Locally the last thing you want to do if someone has a mental health crisis is to call the cops. They will arrive and shoot whoever they see. The last time they shot the unarmed woman that had called about her mother and was waiting outside for the police to arrive.
I spent my career working with people with disabilities and I am really afraid that they are going to eliminate all the services they need and eventually put them in institutions. I think special education for children will also be on the hit list. Ugh!!!
This is my concern as well.
People have no idea how much work goes into trying (and often failing) to protect disabled folks. A government that openly maligns disabled people will get disabled people killed. Period.
Gen Pop had such an abysmally poor understanding of how rough things are for disabled folks on average.
I’m 70 and when I was a kid the only special education was for kids that were called mildly mentally retarded which is now called an intellectual disability. Kids with more severe intellectual disabilities were in horrible state run institutions. They were not allowed to interact with other kids at all at my school . Two of my friends majored in special education in 1972 at college and the Rehabilitation Acts became law in 1973.
People with disabilities were rarely employed until 1973 and with the new law came the department of vocational rehabilitation that helped people with disabilities because employed. All sorts of supports were developed to help people be successful.
The Idea Act gave children the right to have a free and appropriate education with an individual IEP. The department of vocational rehabilitation is under the department of education which is 83% funded by the federal government and the rest by the states. Kennedy was talking about people with certain disabilities such as mental illness being sent to wellness camps to get well. We all know that is a code word for being locked up or worse. All of these programs were decades in the making and could be quickly destroyed. I feel sick even thinking about it.
Yep, I'm neurodivergent and there was no diagnosis or support when I was a kid. I was just put in the "slow class" where we played with alphabet blocks and guinea pigs for hours on end because we weren't worth teaching.
I know first hand what it feels like to have society decide you're worthless because your brain functions a little differently. The fact that they're moving to go back to that is fucking horrifying.
It's not only morally and ethically horrifying, it's economically idiotic.
It's well established that under accommodating people with disabilities means under employing them, and that's a massive waste of human capital.
I'm severely disabled in many ways that make me absolutely unemployable to most organizations because I can never work the way they expect employees to work, and they simply won't accommodate me.
And yet, per hour I make more than 5 times the average in my province working for myself because I'm actually perfectly capable of highly profitable work even though almost no industry would hire someone like me. I'm the only employer willing to accommodate me.
Disabled people are a wildly under-valued resource, and it's estimated that in Canada if we made the country more accessible that disabled people being able to better enter the workforce would increase GDP by close to 20%. And that's not assuming that anyone's disability improves with accommodation.
https://www.iwh.on.ca/plain-language-summaries/economic-benefits-of-fully-accessible-and-inclusive-canadaCutting supports for people with disabilities and further removing them from the social fabric is not efficient and doesn't help the economy. It makes us less able to contribute, and more of an expense to the system.
It's fucking stupid and morally disgusting.
