SRV study tip #5
Continuing with our most recent series of posts on learning about SRV through the PASSING manual and workshop, I want to take a brief look at the glossary section of the 2007 manual (pp. 29-40). That might sound a little boring but the glossary encapsulates some dynamite ideas, ideas that can help us learn about the power of SRV to help bring about positive change for socially devalued people. For example, reflect on the definition and description of purview on pg. 36. Purview is described briefly as:
“The scope or limit of influence, authority, competence, responsibility, or concern in recipients’ lives that would generally be perceived as the appropriate and/or properly delegated one for a particular service or server.”
Regarding the breadth of purview and different human service models and organizations, Wolfensberger and Thomas affirm that:
“Certain kinds of services have, by their very nature, a broad purview to both address recipient needs, and to pursue the address of certain such needs by other parties.”
This is such a powerful concept and can help service workers/services come to a clearer understanding of their mission: what should we focus on? what is outside our mission? Consider for example what is the purview of a residential service? medical service? school or classroom? employment services? and so on.
Purview is a fundamental part of human service, yet when ignored or misunderstood, problems will likely be created and/or exacerbated for recipients of human services. For example:
• A service with a legitimately wide purview (e.g., a residential service) may de facto ignore the scope of its responsibility, thus leaving pressing needs unacknowledged and/or unaddressed.
• A service with a relatively narrow purview (e.g., a recreational service) or a time-limited purview (e.g., a medical service) may unnaturally expand their purview, thus potentially causing further wounding and devaluation (e.g., casting a devalued person into the role of child or patient). Such expansion may be rooted in a particular mindset about the people served or a negative stereotypes about the people served. Often such expansion is driven by non-programmatic considerations and factors.
Fundamental questions for services and service workers to ask themselves include: What is our legitimate purview? Where are its boundaries? How will we fulfill our responsibility without overstepping these boundaries? This examination of purview can often raise difficult questions, e.g., service workers identifying a real need of people served, yet the need is one that lies outside of their purview as a service. What to do then? Ignoring the need is not helpful; however, a good understanding of purview might call for advocating with others (e.g., family, friends, a valued community resource, another human service, etc.) whose purview would include addressing that particular need. There may be other valid options as well.
These are just a few initial reflections on purview within an SRV and PASSING context. As always, I welcome other relevant thoughts, examples and comments on this topic.
Marc
#4
In the last post about studying SRV and PASSING, we looked at the image (1) and competency (2) enhancement subscores in the PASSING tool, under the subheadings of setting (1), grouping (2), activities (3), and miscellaneous (4).
PASSING has 42 ratings. 27 ratings are related to image enhancement; 15 are related to competency enhancement. Almost twice as many ratings deal with image enhancement.
17 ratings address image and competency issues around the physical setting of a service (point range: -329 to +329).
13 ratings address image and competency issues around service-structured groupings, relationships and social juxtapositions (point range: -369 to +369).
6 ratings address image and competency enhancement around service-structured activities and use of time (point range: -188 to +188).
6 ratings address miscellaneous image related service practices (point range: -114 to +114).
What might we learn from these numbers? About 70% of the PASSING ratings, both in number and in point range, deal with service physical setting and with service structured grouping, relationships and juxtapositions. Why are these two domains given so much weight and emphasis? What is this telling us about what services could do to support devalued people in valued roles? A fundamental priority for services is to carefully structure both the setting and the groupings/social juxtapositions in relevant and potent ways which support vulnerable people to have and hold onto valued social roles.
Consider your own life for a minute: think about the power of setting to communicate social roles; think about the ‘company we keep’ and the power of relationship to communicate roles. Yet where do so many human services put their energy, time and attention?
Also, if we are teaching others about SRV and PASSING, or are trying to implement SRV, do we pay enough attention to setting and grouping considerations?
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blog posts, comments and online discussion
It is coming up on 2 years since I started this blog back in February of 2010 and I’ve posted about 150 times since then. I especially want to thank Thomas Neuville, Associate Professor in the Special Education Department at Millersville University in Pennsylvania (US) and executive producer of the DVD set of human service history lectures given by Dr. Wolfensberger and Susan Thomas (also see blog post here)–it was Thomas who encouraged me to start a blog in the first place.
One of my goals from the beginning of this blog was to generate online discussion of SRV-related ideas, both in terms of SRV training and SRV implementation. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of you who follow the blog and also to strongly encourage you to use this blog as a resource for online discussion about SRV teaching and implementation. If we can focus our posts and comments within an SRV framework, I think this could be another great learning tool about SRV. I am always open of course to suggestions about this and any aspect of the blog.
You will notice under each post the name of the blogger who put up the post, either myself or Steve Tiffany, a regular guest blogger. You will also notice a button labeled ‘Leave a comment.’ Click on that button and you will be guided through the simple process of leaving a written comment which will appear below the post. Notice also that when a posting has been commented on, this will also be indicated after the particular post. I hope to see more of these indications soon! If you click on the title of the post, it will open up with all the comments showing, which can make the post and comments a bit easier to read and reply to.
Thank you for reading and we encourage you to post your SRV related comments, questions, examples, additional perspectives, and so on. Happy new year!
Marc
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online column: Are psychiatric medicines making us sicker
A column on psychotropic drugging and so-called ‘electroconvulsive therapy’ (ECT) was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education on 18 September 2011. The columnist challenges the high level of psychotropics given to young people in the US and western, more affluent countries generally. This concern is consistent with what SRV teaches us about the sick role and the patient role; for example, for anyone diagnosed by the medical and mental health service systems as having ‘mental illness.’ The columnist does not seem to deeply examine the overarching dangers of being cast into the devalued roles of sick person and/or patient for people with mental disorders, but is much more concerned with the specific problems of mind drugging. This is understandable perhaps as mind drugging is an enormous and exponentially growing problem for people of all ages, for families and for society. It is also a problem rarely challenged in the media and academic circles.
A few quotes from the column:
“What was even more surprising to me—given the rave reviews Prozac had received from Kramer and others—was that antidepressants as a whole were not more effective than so-called talking cures, whether cognitive behavioral therapy or even old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalysis.”
(The columnist references Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic. See the June 2007 issue of The SRV Journal for reviews of Mad in America.) “If Whitaker is right, American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, is perpetrating what may be the biggest case of iatrogenesis—harmful medical treatment—in history.”
“Between 1985 and 2008, sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics multiplied almost fiftyfold, to $24.2-billion. Prescriptions for bipolar disorder and anxiety have also swelled. One in eight Americans, including children and even toddlers, is now taking a psychotropic medication.”
“A decades-long study by the World Health Organization found that schizophrenic patients fared better in poor nations, such as Nigeria and India, where antipsychotics are sparingly prescribed, than in wealthier regions such as the United States and Europe.”
I recommend looking also at these resources:
Social Role Valorization versus drug therapies
The growing threat to the lives of handicapped people in the context of modernistic values
Wolfensberger, W. (2004). Reply to Levitas, McCandleless, Elenewski and Sobel. SRV-VRS: The International Social Role Valorization Journal, 5(1&2), 42-66
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SRV in the News: “Reading, Writing and Retirement”
Recently, an article in the Toronto daily, the Globe and Mail caught my attention. “Reading, writing and retirement” reports on a program in a nursing home in British Columbia where a Kindergarten class takes place twice a week in the common room. The article presents a glowing report of the program and claims that similar programs elsewhere have helped to increase student’s standardized test scores, while at the same time lowering medication rates among nursing home residents.
As a student of SRV, this program set off several alarm bells. While the intentions of the parties involved certainly seem admirable, especially their attempt bring together younger and older generations, both the heightened vulnerability of the elderly and the image cost incurred by the elderly in such a program, seem to point to unintended negative consequences for the residents of the nursing home.
Since the early 1970s, Normalization and later, SRV theory, has pointed out that the elderly are at risk of being seen as “eternal children” or in their second childhood (see Wolfensberger, 1972 and Wolfensberger, 1998). Placing a kindergarten class in a nursing home unfortunately reinforces these stereotypes. As I commented upon in an earlier posting, the elderly are severely devalued in our culture and therefore face a heightened risk of being susceptible to damaging stereotypes. As Wolfensberger has pointed out, those who are viewed as eternal children or as in their second childhood will be seen as having limited potential for growth and change. Grouping elderly people with children, in programs and activities that we would normally see as age-inappropriate, only increases the chances that people will believe the above stereotypes.
The development of a program such as this raises several questions. For example, if a Kindergarten class can have success in a nursing home, why not develop a program based around a university or college level class? Conducting a philosophy or history class in a senior’s residence would be much more age-appropriate. Secondly, why hold a class in a nursing home at all? This violates the principle of what we call in SRV “culture-appropriate separation of life functions”. In terms of image, a program that arranged for seniors to take classes in universities and colleges in the wider community would likely be the most enhancing option.
See this link for a brief video about the program.
Click here for an article on SRV and aging from the 2003 International Social Role Valorization Conference in Calgary.
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December 2011 issue of The SRV Journal
The December 2011 issue of The SRV Journal is finished and in the process of being mailed/emailed. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can easily become one on our website. Keep an eye also on our website over the next week or two for PDF copies of the reviews from the December issue as well as a complimentary copy of one of the feature articles.
This issue includes articles and reviews by Susan Thomas, Andrew Alves, Thomas Malcomson, Jane Sherwin, Ray Lemay and Stephen Tiffany (one of our bloggers), as well as a posthumous article by Wolf Wolfensberger.
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SRV in the News: Heightened Vulnerability and Economic Hard-Ship
Following my last post, on the theme of the heightened vulnerability of elderly persons, I return to the concept of heightened vulnerability as it is also a very real concern for intellectually disabled people, especially during these hard economic times. The following articles give a sense of the scope of cuts coming to services for the disabled in California in the coming years. According to the California Healthline, the upcoming cuts include a plan to scale-back homecare services by 20%, a provision currently being fought over in the California Supreme Court. As Wolfensberger pointed out in his article entitled How to Comport Ourselves in an Era of Shrinking Resources (2010), “Economic hardships are known to have particularly severe impacts on already vulnerable people” (p. 148). In other words, being of a devalued status in society places intellectually disabled people at a heightened risk for further wounding and devaluation during times of economic difficulty. Wolfensberger makes it clear in his article that there is no easy solution to these problems. He tells us frankly that:
“ We need to wake up to the fact that in human services as in other sectors, we have gotten very spoiled, and taken a lot of things for granted that a distressed economy or society will now or soon no longer be willing to fund, or even able to afford” (p. 151).
For those facing funding cuts in California, it would be appropriate at this stage for their service providers, families and allies to ask themselves how they can shore up the relationships and social roles of those they are serving, to protect them from the hard-ships that will almost certainly follow the proposed budget cuts.
See also: Los-Angeles Times and Boston Globe
For more on Wolfensberger’s 2010 article see this blog posting.
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What is Social Role Valorization about?
“The basic premise of SRV is that people are much more likely to experience the ‘good things in life’ (Wolfensberger, Thomas, & Caruso, 1996) if they hold valued social roles than if they do not. Therefore, the major goal of SRV is to create or support socially valued roles for people in their society, because if a person holds valued social roles, that person is highly likely to receive from society those good things in life that are available to that society, and that can be conveyed by it, or at least the opportunities for obtaining these. In other words, all sorts of good things that other people are able to convey are almost automatically apt to be accorded to a person who holds societally valued roles, at least within the resources and norms of his/her society.” (Osburn, 2006, 4)
Osburn, J. (2006). An overview of Social Role Valorization theory. The SRV Journal, 1(1), 4-13
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Robert Perske
If you have not done so before or recently, I recommend accessing Robert Perske’s website. It contains many of his published and unpublished writings. Perske writes compellingly of the vulnerability of impaired people. His chapter on the ‘dignity of risk’ in the Normalization text by Wolfensberger is still a must read.
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SRV in the News
This is the first of what I hope will be a regular column dedicated to “SRV in the News”. At SRV workshops we often give examples from the media; some of these are current, while others are taken from the news media of the past 20 years or so. As is pointed out in the workshop even a casual inspection of the news media will bring to bear many examples of devaluation, wounding and the ten themes themselves. In this column I will provide a brief description of several articles along with the relevant SRV points. I welcome discussion, analysis and critique in the comments section.
This week I will focus on several articles from Canadian newspapers detailing the devaluation of the elderly:
Stealing from the Seniors (The Calgary Herald): This column outlines the phenomenon of what the author refers to as “elder financial abuse”. According to the author the most common perpetrators of fraud against the elderly is their family members. Apparently one of the reasons for carrying out this kind of abuse is the belief that the elderly “do not need money or have a future”. As spoken about in the introductory SRV workshop, one of the characteristics of devaluation is that as one group becomes more valued in society, others will take their place as the primary devalued groups. One might argue that as disabled people have been given at least somewhat more access to valued roles in our society, the elderly have found themselves occupying more devalued roles. As this article illustrates, it could be argued that the elderly are now one of the most devalued groups in contemporary western culture.
Drugs put seniors at risk (The Toronto Star): In Canada at least, one manifestation of the devaluation of the elderly is an over-prescription of pharmaceuticals, which results in further wounding through harmful side effects. The concept of being placed at further risk by an already devalued status is referred to in SRV literature as “heightened vulnerability”. In this case, societal devaluation of the elderly places them at a higher risk of being placed on mind-altering pharmaceuticals and thus experience further wounding because of this. While a valued person may be able to cope with the complexities of being placed on a large number of pharmaceuticals, devalued persons, who are often bereft of valued social roles and contacts in society, may find it difficult or even impossible to co-ordinate the taking of many different medications.
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New blogger
I am pleased to announce that Steve Tiffany will be joining us as a regular blogger. We have had several excellent guest posts from Steve in the past and look forward to his more regular contributions. He is currently a full-time student in the School of Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, helps to teach Social Role Valorization workshops, and has written for The SRV Journal.
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