Author: stevekuusisto

We read Sunday Stillwell’s blog Adventures in Extreme Parenthood this morning and saw the following:

” Then later in the week I ran across a news story which at first I thought was a parody from The Onion. Only, it wasn’t.

Instead it detailed how this week’s AutismOne conference was heavily promoting a new treatment which claims to have “recovering” 38 children from autism.

As it turns out the the “treatment” involves practitioners and parents giving children with autism an enema with a solution called Miracle Mineral Solution or MMS for short. This chemical compound it more commonly known as industrial strength bleach.

The science blogger known as Orac described it like this,


“What it is, in essence, is industrial strength bleach, 28% sodium chlorite in distilled water. It is frequently diluted in acidic juices, such as orange juice, resulting in the formation of chlorine dioxide, which is, as the FDA characterized it, “a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment.”

Emily Willingham of The Biology Files and DoubleX Science has started an online petition located here where you can watch the video presentation about MMA from AutismOne’s conference last week and if you are as horrified as the rest of us please add your signature to the petition and help us stop this so-called “treatment” which is nothing more than child abuse disguised by a lab coat.”

**

Perhaps there are more horrifying things than bleaching autistic children: maybe you’re weary after the A bomb and the Holocaust and you’ve retreated to your private sanctum to watch reruns of “Three’s Company” forever–but for the rest of us who still believe in medical ethics, human dignity, civil rights, real science, well, this is a moral catastrophe. It’s another instance of outright ignorance mixed with “normative” parents’ fears of disability. Only absolute ignorance and fear can create a “pillow angel” or a child forced to receive toxic chemicals via enemas.

This is a disgrace.

We recommend Sunday’s blog, for her activism and her streetwise humor are sharp, literate, and brave. You will like her Ryan Gosling send ups too!

(CNYCentral)
May 29, 2012

UTICA, NEW YORK– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] An argument on a Utica school bus led to an Autistic child getting his head slammed into a closed window by a bus monitor, according to police.

It happened Wednesday as the bus was stopped in the parking lot of Proctor High School.

The 11-year-old child told his mom he stood up to stretch his legs inside the bus, and was told by the bus monitor to sit down. Both the child and the bus monitor, Kendra Owens, 38, started to argue.

Owens walked to the front of the bus where the child was and punched and slapped him in the face before slamming his head into the window, according to Utica Police.

The child suffered scratches. The boy’s mother reported the incident to police.

Police were able to obtain security footage from the Birnie Bus Service. The footage supported the child’s claim and Owens was arrested.

Entire article:
Autistic child has head slammed into school bus window by bus monitor, Utica Police say
http://www.cnycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=758115
Related:
Police: Utica bus monitor punches autistic child, 11 (Observer-Dispatch)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0529124b

Occupy JRC To ProtestJune 2 To End Skin Shocks At Judge Rotenberg Center

(Canton Patch)
May 29, 2012

CANTON, MASSACHUSETTS– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Occupy JRC will hold a peaceful protest against the Judge Rotenberg Center, scheduled for Saturday, June 2 from 12pm to 4pm. Location to be announced.

The Judge Rotenberg Center is the only place in the country to use aversives, including remotely controlled, painful electric skin shocks to change behavior in children with autism, developmental delays and/or psychiatric diagnoses.

The school has survived a move from Rhode Island to Massachusetts, multiple lawsuits, and the forced resignation of its founder and former Director, Matthew Israel. Most recently, the Judge Rotenberg Center hit the airwaves on a national level when the facility was required to release previously suppressed videotapes of former student, Andre McCollins being restrained face down for over seven hours and shocked 31 times after he refused to take off his jacket.

Occupy JRC will host the protest in Canton, time and place to be announced, and plans to include a march as a part of the day’s events.

Entire article:
Protest Slated For June 2 to End Shock Therapy At The Judge Rotenberg Center
http://tinyurl.com/ide0529122a
Related:
Former JRC teacher lobbies state lawmakers (Canton Citizen)
http://www.thecantoncitizen.com/2012/05/17/jrc-shock-petition/
Judge Rotenberg Center case on Anderson Cooper today (Fox)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0529122c
Join ASAN Seattle in Protesting the Judge Rotenberg Center at the ABAI Convention! (Autistic Self Advocacy Network)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0529122d
Petition: Make the Call! Stop the Torture of Special Needs Children in Massachusetts (Change.org)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0529122e
Petition to Ban Shock Treatment at Mass. School Delivered to State Lawmakers (Youth Today)
http://www.youthtoday.org/view_article.cfm?article_id=5309
Judge Rotenberg Center — Facility Uses Electric Shock To Change Behavior (Inclusion Daily Express Archives)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/institutions/ma/jrc.htm

National Federation of the Blind Partners with Groupon Grassroots

Buy an NFB Groupon June 4–10 to Support Braille Literacy

Baltimore, Maryland (May 31, 2012): The National Federation of the Blind, the nation’s leading advocate for Braille literacy, and Groupon Grassroots, the philanthropic arm of Groupon, are teaming up to bring Braille into the lives of more blind children who need it.

The National Federation of the Blind campaign will be available on the Baltimore Groupon page beginning on June 4, and running throughJune 10. Groupon subscribers can pledge support for the National Federation of the Blind Braille Literacy initiative in increments of $10, with each $15 purchased providing one Braille Reading Pals packet to a blind child.

Braille Reading Pals is an early literacy program that fosters positive attitudes about Braille for children and their families and promotes a love of reading by encouraging parents to read daily with their blind or low-vision child. Participants receive a print/Braille book to read with their child and to encourage an independent exploration of Braille. Participants also receive a plush “Reading Pal” to accompany reading time and help young blind children develop fun and positive associations with reading Braille. Each $15 purchase will pay for a full set of Braille Reading Pals materials for a blind child and help set a blind child on the path to Braille literacy and future success.

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “We are pleased to be partnering with Groupon Grassroots to bring Braille literacy into the lives of more young blind children who desperately need it. There is a proven correlation between Braille literacy and employment, and yet only one out of ten blind children is being taught Braille in schools today. We would never accept such a low literacy rate among our sighted children, and our blind children should be no exception. The Braille Reading Pals program is an initiative to increase the number of blind children learning Braille by introducing a love of Braille and reading into a blind child’s life at an early age. Please help us to create a bright future for blind children by purchasing a Groupon that will go toward giving one blind child the tools needed to become a literate and successful person.”

You must be a Groupon subscriber to purchase a Groupon. If you are not currently a Groupon subscriber and would like to become one in order to purchase a National Federation of the Blind Groupon, you may visitGroupon’s subscription Web page.

Outside Lausanne

By Andrea Scarpino

It may be too much to call this trip to Europe a homecoming–I’ve never met this branch of my Italian family before, so I can’t really come home to them. But I feel something similar, a coming-home-for-the-first-time. Which means that I want to meet everyone who has any interest at all in meeting me. Most of my family is still in the South of Italy–Calabria–but Salvatore lives in Florence, and my cousin Patrizia and her husband Seamus in a small Swiss town outside of Lausanne.

So here we are in Switzerland, staying with Patrizia and Seamus on property that’s been in Seamus’ family for hundreds of years. Right down the hill from us: Seamus’ uncle’s chateau and a garden full of irises. And beyond: Mont Blanc looming.

Our first day here, we walked the iris gardens, learned how carefully they’re grown and tended, that no one has yet developed a purely red iris, that thousands of visitors come each year during the month that the irises bloom. We walked beyond the gardens through a wooded area and on a sloped hillside above us, the ringing of bells: cows grazing with bells tied to their necks. We sat in the woods and listened to the bells and talked constantly–about our childhoods, our family, Swiss politics, the troubled economy, how grapes are tended and made into wine (Patrizia is a sommelier), how worried we are for Obama’s re-election.

That night: a dinner party. Seamus is renowned chef, and in seemingly no time at all, he pulled together a vegetarian dinner party in our honor: cheese soufflé, asparagus risotto with a hollandaise sauce I would have eaten like soup, stuffed peppers and eggplant and zucchini, a green salad, cheese plate with six different cheeses, strawberries with meringue and fresh cream. And wine from his brother’s vineyard–crazy delicious.

And that was just the beginning of the amazing food we’ve eaten–Patrizia’s chickpea and potato soup with a drizzle of the best olive oil, fresh white asparagus perfectly steamed, artichoke pasta, green pea soup with cream, endive salad, red Thai curry that Zac says is the best he’s eaten. And last night, at a typical Swiss restaurant overlooking all of Lausanne, raclette and fondu, crusty bread, miniature pickles that aid digestion.

It’s true my pants have grown tighter since being is Switzerland, but it’s also true that I couldn’t care less. I feel full in every sense: with scenery–stepped vineyards, red tiled roofs, row after row of irises, red poppies peeking through wheat fields, snow-topped mountains that dip down into the lake, grassy parks, stone chalets–with food, with wine, with conversation, with new friendship. New plans.

“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.”

–John Ciardi

I have been waking up sad. Summer is sliding in and I am sad. Like most people I aim for casual philosophy, what the poet Donald Justice called “mordancies of the armchair” since much of life is deeply sad and escapism is at best ineffective. I take my sadness like a baby in my arms and carry it from room to room. I talk to it. Sing softly to it. It’s better to honor the infanta dolorosa than humor it so I sing the saddest things I know: songs from the Finnish, from the age when people kept coffins in the parlor, ate off them. Death has always inhabited the furniture. This is, then, something more than a sad song, it’s the branch of philosophy called “the blues” and like Leadbelly “I see my coffin comin’ Lordy Lord in my back door” –there’s no product from Madison Avenue that can fix it.

Maybe I should try a new anti-depressant? Maybe a new drug could turn the casket into a sailing ship? Maybe I could be Herman Melville without the sandstorm in his head? I could be just another literate tourist floating on our blue planet. I would own a gentler view, something like Walt Whitman’s idea that death is not what we suppose, and better. Death is better than the imagination’s grasp of it. I told you I’ve been waking up sad. I have been this way from childhood, seized by tears even on sunny days.

Then something happens. The blues heat up. I feel it all over, like ants. I want to crawl under the kitchen sink and press my eyes to the cool pipes and cry.

In ancient times I’d have been the one in the hut at the edge of the woods, the one laughing and crying, singing to himself, feeding the stray animals with bartered food.

You see, this is adulthood. In the United States this is not properly understood.

James Hillman: “Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.”

Lately I have a depression “of some kind” and I suppose by lately I mean all my life.

Meantime here’s a great psychiatry joke:

Joe has been seeing a psychoanalyst for four years for treatment of the fear that he had monsters under his bed. It had been years since he had gotten a good night’s sleep. Furthermore, his progress was very poor, and he knew it. So, one day he stops seeing the psychoanalyst and decides to try something different.

A few weeks later, Joe’s former psychoanalyst meets his old client in the supermarket, and is surprised to find him looking well-rested, energetic, and cheerful. “Doc!” Joe says, “It’s amazing! I’m cured!”

“That’s great news!” the psychoanalyst says. “you seem to be doing much better. How?”

“I went to see another doctor,” Joe says enthusiastically, “and he cured me in just ONE session!”

“One?!” the psychoanalyst asks incredulously.

“Yeah,” continues Joe, “my new doctor is a behaviorist.”

“A behaviorist?” the psychoanalyst asks. “How did he cure you in one session?”

“Oh, easy,” says Joe. “He told me to cut the legs off of my bed.”

Police Handcuffing 7-Year-Olds? The Brutality Unleashed on Kids With Disabilities in Our School Systems
(AlterNet)
May 25, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] There’s a danger looming in schools today that’s putting our nation’s most vulnerable children at risk. Around the country, teachers and administrators are struggling to meet the needs of a growing population of disabled students, who are entering school environments ill-prepared to educate them responsibly, thanks to a lack of both adequate training and resources.

This lack of preparation for handling students’ special needs is, in turn, sparking a disturbing and dangerous trend: the use of harmful “zero tolerance” policies that end in seclusion, restraint, expulsion and — too often — law enforcement intervention for the disabled children involved.

From coast to coast, the incidents are as heartbreaking as they are shocking

Cases like these, of students trapped by school policies rarely designed to deal with the nuances of their diagnoses, are growing — and the situation is further clouded by race, class and social factors. These factors can determine what kinds of evaluations, interventions and treatments are provided to students with disabilities or suspected disabilities, and ultimately decide whether children are able to successfully complete their educations, or fall by the wayside.

The increased use of law enforcement to deal with behavioral issues in schools gained heightened attention this year when Salecia Johnson, age 6, had a temper tantrum in her principal’s office, and was handcuffed and detained by local police as a result. She was so traumatized by the experience that she has trouble sleeping at night — and she’s not the only one.

Entire article:
Police Handcuffing 7-Year-Olds? The Brutality Unleashed on Kids With Disabilities in Our School Systems
http://tinyurl.com/ide0525123a