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8:33pm
August 3, 2015
Experiences at the Judge Rotenberg Center - Telling People’s Stories
I would like to interview people who have been residents of JRC and people who have worked there. It is incomprehensible to me that JRC still operates and my sense is that putting an end to the cruelty may hinge on people in positions of power hearing from people who have experienced life there. Until the Andre McCollins video became public, people were able to buy JRC’s story that the shock from the GED was like a pinch or a bee sting. Being able to witness the inhumanity of the shock has changed people’s understanding in important ways.
Offering people a way to tell their story in a safe way may make a difference. I am proposing an oral history/story project in which I help people tell their stories of life at JRC by interviewing people, writing their stories and giving people the opportunity to review/revise their story. It would then be up to each person to decide what he/she wants to do with the story. Some people may just want it as a personal record of their time there; others may want to share it more broadly. This could be done anonymously at the person’s discretion. Each person will own and control his/her story.
Some people know all about JRC but when they hear about it in a person’s own words it can make it so much more real and only then does the horror of the situation hit them. One person’s story can make a difference.
If you are interested in sharing your story, knowing you will have complete control of it and if and how it is eventually shared, please email me at nancy-weiss@comcast.net. If you know people who have been at JRC either as residents or staff, please forward this email to them. The best way for me to reach people will be people sending this request to others who may be interested.
Thanks for your help and interest,
Nancy Weiss
Signal boosting, because I would love to see this initiative succeed in gathering stories and maybe getting the Judge Rotenberg Center closed down. Nancy Weiss has been fighting against the atrocities at the Judge Rotenberg Center for MANY years, she’s awesome.
Signal boost.
62 notes
8:36am
June 2, 2015
Nightmares
How long will the nightmares last? How many more nights will they have me back in their grasp? In these dreams I am strapped once again to the devices. I feel the fear in my stomach. I see the same faces that I left behind, living the same day over and over. Popsicles sticks, counting, anxious faces, darting eyes, working to earn praise, then starting over again. Sometimes I fight the staff back with a confidence I didn’t have before. My favorite is when I told Matthew Israel to his face to go fuck himself. He did that nod, instructing the staff to shock me, but it didn’t hurt. That time was not a nightmare with a moment of victory. But mostly, the dreams are terrifying. I get shocked, and it hurts. I can’t escape. I can’t dial the phone to call my mom for help.
I have been through a lot of shitty programs, schools and situations. But the Judge Rotenberg Center wins the distinction of being the only one I have nightmares about. I don’t think they will ever end. Because that pain is etched in my mind. But maybe that’s ok. It keeps my anger fresh, and my longing to make it right. I never will forget the feelings or the pain. At least now, I can wake from those dreams and look around at my new real life, where I feel safe and happy.
8:36am
June 2, 2015
Part of my actual official recording (behavior) sheet from Judge Rotenberg Center. Just some of the things I was shocked or it in trouble for. There is much more too. Under MDIS2 is I get shocked for having “5 IVB1 in an hour” at bottom shows what IVB is- talking to self, laughing etc. JRC claims they only shock major behaviors. Liars. See MDIS1- I also got shocked for “touching telephone, tic like body movements (I have Tourettes), hand movements in front of face, jumping up and down etc and much much more. This is only part of my sheet
8:36am
June 2, 2015
Another Unfortunately True Story
In my first few months of being at JRC, I had been asking about where my glasses were. They had gotten taken from me at some point after I got there, and they said I was too “unsafe” to have them. Even though I was very nearsighted and had worn my glasses since I was 13. Not being able to see well contributed to my frustration and anxiety.
One day my case manager at the time came to my workshop with a pair of glasses and forced me with a 3 step direction (under penalty of shock) to put them on. They weren’t my glasses I had never seen them before. She pinpointed me “arguing with staff”. She said I HAD to wear them, that I was mistaken and they were mine, she found them in her desk drawer. I couldn’t see anything out of them and it made me sick to wear someone else’s prescription. Her and the workshop supervisor forced me to wear the all day, saying I just needed to get used to them again. THEY WERE NOT MY GLASSES. I think at some point they realized they were wrong, but at JRC staff can never admit to making a mistake, so they will maintain to the end that they are right, at students expense and much to our frustrations.
To save myself, I ended up “losing” the glasses so I wouldn’t have to wear them anymore. Of course that got a new behavior added to my program “hiding or losing. throw away glasses”. The truth is I would never hide or throw away my actual glasses, I really need them to see. I was forced into doing that because they were forcing me to wear someone else’s glasses! Like, who DOES that? Oh yeah, JRC…
8:35am
June 2, 2015
Proof JRC was shocking us on the board. This was mine. So many other students got this too. See number 3, where it directs staff to make sure the torture is good by being discrete, so the student (me on this one) “doesn’t know the application (shock) is coming”
8:34am
June 2, 2015
The Day I Spoke Up
One of the last houses I lived in before I finally got out of that place was one I hated the most. The supervisor of that house had a really bad mean streak. I did my best to stay on her good side because if she didn’t like you she made sure your life was hell. Mostly I got along with her and bit my tongue when she tested me. But I was always stressed at that house, especially when she was in charge. I remember one day one of the other girls commented that we were being tortured. She got angry and said that we didn’t know what torture was, referring to her home country. But she was wrong, We knew torture very well. She had no empathy towards what we went through every day mentally and physically. She had the nerve to try and make us feel guilty for commenting on our own abuse.
It was a Saturday or Sunday. We were all sitting in the living room having some free time. One of the other residences called saying that a certain girl in our was on the list to go on a field trip with them. So the staff had to get her ready to go. She needed help dressing and stuff and she didn’t have any socks on. Staff didn’t feel like going upstairs to get the girls own clothes so they dug through the laundry that was downstairs with us. When they were giving her the socks I noticed they had another girls name on them. She was kind of my friend, and not even thinking I said, “hey —- aren’t those yours?” She said “yes”. Now I just want to say I didn’t do anything wrong. It was against the rules for staff to give our clothes or property to other students, although they did it all the time. And it was free time so I didn’t need permission to speak to my friend. But the supervisor got really mad that I said that. Her face turned nasty and my stomach dropped. She told me “No talking out!” I tried to hold it in, but the oppression, the fucking oppression, the power tripping staff who saw us as less-than. The policies and the “program” that stripped us of our basic rights to freedom of speech and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. The program that denied my intelligence and personhood. I couldn’t take it another day. I came right back at her, saying “I was just helping my friend”. She says “no arguing with staff”, and it went back and forth from there. I knew I was going to lose all my privaleges by this point so I just kept talking. There was nothing I was doing on my program that she could shock me for. But she searched and searched my sheet. Finally she stopped and called the monitor from next door over. They had to call the monitor over to shock us ever since the prank phone call fiasco, so I knew what was coming. And I knew it was for a lie she made up. She lied and told the monitor I was tensing up, and they shocked me.
I was so incredibly frustrated. I was at my breaking point. Staff did whatever they wanted and got away with it. And we weren’t even allowed to defend ourselves or speak up. At JRC, even if a staff is pinpointing you wrong, you are expected to accept it and the punishment, and then later write a “business letter” to your case manager telling them what happened. They teach us that we are punching bags and must accept all the shit done to us with out so much as a peep. That is teaching us to be victims that don’t matter. I was sick to my stomach. I had to get away. I requested to call my legal guardian but was denied. I felt so unsafe there, with her. I knew she could make up any lie she wanted to hurt and shock me.
I gathered the strength, and ran up the steps and out the front door. As soon as I hit the cold winter air, my lungs tightened up from my asthma and I barley could make it across the icy front yard. I just crossed the street and I got grabbed from behind. It was the supervisor, and I felt like I was in a fight for my life. I couldn’t let her take me back inside, because now that we were outside, she could say I did anything and there was no camera to prove I didn’t. I knew she would. She tackled me into a snowbank and was sitting on me. I was trying so hard to get up. Cars were going by, and one finally stopped. A man got out, and told her to get off of me. I was yelling “help help”. She told him she had a right to do what was because I was in a “group home” and she was in charge. I kept asking him for help, and he got between us and made her get off of me. I remember I hugged that man, and I felt safer with that stranger then these staff I had been stuck with for years. He had called the police and when they came she kept arguing that she had a right to take me back to the house. But thankfully they wouldn’t let her. The police called an ambulance which took me to a nearby hospital. I felt so relieved to be away from her, like the world off of my shoulders, I had been so scared. They put me in an empty room at the hospital, and soon after, the supervisor arrived. She tried to come in the room with me and I freaked out. the security guard told the doctors that I was calm until she came near me, and they made her get out. After a while the weekend administrator came. She told me because of what I did I had to move to another residence with more staff. I actually felt relieved. I would be away from her.
I am so thankful to that stranger who stopped to help me. If he hadn’t pulled her off of me and called the police, she would have gotten me back in that house and shocked the hell out of me. It is amazing to me how all those strangers had more common sense and compassion then the staff and JRC program. It shows that what society considers wrong, is excused at JRC. Strangers saw me as more human the staff did. I was lucky that day, but there were many other days when I wasn’t.
Okay the following is not meant to take away from the impact of the story above at all, it’s just a reminder because of the symbolic super-importance the JRC has taken on in the minds of many people who have never been there or never been anywhere like it. This should not detract at all from the horribleness of the JRC or the experiences of the people who have lived there or have been at risk of living there. (I’m glad I didn’t have different parents, I would’ve easily been a candidate as a teen and young adult.)
So this is for everyone who wasn’t at the JRC:
Just a reminder that no matter where you are, these things are happening in your backyard, right now. You probably don’t even know how to recognize half the institutions in your area (many of them look almost like ordinary houses, these days), and your eyes may even glide over some of the more obvious ones as background scenery. And things just as bad or worse are happening there, too. The JRC sucks but there’s very little unique about it. Focus on its uniqueness only contributes to the torture of others at other places. Closing it may not even help some of its inmates: Many will be sent to other institutions, and those institutions may do more damage than the JRC did for all anyone knows (and that can happen whether or not the person is consciously aware that the place is worse: it’s very common to be in a Stockholm Syndrome situation or one where you think a place is better because it lacks one specific thing that happened to you at another place, meanwhile it’s actually worse than the other place and you only realize it ten or twenty years after the fact when you look at the impact both actually had on your life – the worst place I was at had no locks on the doors, no bars on the windows, the windows were regular glass, no restraints, but it was utterly diabolical in ways that are far worse than things that other people would think are “objectively” worse… similarly many people I know who’ve been in both private and state institutions would take the state institutions any day, which causes surprise and disbelief among people who’ve only been to one or the other or neither – there’s no measuring stick you can easily use to say “this one is the worst” and I worry when JRC is singled out as the worst place anyone could possibly be… it’s an utterly horrible place, but unfortunately for disabled people everywhere, it’s one among many thousands, probably (I am not good at numbers but I think thousands at least)… so if you care about shutting down the JRC, please care about shutting down all the other places too, including the ones that are deceptively beautiful-looking but sometimes the most awful of all).
3:31am
June 9, 2014
➸ This is how I feel when I read a lot of posts about the Judge Rotenberg Center.
Close the Judge Rotenberg Center. For the love of everything holy, close the Judge Rotenberg Center. Stomp it into the ground and dance on its fucking ashes. But. You won’t be done. You’ll just h…
So the above link goes to the permanent home on my main blog, of that really long post I wrote about why the Judge Rotenberg Center is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to closing down bad institutions, and how focusing on the “one bad institution” can make you lose sight of what actually makes an institution bad, and the fact that many of the “good institutions” could be doing far worse damage. (Someone referred to the damage done by “good institutions” as “subtle”. It’s not subtle at all, it’s grievous gaping wounds in your soul. It’s just not recognized for what it is. That’s different than ‘subtle’. Most damage done by 'good institutions’ is seen as simply mental illness on the part of the inmates, and that is seen as cause for building more and more 'good institutions’, which creates a nightmare scenario. Basically all your most utopian institutions are dystopias at heart, and many of them are capable of damage at least as bad, if not worse, than the institutions that everyone agrees are bad.)
Anyway, that’s the post’s new home, so if you want to direct anyone to it, that’s a good place to look. It’s extremely long, but I couldn’t think of a single idea that I could cut out to make it shorter. The problem with trying to explain things that people really have never heard of before, is that it takes a lot of… length, because you have to tell them what they think they know, explain why what they think they know is wrong, and then tell them what’s actually going on. And this is definitely an “everything you know is wrong” kind of post.
7:32pm
June 8, 2014
➸ She shocked me on the 4 point board
They shocked me on the 4 point boardOne of my first programs I had at JRC was unbearable. I was on food portions where I would lose my meals for any little behavior, like rocking or talking to myself (there was a huge list of behaviors I couldn’t do). They also put in my program that I get…
One survivor’s story.
3:17am
June 8, 2014
➸ What I think when I see twenty bazillion posts about the JRC on my dash.
Close the Judge Rotenberg Center. For the love of everything holy, close the Judge Rotenberg Center. Stomp it into the ground and dance on its fucking ashes.
But.
You won’t be done.
You’ll just have eliminated the most obvious of a huge number of places that torture and abuse their patients in…
Holy crap I had no idea I’d written that. It’s worth reading the whole thing, even though it’s long. I should think of putting this on my main blog.
6:27am
December 21, 2013
What I think when I see twenty bazillion posts about the JRC on my dash.
Close the Judge Rotenberg Center. For the love of everything holy, close the Judge Rotenberg Center. Stomp it into the ground and dance on its fucking ashes.
But.
You won’t be done.
You’ll just have eliminated the most obvious of a huge number of places that torture and abuse their patients in the name of treatment.
Skin shock is showy and scary and it makes a good story and it makes it easy to see what is hurting people.
But people can be hurt just as bad or worse without it.
People can be hurt just as bad or worse by places that don’t brag about the torture they inflict on their patients.
People can be hurt just as bad or worse in the institutions everyone loves to love because they’re so beautiful, they have such wonderful grounds, they seem so loving.
You can’t understand, maybe, why this is true.
You think, maybe, that abuse, trauma, PTSD, CPTSD, can be measured in volts.
It can’t.
You think, maybe, that the destruction of lives is proportional to the visible destruction heaped on the body.
It isn’t.
It’s so much more complicated.
I have a friend who gets really upset every time some over-the-top institutional horror story makes the news. So do I, for that matter.
One part of it is because, obviously, it’s horrible, and we’ve both lived through horrible things. She’s been to both state and private institutions (and found private ones worse, by the way, so much for stereotypes). I’ve been to private institutions and private residential treatment facilities and what I like to call ‘community institutionalization’… too hard o explain in such a short space.
I spent most of my teen years in the psych system (and to some degree was exposed before that) and sometimes in mixed psych/DD settings, and pretty much all of my adulthood in the DD system. I have physical disabilities that could easily put me in a nursing home, and developmental disabilities that qualify me for admission to an ICF/MR. Staying free takes up more of my energy than I’d like.
I’ve been abused and tortured and traumatized and almost-killed in all kinds of settings, inpatient and outpatient.
At one time in my life, with severe self-injury, I’d have made an ideal candidate for the Judge Rotenberg Center. I am not somehow different from people who go there. You’d be surprised at the people who go there and how not-different they are from many people you’d imagine would never go there.
(That’s true of all institutions. The people who live inside them, and outside of them, are identical in every way. The only difference is how the support takes place. When it’s support at all and not just hell on earth.)
Anyway.
What I want to say is.
One reason that my friend and I get upset by these stories is because we’ve lived through some horror stories of our own.
Another reason that we get upset by these stories is this fear we have, that we don’t think is irrational at all.
We fear that when people focus on the outrageous, the flamboyantly awful, then they won’t see the way the outright ordinary, even the seemingly wonderful, can do the same degree of harm, or worse.
The worst harm in institutions is, by the testimony of many, many inmates, not just the physical torture that takes place in some places – sometimes above-board, sometimes secretly. Often it’s things you can’t even name. Those things are happening in the JRC too. Those things hurt people there as much as the torture does. Nobody is doing a huge campaign to shut down those things.
Many people, if the JRC is closed, will simply be sent to other institutions.
They will then be told that they are lucky and that those other institutions are better.
They may come to believe those other institutions are better.
Those other institutions may actually be better. But they may not be. It may just be that the badness has seeped down deep into some underground place where you can’t count it, can’t name it, can’t even describe it, and therefore it…. isn’t there.
And they will continue to get hurt by that. They may not realize they’re getting hurt by that. They may attribute the hurt to themselves, to their mental illness, to anything but the environment that is causing or contributing to it.
And that hurt may be harder to recover from than the JRC.
How do I know this? Because while I was not in the JRC, I was in mental institutions that physically tortured me (not with skin-shock), and was then moved to a 'better’ place that tortured me in harder-to-explain ways, and hurt me in deeper places, and I learned to say and believe how 'better’ they were while living how worse they were deep down. I still live with how worse they were.
And I know many other people who have the same story to tell.
And I know that unlike me, many people who live at the JRC won’t be able to escape the institutional system the way I was. My situation was unique to me. I didn’t get out because I was better off disability-wise than others, I got out because I was in a particular, unique set of circumstances. The difference between people on the inside and people on the outside is not their disability.
But once you’re in a long-term institution, it’s harder to get out. I was lucky, I was usually in a string of short-term institutions (even if I spent longer time periods in them than other people there), then when I was in a longer-term one, my residential facility closed and it became useful to them to decide I was recovered enough to leave, and to “transition” me to a “less restrictive environment”. Which was still a hellish environment, mind you, but more chance of freedom, there, too. And I had people around me savvy enough to advise me how to take the chances I had.
And most of the people in the JRC won’t be leaving to freedom, if it gets closed. They’ll go to other institutions. And however grateful they are to be out of the JRC, they will get hurt in those new places. Because that’s what institutions do. Invariably. You don’t have to know you’re hurt to get hurt there. You don’t have to understand how deep the hurt goes, to get hurt there. You just have to be there. And you’re often the last person to know how deep it goes, right down to the level of your self and identity and everything important to you. You can get turned inside out without anyone laying a finger on you.
Nobody will ever be able to pinpoint the institution that inflicts the worst of this sort of damage on its inmates, because this sort of damage is, by its very nature, secretive, even from the person it’s being inflicted upon. And because nobody will be able to pinpoint the worst of it, there will never be a massive, targeted, decades-long campaign to close the worst of these institutions. Anonymous will never catch on and take part. The world will not be outraged by the damage inflicted, no matter how devastating.
And if the people damaged by these institutions show that they are grievously psychologically injured by these institutions, people won’t connect it to the institutions. They’ll connect it to the nebulous concept of 'mental illness’, and quite possibly try to construct more of the exact same kind of institutions to deal with it. Nobody will notice that the 'increased mental illness’ is correlated with the institutions themselves. Nobody ever does notice.
Nobody catalogues this kind of damage. Few people study it. Few people understand it. Few people can see when and where it is happening. Few people can understand the damage in the first place. Most people who describe the damage won’t be believed.
Worse than merely not being believed:
When we describe the damage inflicted upon us, we are invariably described as ungrateful for the advantages that we had in not being in “a place like the Judge Rotenberg Center”, or not being in “a state institution”, or not being in a place that the world universally recognizes as horrible. Because some of the worst damage is inflicted on us in places that other people see as wonderful.
They will ignore the abundant testimonials by ex-patients who have experienced a wide variety of institutions. There are tons and tons of people who have been to both state and private institutions and found the private ones immeasurably more damaging, because the extra funding means extra ability for staff to mess with the heads of the inmates. There are tons and tons of people who have been to both state institutions and group homes and found the group homes immeasurably worse. There are tons and tons of people who have been to both locked private traditional-institutions, and unlocked residential facilities and group homes, and found the residential facilities and group homes immeasurably worse. There are tons and tons of people who have been physically tortured at one institution, moved to another institution where no apparent physical torture was present and found the second institution immeasurably worse. There are people who have been moved from 'bad’ institutions everyone loves to hate, to wonderful paradise-like 'intentional communities’ where they had, in the eyes of others, everything they could possibly want, and described how much more horrible the intentional communities were, the ones formed with the best intentions of parents and staff.
People ignore this.
People ignore this completely.
No, worse.
People ignore this and they utterly disparage any current or former inmate who says these things. They say we don’t understand what we’re talking about. They say we have no vision. They say we have no comprehension. They say we don’t understand how good we have it.
And it’s even worse for people who have only been to the 'better’ (in the eyes of the public) institutions, and complain about how awful they are. They’re told that they don’t understand how good they have it, only much worse. And they are told they should be grateful for what they had, that they wouldn’t last a day in a 'real institution’.
Hell, i’ve been told I haven’t been in a 'real institution’ just because I was in locked, private, short-stay institutions a lot of the time. (And one private long-stay institution that was on a ranch in the country so it didn’t count as an institution, somehow.) Never mind that, at the time, I was referred to as institutionalized by everyone in the system, including people in these institutions… apparently it’s not an institution until it’s a big-campus state institution.
So people who’ve only been in much fancier, much 'better’ institutions than I’ve ever set foot in, are told this only ten times worse than anything I’ve ever gotten for talking about my experiences. Especially if they’ve been in the pseudo-utopian farm communities, or the 'intentional communities’, or things like Camphill, which are all billed as not institutional somehow even though they totally are. You can’t change an institution by changing the shape of the building and slapping on a new coat of paint.
Anyway.
People who have been through the worst kinds of hell that institutions can provide are not believed, because the worst kinds of hell that institutions can provide are not things that people outside of institutions can understand in any way. People outside of institutions want the blood and gore and skin shocks to prove a place is horrible. They don’t want to understand that there are things more horrible than any of that. They don’t want to understand. They just don’t want to understand.
And people in institutions often don’t want to understand either. I didn’t want to understand what was happening to me. I wanted to believe that now that I wasn’t being tied down and tortured on a daily basis, then I was free. I wanted to believe that really badly. You have a vested interest in believing you’re someplace better now, that things will get better. Sometimes believing things are better is your only defense against how awful things are.
But once I really got out, and I had to deal with the intense emotional and psychological injury I’d been done by all of these places, the truth gradually began to dawn on me. It’s easier to heal from physical wounds than it is from psychological and emotional wounds. It’s easier to heal from the obvious horrors than the hidden horrors that lurk behind the scenes, turning you inside out and upside down, piece by piece, one bit at a time. You can heal, but I can tell you that it’s not being tied down, not physical or sexual assault, not even the horrifying restraint practices I sometimes endured, not the physical pain, that continues to haunt me. I mean, it does, to some degree. Things like that always do. But there are things that have damaged me deeper, in ways I can’t even articulate.
And my friends and I, when we see coverage like this, we’re so afraid.
We’re afraid of the 'better’ institutions.
We’re afraid of the public’s idea of what a 'really bad institution’ is.
We’re afraid of some of the disability community’s idea of what a 'really bad institution’ is.
The JRC is a really bad institution. It’s doing that horrible kind of damage at the same time that it’s doing the physical damage. I can see that. Because it’s got enough funding, it can really fuck with people’s heads.
But you could force the JRC to remove every piece of physical punishment it owns, even restraints. And it would still be horrible. It could even become worse. Because when places can’t focus on hurting your body, they have more time to focus on hurting your mind. And hurting your mind does the most lasting damage there is.
The JRC needs to be shut down, period.
But there are places just as bad that will never be shut down if we use the JRC as the model of what the worst kinds of institution look like.
And there are places even worse that will never be shut down either.
And the worst places in the world, generally, are the same ones that will get propped up by the shutting down of the places the public has the most visceral unpleasant reactions to.
There’s problems in the disability community, too, and until they’re exposed for what they are, there will be a lot of difficulty changing things.
There’s… a lot of disabled people out there who engage in the completely unproductive practice of competing to talk about who stayed in the worst institutions, who had the worst treatment.
Understand that when I’m talking about the worst institutions above, I’m not talking about the worst institutions in any kind of competitive sense. I’m talking about, the worst in terms of the overall amount and kinds of damage done.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who had worse experiences in state institutions than private ones, or that there aren’t people who had worse experiences in traditional institutions than in pseudo-utopian farm communities. I’m not trying to negate any one person’s personal experience. I’m just trying to explain… things are not what they seem, what everyone believes to be true is not necessarily the truth.
But I’ve seen disabled people who compete with each other about things like this. They say that they, unlike so-and-so, had experience with REAL institutions. Or they, unlike so-and-so, had REAL bad experiences. Or they, unlike so-and-so, were REALLY traumatized by what happened to them. That because they stayed for months rather than days, or years rather than months, their experiences were automatically worse and more deserving of recognition. And there’s… absolutely nothing productive that happens there. That’s ego-driven bullshit. It’s not activism, it’s not helping anyone at all. It’s a competition in self-pity.
So understand, again… when I’m comparing things, I’m doing so not with the aim of undermining any given person’s experiences in their own life. I’m doing so with the aim of showing people things they don’t want to see. I’m saying that what most people says is best, in terms of institutions, is often the worst of all. That often, the most damage is done where it can be seen the least. People have to understand this if they’re going to have any hope of actually reducing damage.
So close the JRC, close it over and over and over again until it’s really damn closed.
But… don’t focus on it to the exclusion of places just as bad or worse that don’t necessarily look as bad on paper.
Understand that your visceral reaction to the idea of skin shocks doesn’t make it the worst possible punishment that can be devised. It’s a pretty diabolical physical punishment. But sometimes – no, more like often or usually – people are damaged worse by things that don’t touch them physically at all.
Your instincts here are not necessarily a good guide to what is truly awful.
And I worry so so much about what will happen to people after it closes.
And I worry so so much about people enduring unspeakable damage, sometimes far worse than skin shock would hurt the same people, in institutions considered progressive and even utopian.
(Trust me, behind just about every utopian institution lies a dystopia beyond imagining. And I worry about the “He loved Big Brother” effect obscuring people’s views of what actually goes on in those places.)
My worst nightmare. And when I say my worst nightmare, I mean, these are actually real actual dreams I have that are worse than any other nightmares I’ve ever had. They vary in content, but they go something like this:
I’m living in a place with lots of other people with disabilities. There are staff there. The staff try to give us every freedom they possibly can, at least as visible from the outside. In one of these nightmares, I’m climbing a tree, outdoors, and totally allowed to do so. But there is someone following along behind me to make sure I don’t get hurt. I feel like a child.
I feel like I’m suffocating. I feel like I’m suffocating in cotton candy. But I can’t point to anything particular that’s wrong. There’s this fog that lurks over the entire place. It’s white, maybe slightly yellow or pinkish white, but mostly white. And it obscures the ability to see anything. And it smells like sweetness. And it feels like death, in the worst possible sense. But you can’t tell where it’s coming from. It’s everywhere and nowhere at once. You can’t see it except in your head, and only out of the corner of your mind’s eye.
Staff are nice to us, in the same way that people are nice to young children. They giggle at us as if we’re cute. They hug us a lot.
They also make us do what they want us to do. It’s not possible to know how they do it. They don’t use physical torture or restraints. They don’t even always use drugging or anything like that. We just… somehow always end up moving in the direction that they want us to move in, so to speak.
When I wake up, I feel an intense longing for the place I just woke up from, just for a minute or two. And then I realize what’s going on, and I want to vomit over and over and over again until the experience is gone from my head forever.
This isn’t the best description, because the problems of these places can’t be described. I once spent six days in a place very much like that, though, and the sickly-sweet-death-fog clung to me for years before I could get it to dissipate.
Nobody will ever get the kind of backing to close a place like that, that they will to close a place like the JRC. Even though a place like that could potentially do more damage than the JRC, after a person is moved from the JRC to a place like that. And if we close the JRC, it’s quite possible idealistic people will be building places like that to take its place.
I can’t explain why it’s as bad as, ,or potentially even worse than the JRC or a place like it.
I can’t.
But it is.
Please trust me on that.
Please understand what I’m trying to say here, because it’s incredibly important, and not enough people are saying it. (And no, it’s not “don’t close the JRC” or “the JRC is good”. Somehow, people are really fond of reducing important, complex things I say to simplistic bullshit like that.)
I’m trying to say this, for the sake of all the people who won’t be helped if we focus only on closing the JRC.
Now I’m going to try to get some sleep again. I hope I don’t have nightmares.
ETA: Before anyone tells me, as they always tell me when I say this, that the Judge Rotenberg Center will call attention to the issue and everything will follow from there and the public will be interested in closing all the other institutions then, later, once we get to the JRC first, that’s not at all how I’ve ever seen it work, not with Willowbrook, not with anything. (And a friend of mine worked in a “good institution” that killed a former Willowbrook client, mind you. She got fired for trying to stop them from killing her. So she survived Willowbrook only to get killed by staff in a 'supported apartment’ group home setting. So… that’s a very specific example for a very specific reason.) The public doesn’t want to close all institutions when they hear of things like this. They want to make good institutions and then forget about the matter. And the good institutions can be worse than the old ones in many ways.
5:58pm
April 11, 2012
Anyone whose brain responds badly to flicker
Don’t watch the Judge Rotenberg Center footage that’s making the rounds, or watch it advisedly. It’s got a constant background flicker that is just all kinds of not good for anyone who responds to flicker with seizures, migraines, or other brain ickiness.
8:57pm
February 20, 2012
➸ Why Students Praise the Judge Rotenberg Center
An old blog post of mine where I describe a video the JRC uses to manipulate parents into disregarding their children’s complaints about the institution. It also teaches parents how to manipulate their children into only saying good things about the JRC.