Join the Discussion! Respect and Learning Disabilities

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by Merely Me
Saturday, October 17, 2009

I would like to get a conversation going about the topic of whether or not you feel people who have learning disabilities or other special needs are treated with respect.  I see this issue being brought up here on Friends of Quinn in various ways.  Some of you who might live in a group home setting have talked about feeling as though your rights have been violated.  Others have discussed how people treat you differently than other people just because you have a learning disability.

Since we are discussing "respect" maybe it would be a good idea to talk about what this word means.  To me, respect, means that you treat others as you would want to be treated with politeness, consideration, and dignity.  But the truth of the matter is, many people having learning or cognitive disabilities are routinely treated with disrespect. 

One of the ways I have seen disrespect is when children and adults with learning disabilities are labeled with pejorative names due to their various challenges.  I have friends who have children with disabilities ranging from dyslexia to Asperger's Syndrome.  And I can tell you that every parent I talk to has some story to share about their child being called lazy or even stupid due to their problems with learning.  And sometimes these messages even come from teachers and therapists who are supposed to be trained to understand the challenges of these disabilities.  I had one friend tell me that the speech therapist her son was seeing for his already diagnosed apraxia of speech, told her child that he did not have a speech problem, that he was just lazy.  Another friend told me of a teacher who told her son with ADHD to just get over it and grow up when he was having difficulty getting organized for class.  You would hope that these are but isolated incidents but I fear that this sort of thing goes on far more than we know. 

Another type of disrespect for people with either learning or cognitive disabilities is when people are talking about the individual right in front of them as though they are not there at all.  I have had professionals talk to me about my son who has autism without even looking at him.  When one doctor asked me if my son could talk, I said, "Why don't you ask him, he is right here."  It is dehumanizing for a person to be treated as though they were an object in the room instead of a fellow human being with thoughts and feelings of their own. 

Disrespect also comes in the form of treating adults with disabilities as though they were children.  When I worked at a day program for people with multiple disabilities I was told of some of the activities they used to do.  Imagine adults being told to march around in a circle and recite, "I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a little pearl" and "I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm my mother's pride and joy."  Yet this was considered recreational therapy for this group of adults.  I also know of some adults with disabilities who had to fight for their right to do normal adult things such as to go on a date or have a relationship with the opposite sex.  As an adult, most of us get to make choices about our life.  But if you have a disability of any kind, it seems that these choices are sometimes made for you from things like where you will live to even what you will eat.