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The Ones We Sent Away

• civilitty 3y ago
  https://archive.ph/PrGLB https://archive.ph/PrGLB
  • jayavanth 3y ago
    Site is down for me right now
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Boy, this brings up a lot of complicated feelings for me. Not only has my family had some of this, I know of many, many others.
• Obscurity4340 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • AussieWog93 3y ago
    Nope, now stop thread crapping please.
    • Obscurity4340 3y ago
      Sorry, I just had to know. I was feeling a bit involuntarily solipsistic lately for some reason
• maximilianburke 3y ago
  What a story. I got to the end a complete, sobbing wreck. To send your own children away to abominable, putrid institutions at the advice of doctors is something I can't even imagine. And it really wasn't that long ago.
  • crdrost 3y ago
    Definitely. I like to play a game sometimes... more or less based on the idea that bloodletting and rectal feeding and wound probing were medical "best practices" of the past and now seem so obviously ludicrous to us now. So I like to look at something that I think is obvious, some "best practice of our time", and wonder how it might in 100 or 150 years suddenly seem totally ludicrous to posterity with the revelation of some knowledge K where "oh now everyone knows K, how silly everyone was before they knew K." K=neuroplasticity is an emerging case of this phenomenon for the more recent history, I think the strength of the evidence is high there. HN has also entertained in its top ranking some articles from Slime Mold Time Mold hypothesizing a K="what if the obesity epidemic has nothing to do with calories in vs calories out, and actually there is some toxin which the body has to sequester in subcutaneous fat and that's why everyone's getting obese" -- that would be a potential modern example, although I don't think that blog makes a very good case for it. (Lustig makes a better case on this front for K="our modern Western diet removes liver protection and starves our gut microbiomes" and I think you could make an even better case that K="the dangers of chronic low-level whole-body inflammation", with Lustig only gesturing at one part of that broader problem maybe?) A major theoretical discovery of K="computers can't do XYZ" would be another such thing for all of us who in the modern world chase these fads about computers reinventing finance or art or the modern economy. You'd have people in the year 2100 saying "can you believe only 75 years ago, everyone would just believe that computers were magically going to fix X and then they wouldn't and everyone would suddenly believe they would now fix Y and then they wouldn't and then Z and they wouldn't and and and... straight faced rationalist businesspeople acting like 'Tech-Jesus is coming' on August 1st, oh sorry it's September 1st, sorry -- October 1st? November? Maybe in the coming year? well SURELY this decade."
    • coffeebeqn 3y ago
      Mental health care is still in the dark ages and the medicine we have are mostly crappy. I just got off SSRIs - the most prescribed mental health medication. It messes with your whole body since serotonin has hundreds of different uses in the body. And we don’t know why it works! It’s basically bloodletting or eating the village healers herbs
• gumby 3y ago
  My dad had an Uncle Charles (probably born around 1910) who didn't live with the family. He was what was called a "spastic" -- probably cerebral palsy. The family (out in the bush) couldn't look after him so he was committed to an institution. My dad visited him as a kid. Uncle Charles had never been taught to read or write but he was an excellent chess player and (like his brother, my grandfather) could do complex arithmetic in his head. What a waste of a life for him! On my grandmother's side, her youngest sister Jean wasn't allowed to marry because her job was to look after the parents when they got old. And when they passed on she had no skills as she hadn't been able to acquire any. What a waste of a life for her! Most of 20th century Australia was tough.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    I know a guy with CP, who is quite rich. The thing about CP, is that it usually only affects the body (sometimes, with deadly results), but the mind is often quite sharp. This guy was (and still is) a serial entrepreneur. Really sharp. I would not be surprised to find out that he has used his visible handicap to lull people into thinking he was easy meat.
    • bitwize 3y ago
      Eric S. Raymond has mild cerebral palsy. Both he and his doctor hypothesize that in CP, like autism, the same neural miswiring that gives rise to the condition can, in some cases, also bestow greater insight or intelligence.
  • pjc50 3y ago
    Ireland had a variant of this where women who got inconveniently pregnant were sent away to forced labour institutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland If women died from the conditions, they could be buried in unmarked graves: > In Dublin in 1993, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity – owners and operators of the laundry in High Park, Drumcondra – had lost money in share dealings on the stock exchange; to cover their losses, they sold part of the land in their convent to a property developer. This led to the discovery of 133 unmarked graves. The Sisters arranged to have the remains cremated and reburied in a mass grave at Glasnevin Cemetery, splitting the cost of the reburial with the developer who had bought the land. It later transpired that there were 22 more corpses than the sisters had applied for permission to exhume, and death certificates existed for only 75 of the original 133, despite it being a criminal offence to fail to register a death that occurs on one's premises.[3] In all, 155 corpses were exhumed, and cremated There was also unmarked graves for babies: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60464447 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60464447 (see also institutions in both Australia, Canada and possibly New Zealand for forcibly removing children from certain ethnic minorties, known as "residential schools")
• hellotheretoday 3y ago
  I worked in a facility like this for the first 5 years of my career Many of the clients are very aware they’ve been abandoned. Especially so because there are a select few who do get regular family visits. It was crushingly depressing to work holidays and have the regular crew of kids that never went home or had visitors. If you work with adults it was significantly worse, many of them had no visitors for literal decades Also those places pay terribly but I’m sure that shocks no one. When I worked there it was at one of the places known for paying very well in the industry and they payed 13/hr for children and 9/hr for adults (2010). AFAIK the rates are only 2-3 dollars more an hour now 13 years later
  • moomoo11 3y ago
    Can you tell me what these facilities are called? I volunteer on all holidays and I’d be glad to keep folks company or help out the staff.
    • hellotheretoday 3y ago
      While that is noble and appreciated unfortunately many facilities will turn you away because of the liability involved. The unfortunate reality of working with populations that include severe developmental and intellectual disability, traumatic brain injury, dementia, mood disorder, etc is that impulse control can be severely impaired. This can lead to extreme and sudden violence that can catch you quite off guard if you are not prepared for it (and even if you are) and cause significant injury. The staff turnover rate and workers comp claims were crazy high as a result and part of the cause of the low pay (although there were many other major factors involved). It can be quite dangerous. Although to be clear this is absolutely not to suggest that someone who is mentally ill or disabled is inherently dangerous of course; this is a small subset of individuals whose functioning was impaired in such a way that made the likelihood of violent behavior significantly more likely. Often it was not intentional violence, more like a childish tantrum except with the body of an adolescent or young adult that could do serious damage. Although occasionally it was serious targeted violence too. I personally still have a permanent neck and spinal injury a decade later as well as a ton of scars from bite marks. I saw much worse. It’s not just some mild annoyance shit, it’s life changing ruin your body kind of injuries. With that serious caveat the other issue is that there’s not really a “standard” name for these programs. They vary by level of care, by provider, by state, and sometimes even by county. But some examples from around me would be residential schools, residential treatment facilities, long term structured residences, etc. more generic terms are things like “group homes” and they’re all considered an extension of psychiatric inpatient treatment facilities. Also fwiw depending on your state/locale there may be volunteer opportunities that offer training to help alleviate the above issues. At another program I consulted with later in my career they had volunteers who would socialize in this capacity. It was a really nice program; they would essentially go through a condensed version of the staff training. They wouldn’t do anything like restraints or things like that but they would teach them evasive maneuvers, de escalation techniques, and then train them on the clients a bit with staff before letting them do more independent socialization. Was really nice for the clients. The downside was the really difficult clients who had extreme behavioral issues tended to not get the service and they also tended to be the clients who got visited the least. But that’s the difficulty of the issue; when your behavior gets to that point you kind of need specially trained people around you at all times for safety. And the thing is populations change the frequency of this a bit but not as much as you’d think. I’ve spent most of my career doing pediatric stuff, child and adolescent, with some stints doing adult work. All of those populations can have these issues obviously but it does tend to calm a bit with age in my experience. However, I have peers who focus in gerontology and dementia and have similar issues because of the impulse control issues that can come with that diagnosis. I hope this doesn’t scare you off. I only hope to prepare you for the realities of the situation. I would hate to just post “oh yeah go volunteer” and have some kid bite you and have it get infected (human bites get infected super easily if they break skin, mouths are nasty!) or have your hair pulled and get your neck all messed up. You can do this and be safe if you are prepared and trained, you don’t need to be hypervigilant (that can actually make things worse), but you do need to be aware of your surroundings and know how to position yourself safely. That all said my suggestion would be to find a residential facility near you and contact them directly to see if they have any volunteer opportunities. If they just invite you they most likely have a population where none of this is a concern and you are good to go. If they offer training and you’re up to it go for it, you’ll learn a lot about safe positioning and de escalation techniques. If they ignore you I’m sorry, a lot of these places are overwhelmed and constantly short staffed unfortunately
• neonate 3y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20230905224123/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/disabled-children-institutionalization-history/674763/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230905224123/https://www.theatl...
• anabis 3y ago
  >the most commonly cited rationale for institutionalization in those years was >that neurotypical siblings would suffer—from shame, from attention starvation— >if their disabled siblings were kept at home. There is alternative perspective of "Young Carers" or "きょうだい児" in Japanese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_carer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_carer I don't think it was a easy choice then, or easy choice now. Seems to be a relevant subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/siblingsupport https://www.reddit.com/r/siblingsupport
  • thriftwy 3y ago
    Here we have an interesting pattern where the childhood is actually a brittle thing: If you have a good childhood you grow up into an well integrated adult with no issues. However, if you are having a bad childhood, not only you have the process disrupted for you but it also cascades into your family, in this case siblings. That's because the childhood is so social, and it is often the bad kind. Many of non-neurotypical (or even physically disabled) children could grow up into integrated adults, it would just take somewhat more time. However, they often don't have access to that time as they are isolated and sidelined by the social structure. Adult don't care about each other or meddle in each other's affairs, but children would. That's often deleterious.
• asimpleusecase 3y ago
  I knew a lady who was born with very complex spina bifida. Her parents were wealthy and had very manicured lives. They signed her over to an institution at birth. She grew up with people with profound mental retardation. She receive no education. At 20 she was found by an uncle who always suspected something had happened that was not being disclosed. He began to visit her and teach her to read. He explained that she had a right to leave and helped her start her life. In a couple of years she was able to enter University and graduated despite the lack of any education before 20. She developed a friendship with a lady with CP and they were housemates when I met them. She died of pneumonia several years ago due to constricted lung size. She was a lovely friend.
  • colineartheta 3y ago
    Thank you for sharing this nice story. What an amazing uncle to find her and help her like that.
• ggm 3y ago
  The Kennedy family, and the Royal family both have this in their past I believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerissa_and_Katherine_Bowes-Lyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerissa_and_Katherine_Bowes-Ly...
  • feintruled 3y ago
    Rosemary Kennedy is an especially horrendous example. She was not at all disabled but was having behavioural issues (maybe due to depression) and they arranged for her to have a lobotomy which was the snake-oil-du-jour and it went terribly wrong (though one wonders how a lobotomy can go right) leaving her in a most dreadful state.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• niemandhier 3y ago
  My grand parents refused to sent my severely autistic aunt to such an institution. In 1960 Germany, a Country without mentally handicapped due to the euthanasia programs a few years before, this decision ruind their lives. The social pressure to commit your child to such institutions was very strong in addition doctors told them that it would be for the benefit of the child and they were acting selfish. We need to be careful when passing judgement on those who did listen to why society told them.
• cjrp 3y ago
  In the UK there were asylums for "imbeciles" (the term for people with learning difficulties). Although they no longer exist, there is a plot of land near me which cannot be built on because it's essentially an unmarked, mass grave for patients of the asylum. Terribly sad.