Giving a Name, and Dignity, to a Disability – The New York Times

2016/05/09 Leave a comment

Interesting account of the evolution of terms for those with intellectual disabilities:

OTHER organizations and state agencies have done the same, most of them joining the medical and scientific communities in adopting the term now in favor: intellectual disability.

Dr. Wehmeyer said the change made an important break from the connotations of past terminology. “It’s the first term that doesn’t refer to the condition as a defective mental process — slow, weak, feeble,” he said. “Intellectual disability conveys that it is not a problem within a person, but a lack of fit between that person’s capacities and the demands of the environment in which the person is functioning.”

But even Dr. Wehmeyer did not immediately care for the term (“I would have gone with cognitive disability,” he said). And not everyone embraces what is called people-first language — as in “people with intellectual disability.” Advocates in the blind and deaf communities, for example, argue that such constructions are unnecessarily defensive and hinting of shame.

The question now is whether “intellectual disability” will remain the preference, or, like its predecessors, devolve into a derogatory taunt. The answer seems to hinge on society’s ability to shed its prejudices and move past that stigmatizing sense of otherness.

One of the men I wrote about, Keith Brown, lived for many years in Texas institutions before working for more than three decades in that turkey-processing plant in Iowa. His job was to “pull crop” — that is, to yank out part of the digestive systems of dead birds swinging past on shackles.

When he and the other men were finally removed from their squalid schoolhouse dormitory in 2009, after repeated failures of government officials to heed warnings, Mr. Brown was found to have suffered significant physical and emotional consequences, including post-traumatic stress.

Today he is the sole resident of an apartment in Arkansas. He is a commuter, a palette-jack operator, a pet owner, a Dr Pepper drinker, a brother, an uncle. He is many things, he says, “but I am not retarded.”

Source: Giving a Name, and Dignity, to a Disability – The New York Times

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

Backlogged social security panel stops tracking results of appeals

2014/08/23 Leave a comment

All too symptomatic of the Government’s tendency to provide less and less information on its performance. See earlier Tribunal can deny in-person appeals in disability benefits cases.

If you can’t (or don’t) measure it, you can’t manage it, to use the cliché:

The tribunal did not immediately respond to queries about why it stopped tracking appeal results. Under the old regime, appeal decisions were published online and the so-called review tribunal made the statistics public in its annual report.

Allison Schmidt, a Regina-based disability claims advocate and consultant, said she “smells a rat” in the government’s recent failure to track how many appeals are allowed or dismissed by the tribunal.

She adds she suspects the Conservatives don’t want the public to know how many appeals are being denied.“Surely the tribunal must know the results of their work,” Schmidt said in an interview.

“It is ludicrous to assume that a quasi-judicial administrative government agency would not know the results of the appeals they conduct. All they have to do is count them; the decisions are all on file. What about transparency?”

Backlogged social security panel stops tracking results of appeals.

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Tribunal can deny in-person appeals in disability benefits cases – Citizenship Parallels

2014/07/08 1 Comment

Similar situations are likely to occur with respect to the lack of oral hearings in cases of citizenship revocation. A number of witnesses, including some generally supportive of the Government, expressed concern over the lack of oral hearings and relying on a paper process (others argued for full access to the Courts):

And a retired doctor who heard appeals under the previous system says he could not have made fair decisions without meeting claimants face to face.

“I can tell you there were a couple of times when you would say to yourself, ‘This is a slam dunk for denial,’ until the human walked in,” said George Sapp, who lives near Halifax. “Then you would see the person that’s attached to the file. And sometimes it took you back. And you listened.”

Tribunal can deny in-person appeals in disability benefits cases – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Citizenship, Revocation Tagged with

Wayne Wouters: Public service reform means fixing sick leave too

2014/05/27 Leave a comment

More on Destination 2020 and the Clerk’s messaging on workplace stress and changes to sick leave:

Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters told the Citizen his Destination 2020 reforms, meant to bring the public service into the digital age, go hand-in-hand with Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s promise to replace an outdated sick-leave regime created more than 40 years ago for a very different workforce.

Wouters said he supports Clement’s plan to replace the existing accumulated sick-leave regime with a new short-term disability plan aimed at getting ill and injured workers better and back to work faster.

“Our system is not conducive to a modern workforce,” said Wouters. “People go on sick leave and they go on long-term disability and it’s out of sight, out of mind. We never think how to bring these people back, incorporate them and what kind of wellness program they need.”

A large part of stress is fundamental to the different roles of the political and official levels. When a government works well with the public service (without being captive to their advice), stress goes down. When a government is more antagonistic to the public service and often dismissive of their advice, stress goes up. Hopes that the Conservative government would evolve more into the former, given their time in office and having a majority since 2011, have not panned out as any number of recent incidents attest.

As to the replacement of sick leave and disability insurance, I have had experience on both sides of the issue: as a manager, with employees who abused the system, and as someone with an aggressive cancer which forced me to be absent for an extended period of time.

As a manager, there were few tools and support to deal with abuse in a time-efficient manner. Some employees used accumulated sick leave as “pre-retirement” time, which annoyed me to no end. But given that employees can always get a doctor to certify absence and the Health Canada verification process, while helpful, is somewhat cumbersome, there was not much that one can do. The sick leave reforms will address, at least in part, some of this abuse.

But as someone with cancer, who had banked considerable sick leave over my career, having this accumulated sick leave made a difference during my extended absence. I used it when I needed it. I also benefited from extremely supportive managers and HR. In the end, given a relapse, I ran out of sick leave and went on long-term disability.

One can argue, based upon comparability, that these changes may make sense. But as usual, when we focus on abuse, as we have to do, we penalize those who play by the rules, and who may find themselves in a catastrophic health situation where banking and flexibility can make a big difference.

Wayne Wouters: Public service reform means fixing sick leave too | Ottawa Citizen.

Filed under Government Tagged with , , , ,