4:00pm July 12, 2013

➸ Okay, this actually creeps me out more than a little...

youneedacat:

feliscorvus:

A Dutch dementia facility where carers act as shopkeepers to keep an eye on residents attracts global interest.

I don’t normally do trigger warnings but I will say that some of this article literally made me nauseous. Proceed with caution if “real life dystopia" stuff freaks you out. :/

I know dementia isn’t the same thing as autism, but I am 100% sure that this is exactly what a lot of people have in mind when they imagine an “ideal care facility" for people with any sort of cognitive and/or developmental disability.

And that’s not even getting into the whole mess surrounding how people with dementia are viewed and what assumptions are made about them. I know it can be really really difficult and scary for both the person who has it and their family members, etc., but that doesn’t make it remotely okay to treat someone like their personhood is gone because they have dementia.

Nor does it make it okay to lie to them and essentially “trick" them. I don’t necessarily claim to have a solution for safety-related stuff but I am sure there has to be something better than deception. Especially given that the one constant I have seen in interacting with people in varying stages of dementia is a terrible fear that someone is trying to put something over on them, or isn’t telling them something.

But anyway, the part that freaked me out the most was this:

‘Dementia Village’ - as it has become known — is a place where residents can live a seemingly normal life, but in reality are being watched all the time. Caretakers staff the restaurant, grocery store, hair salon and theater — although the residents don’t always realize they are carers — and are also watching in the residents’ living quarters.

Residents are allowed to roam freely around the courtyard-like grounds with its landscaped trees, fountains and benches — but they can’t leave the premises.

Their two-story dormitory-style homes form a perimeter wall for the village, meaning there is no way a resident can accidentally wander out. And if they do approach the one exit door, a staffer will politely suggest the door is locked and propose another route.

Seriously, humans?! Again, I do NOT claim to have all the answers to how to actually address certain kinds of difficulties people might have. But this does not strike me as a step in the right direction as long as it relies on deception. It literally reads like some sort of sci-fi dystopia.

I said this on FWD agrees ago about a much less expansive idea if something very similar. A fake bus stop. I described my own experiences in the process.
I got jumped on hard by tons of people. Who said I just didn’t understand dementia. I think I understand it better than they did. But then they were the same people I described in a recent post, who pretty much believed that it was ableist to question psychiatry.
Anyway I was eventually, IIRC, just told to calm down and stop being furious about not only the fake bus stop but their reaction to it. I have no words. This literally is my nightmare. I’ve had nightmares about this place. Almost exactly.
And everyone thinks their fucking dystopia is really a utopia.

One exit door? And if there’s a fire?

Places like that don’t tend to care about fires. One mental institution I was in, had the children’s building with a shape like a V with the nurses station at the center, a day room on each side of the nurses station, and a locked door at the center, with a hall going off in each direction. The exits, each one a set of two locked doors in front of each other with a couple rooms in between, were at the end points of those halls. As far from the day rooms as possible.

In a fire, what was the evacuation plan? All inmates go to the DAYROOM and wait to be evacuated. You couldn’t get further from the exits in places patients were permitted to go. And none of us were clueless what that many about our value.

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