Suppose that, when you were about 20 years old, you had been given the chance to go on the best, most awesome Spring Break experience that you can imagine -- whatever that would have been for you. A week away from all responsibilities and any annoying supervision that you may have been subjected to.
And now imagine that you were not allowed to go home for a year. That your family could visit you, but that you had to stay there in whatever paradise your imagination has conjured up. That your family fought and fought for you to be returned to them but that it took a year for them to do it.
This might be distressing to you; don't you agree? It might be distressing to your family.
Do you think you might suffer "significant long-term harm"?
Thanks to Colin Revell, I've just read the story of Steven Neary, an "autistic man" "who also has a severe learning disability",* according to Caroline Davies in The Guardian, who behaves in challenging ways, and who went into respite care at the end of 2009 for a few weeks because his father, Mark Neary, with whom he lived, needed a break. Local authorities, citing his behavior and the fact that he is overweight, then kept him there for "about a year" -- planning to keep him longer and to place him farther away -- with his father fighting for his release the whole time, before a judge had him released. Mr. Neary now receives support to live in his own home.
"Though he was 'necessarily critical' of [the local council], said the judge, everybody concerned 'genuinely wanted to do the right thing', and problems arose 'from misjudgment, not from lack of commitment', according to Davies' article. In addition, "The 21-year-old suffered no significant long-term harm, added the judge, although the events were distressing for him and his father."
I find it very hard to believe that someone institutionalized for a year has suffered no significant long-term harm, and I don't think the judge would have believed so either if Mr. Neary had been nondisabled. And that's even if the care unit was a good one. I'm also tired of hearing that nondisabled people's good intentions (or alleged good intentions) mitigate in any way the harm they inflict on disabled people. So while I am glad that the judge did the right thing and let Mr. Neary go home, I am frustrated by Ms. Davies' account of his response to the problem.
I will give the judge credit for getting one thing right: Ms. Davies quotes him as saying that Mark Neary "could be 'proud of the way in which he has stood up for his son's interests'." I wish I had had a parent like that when I was 20.
*Note that while in the US "learning disability" generally refers to a specific impairment like dyslexia, in the UK it refers to more global intellectual impairment.
