. They'll lengthen the aspie's rap sheet simply for refusing to read a bible (I call it the BILE) on a whim and having the staff call the cops to take him back to jail and charge for "breach of probation".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FQMK9D4vX4

I know that the CBC story talks about CAS group homes, but I would imagine lots of special needs people have ended up in the same places as well. Group home staffs to me are cut from the same cloth, no mater what type they're in - they're the types of people who if they were cops, would shoot somebody on a whim like most bald-headed cops do these days. They're the types of people who if they're EAs or teachers in the special needs class, they abuse the kids. It's all about power and control for those people. I've also known people who've worked in those places and they have questionable morals, one for example would chronically drink, party, go to the only strip club in town (the old Mattagami "Hotel" in Timmins) and swear at his own kids and hit them himself, as well as graphically talk about sex in front of them (they were pre-teens). I knew an EA at the school in Timmins who had the group-home mentality, and said that he used to be a former screw at a young-offender's camp, the ones that Mike Harris closed down in the 1990s in his nonsense revolution. He would frequently berate people, cause kids to have meltdowns and then use police-style tactics to restrain them (knee in the spine anyone?).

With those people, it's all about power, control, and their place on the Sunshine List. I honestly think an Aspergian solution (an Aspergian region in Ontario similar to a Volkstaat) is necessary because group homes in Ontario from the Harris hospital-shut-down period onward (even the so-called "Liberals" don't care about it) and Quebec under the Marois-Laprise-Drainville Lacanian franco-chauvinist troika are basically places where you're doomed to be abused and the type of place where, just like the ghetto, the police are not your friends.

I'll make more comments on "Aspergia" threads about the latter part, which is for another forum, here I'm telling you about how group homes are run where I live. I don't trust any of them, especially ones run by religious people, ex-cops, or French people (read: Lacanian tyrants).


I do not mean to plug things here, but....
If anyone wants to talk about anything I've written here in private, please note me. To note, I'm currently politically active and am working to get a social-democratic political party in Ontario to be elected as the next provincial government. I'm working on solutions to everything. I have my foot in the door and delivered epicness to them already, so they listen to me.