Search results

Institutions are a central and painful feature in the historical record of the treatment of people with intellectual disabilities in Canada. To date, scholarly work has provided a robust understanding of the multiple intersecting factors and "political rationalities" (Chapman, 2014) that have contributed to institutions' development, including their relationship with capitalism's "exploitative social relations of production and consumption" (Erevelles, 2014, para. 6). Accounts from institutional survivors that describe the direct and lived experience of institutionalization have begun to emerge in Canadian disability studies and historical canons. Based on research that examined the impact of institutionalization on families, this paper draws from survivor narratives to explore the alienation and abandonment that survivors experienced as a result of having been institutionalized. It interrogates the connection between survivors' experiences and the function of their alienation in the workings of a capitalist system. Additionally, this paper addresses some of the historical, social and political conditions of the time and place of concern (post World War II Ontario), and discusses how those conditions created a discourse of persuasion in the institutionalization of children with intellectual disabilities.

"After 133 years of operation, the 2009 closure of Ontario's government-run institutions for people with intellectual disabilities has allowed accounts of those affected to emerge. In Broken, Madeline Burghardt draws from narratives of institutional survivors, their siblings, and their parents to examine the far-reaching consequences of institutionalization due to intellectual difference. Beginning with a thorough history of the rise of institutions as a system to manage difference, Broken provides an overview of the development of institutions in Ontario and examines the socio-political conditions leading to families' decisions to institutionalize their children. Through this exploration, other themes emerge, including the historical and arbitrary construction of intellectual disability and the resulting segregation of those considered a threat to the well-being of the family and the populace; the overlap between institutionalization and the workings of capitalism; and contemporaneous practices of segregation in Canadian history, such as Indian residential schools. Drawing from people's direct, lived experiences, the second half of the book gathers poignant accounts of institutionalization's cascading effects on family relationships and understandings of disability, ranging from stories of personal loss and confusion to family breakage. Adding to a growing body of work addressing Canada's treatment of historically marginalized peoples, Broken exposes the consequences of policy based on socio-political constructions of disability and difference, and of the fundamentally unjust premise of institutionalization."--

The recent emergence of institutional survivors' accounts of mistreatment and abuse in Ontario's institutions for the "feebleminded" offers a window into Canada's long history of segregation, mistreatment, and neglect of people labelled intellectually disabled. The breaking of this silence has also allowed the stories of others who were deeply affected by institutionalization to come forward. Narratives from siblings of institutionalized individuals, although not first-hand accounts of the life inside institutional walls, offer much needed perspective on the extensive and ongoing effect of institutionalization in the lives of thousands of families, and offer additional insight from another marginalized group that until now has not held a place in Canada's visible and spoken history. This paper is a weaving together of three sibling narratives that were part of a panel at the Canadian Disability Studies Association (CDSA) conference in Ottawa, Ontario in June 2015. All sisters of institutionalized persons, the three contributors remark in particular on their profound experiences of loss after their brother or sister was sent away from the family home. The contributors believe that it is through the sharing of such experiences that society can better come to understand the devastation wreaked upon both individuals and families through misinformed and prejudicial policies over a period of more than 150 years.

This paper describes how four 'helping' professionals came to embrace and teach critical disability studies (CDS) perspectives rather than biomedical approaches to impairment and disability that traditionally inform those professions (occupational therapy, physiotherapy, social work, and speech-language pathology). Sharing examples from our experiences, we describe how we came to question the normative, ableist assumptions of our professional disciplines. We then briefly outline literature demonstrating how critical approaches have been incorporated into professional research and practice and discuss possible obstacles and tensions in adopting more widespread critical approaches into professional spaces. We conclude by suggesting that continued development of connections among scholars and activists within CDS, rehabilitation and social work, and the community, is necessary to ensure that intersectional critical perspectives in relation to disability become a core component of professional training programs.