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11:52am June 27, 2013

reply to apheline about group homes and institutions

Sorry for not doing as a reblog, none of my tumblr clients will let me. My post:

Group homes are institutions. They’re just tiny ones with only a few people living there. Size and location doesn’t make an institution, power does. In fact there are even what I’ve called distributed institutions - agencies that provide assistance to individual people in our homes, but do it in an institutional way.

Larger institutions aren’t necessarily worse than group homes. Sometimes group homes are worse. Sometimes institutions with only one person living there are worse. It all depends on the situation. It’s basically the Zimbardo experiment being repeated over and over thousands of times with no controls put on it.

I always tell people I can never count how long I was in institutions because it’s all a matter of definition.

Because even when I was technically out, I left my parents home and went to an institution-like special ed school, then went to a series of institution-like day programs. The only difference between that and living in a mental institution or residential facility was that instead of walking from one part of the grounds to another, you drive from program to program in a car. But the actual experience was little different. And while I was at home between various stays at more traditional institutions (longest I think was about 9 months being shuffled between the places, shortest was three days, total time about a year and a half spread over three years?), my parents didn’t really know what to do about my problems so for awhile they took their cues from the system I was in, and home was little different at times too.

So… time spent in institutions could be anywhere from a year and a half to four years(?) Depending how you divide it up. That had the insidious effect of making me literally not notice I wasn’t locked up anymore for quite a long time after.

But yeah institutions aren’t about size, not about public or private, not about the shape of the building, not about how long you stay, but about power and who has it and who doesn’t.

My building right now looks like an institution. Many people in town think it’s a nursing home. What makes it different is it’s not run by staff. It’s just housing for elderly and disabled people. If institutions were about building shape, it would be one. (It’s even got the horrible green hallways.) There may be some people here in institutional programs, but the building itself isn’t one.

So in most sociological terms, institutions for disabled people might be called group homes, nursing homes, residential treatment centers, residential schools, hospitals, state hospitals! psychiatric wards in general hospitals, and all kinds of other names.

And in my book lots of non-residential systems are institutions as well.

So when I talk about institutions I don’t mean just one kind of place.  I’ve personally been to private psychiatric institutions, children’s hospitals, psych wards, and a residential treatment center that I sometimes call a group home.

And of all of those the group home was by far the worst. I think because they made up for the lack of physical locks or restraints, by overestimating me to the point of stupor, seizures, and toxicity, as well as brainwashing, there’s no other good word for it. I’d rather be tied down any day but maybe I’m weird.