announcing a series of workshops on human service history by Jack Yates

Jack Yates, a long-term student of Wolfensberger’s work, is giving a number of (stand-alone) half-day workshops on human service history in March and April (each workshop covers the same material).

The focus of the workshops is on the history of human services to children and adults with intellectual impairments, roughly from the 19th century up until today, with a big emphasis on the ‘eugenics’ period.

Email Jack for more information: jyatesATpeopleinc-fr.org

dates:

March 7 from 9:30 to 12:30 (location: Kennedy Donovan Center, 171 Main Street, Milford)

or

March 21 from 1 to 4 (location: Nemasket Group, 56 Bridge Street, Fairhaven)

or

April 11 from 9 to noon (location: Wynn and Wynn, 90 State Highway (route 44), Raynham)

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NY Times article: ‘Designing for calm’

The NY Times Sunday Review piece from 13 January 2013 entitled ‘Designing for calm’ touches on a number of SRV and PASSING relevant points, and might be seen as a nice counterpoint to an earlier blog post linked to an article entitled ‘Architecture of insanity.’

The writer points out links between the nature of many human service settings and the occurrences of violence in those settings. The writer claims, correctly from my perspective, that architecture and setting can be consciously designed to be calming and thus reduce the prevalence of violence in certain service settings. How? By paying attention to such fairly simple things as: opportunities for privacy, options for private bedrooms and bathrooms, architectural designs that minimize noise and crowding, movable seating, more natural light, and so on. (A non-programmatic point: Even when such features cost more, the writer states that these costs are more than offset by reducing the financial costs associated with violence and aggression in service settings.) Some of the relevant ratings from the PASSING tool (2007) include: R213 physical comfort, R214 challenge and safety features, R215 individualizing features.

The writer does not raise larger questions around what is normative, or in SRV language, the culturally valued analog. This SRV tool is also relevant to discussions of setting and environment. For example, someone’s home, favorite coffee shop, library, public park, art museum, and so on, are more culturally valued and are likely much calmer and calming than many or at least most human service settings, no matter how nice.

In addition, such culturally normative and valued settings would provide many more valued role communicators and options for socially valued roles. Even with nicer architectural features, human service settings often communicate devalued role expectations of, for example, human service client, the menace role, child role, etc.; perhaps through service features and practices such as the language used by staff, program policies, staff-service recipient ratios, segregation and congregation, etc. Some devalued roles are also likely to contribute to increased violence and aggression, not only from service recipients but from staff as well. Nonetheless, the writer’s points about the physical settings of human service programs are quite instructive and consistent with SRV and PASSING.

Marc Tumeinski

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‘Not In My Backyard’ (NIMBY)

Thanks to Margaret Boyes and John Armstrong for sharing the following news article with me, concerning the proposed opening in a suburban neighborhood of a group residence for adults with addiction. In my reading, the article briefly raises several Social Role Valorization-relevant points:

• the wounds of rejection and distantiation; regardless of whether you agree with the neighbor’s concerns or not, the ‘not in my backyard’ thinking does often lead to further rejection of vulnerable people

• note that the proposed program location was formerly used “to house psychiatric patients;” once a building or site is associated with societally devalued people, it is highly likely that it will continue to be used as a human service site, even if the types of people served change. This phenomenon relates to imagery, including the history of a setting (PASSING manual, R1152, p. 121)

• the NIMBY reaction indicates the power of negative stereotypes, in this case surrounding people who are addicted

• although not mentioned in the article, one of the underlying factors often behind NIMBY is the relatively large numbers of people to be congregated in a particular location (in this case, 6 – 8 unrelated adults). This grouping size and composition is not consistent with the culturally valued analog (PASSING manual, pp. 30-31). Such congregation in combination with negative stereotypes is problematic for societally devalued people, and does not lend itself to personal social integration, societal acceptance, etc.

• one official in support of the proposal notes the hope that some people in the program would eventually move into their own place (i.e., potentially gain the valued social roles of tenant or homeowner, neighbor) and find work (i.e., potentially gain the valued role of employee).

What examples of NIMBY have you encountered? How might these situations be understood in terms of SRV/PASSING? What strategies of SRV could help to mitigate the problems of NIMBY? Send us your replies.

Marc Tumeinski

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Announcing a new, revised publication of ‘The Limitations of the Law In Human Services’

I am pleased to announce that Valor Press is publishing A revised and expanded edition of Wolf Wolfensberger’s classic work The Limitations of the Law In Human Services. It will be available this March at the very reasonable price of 25$ cdn + shipping & handling (83 pages).

From the flyer:

Since the publication of the first edition, Dr. Wolfensberger developed extensive material and taught widely on the limits of a law- and legal rights-based approach to addressing human needs. His teaching came to emphasize more and more that the foundations for an adaptive, or even merely a functional, service system were in the minds, hearts and values of the members of a society; and that so often, recourse to the law was either an attempt to bypass the long and difficult work of persuading the citizenry to adopt certain attitudes and values, or a de facto declaration that such an attempt at persuasion would fail. However, this does not mean that recourse to the law is to be totally rejected, only that its limitations must be understood, and it must be put and kept in its proper place. This version has been expanded from the original 24 page version to 83 pages. 

This book includes the following chapters 

FOREWORD Orville Endicott

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND AND SOCIETAL CONTEXT

INHERENT LIMITATIONS IN LAW ITSELF

 Laws Are Ideological

 Law is More Allied to and Productive of Order Than Justice

 Law Cannot Solve Problems of Human Relationship

 Social Problems Can Rarely Be Solved by Law Alone

 The Effectiveness of Legal and Other Technical Safeguards is Very Limited

 The Irresolvable Conflict Between Clarity and Specificity of Law, and Flexibility in Its Implementation

 

LIMITATIONS OF LITIGATION AS A WAY TO SOLVE SERVICE PROBLEMS AND/OR ACHIEVE SERVICE OR ADVOCACY GOALS

 Problems With Relying on Litigative Approaches

 The Power of Litigative Victories is Very Limited

 Conditions Under Which Recourse to the Law for Service and Advocacy Problems Might be Justified

 

LIMITATIONS OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION, AND OF LAWYERS

 The Tendency to Idolize the Law

 Lawyers Tend to Be Conservative and Oriented to Privilege

 Like the Law Itself, Lawyers Tend to Be Oriented More Towards Order Than Justice

 Lawyers Tend to Be Oriented to Specific Cases, Not Systemic Issues

 Lawyers Tend to See Themselves as Mere Technicians

 Lawyers Tend to Be Oriented More Towards Winning Than Towards Problem-Solving, or Even Truth

 Lawyers Can Be Hard for Non-Lawyers to Deal With

 

CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SUBJECT INDEX

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Writing in human services

One of the things I learned from Wolf Wolfensberger was the power of writing in relation to leadership development, social and societal change, and human service broadly.

Even a quick Internet search finds great emphasis on writing within human services:

 http://msw.usc.edu/mswusc-blog/top-five-skills-in-a-social-worker%E2%80%99s-professional-toolkit/

http://www.wcu.edu/11844.asp

http://www.academia.edu/621774/Teaching_Social_Work_Writing

http://careers.socialworkers.org/documents/WritingSkillsLL.pdf

http://tinyurl.com/bguywoy

My question for our readers is: how is writing important to you? how do you use writing in your human service work? how do you incorporate writing into your SRV and PASSING related teaching or training?

Marc Tumeinski

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‘Architecture of Insanity’

Jack Yates recently shared with me an article entitled the ‘Architecture of Insanity: Boston Government Service Center’ by Michelle Koh and Gwen Lee. Located in Massachusetts (US), the Government Service Center has two parts, one of which is the Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center. The photos and description of the Lindemann Center are particularly relevant to Social Role Valorization and PASSING.

From the article: “When Rudolph designed the Lindemann Center, he had hoped to create a landscape that would reflect the interior mental states of inmates suffering from Alzheimer’s, dementia or schizophrenia. Armed with his theory of psychology, Rudolph tried to recreate the hallucinogenic or exaggerated mental and emotional states of the insane with never ending inchoate corridors, a chapel with a dismal atmosphere and macabre twisting stairways, one of which, like an oubliette in a medieval keep, leads nowhere. The building’s dramatic structures and subliminal imagery (there is a thinly veiled frog’s head looking out from the building’s facade) make the Lindemann Center very expressive, but also foreboding and dangerous. With a romanticised view of mental illness, Rudolph made the building “insane” in the hope that it would sooth those who dwell in it by reflecting the insanity they feel within. Unfortunately, the outcome is not what the architect had hoped for.”

This is a dramatic example, though probably not a unique one, yet can still teach us quite a bit when we consider the Lindemann Center in terms of SRV and PASSING training and implementation. A few questions to consider while reading the article:

• What were the conscious assumptions of the architect?

• What messages would the exterior and interior of this setting communicate about adults with mental disorder? What devalued roles are communicated by the setting? (Wolfensberger, SRV monograph, pp. 64, 107; Wolfensberger & Thomas, PASSING manual–Service-Neighborhood Harmony, Setting Aesthetics, Setting Appearance Congruity with Culturally Valued Analogue, Miscellaneous Image Aspects of the Physical Setting)

• What competency impacts might living in such a building have on adults with mental disorder? (Wolfensberger & Thomas, PASSING manual–Physical Comfort of Setting, Challenge/Safety Features of Setting)

And so on.

Marc Tumeinski

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SRV training: key parts

In leadership oriented introductory Social Role Valorization workshops, as originally developed by Wolf Wolfensberger, we cover the following five interrelated parts:

1. Introductory orientation, including a preliminary sketch of SRV and some key concepts

2. Social evaluation and social devaluation, and its impacts, including a review of groups most vulnerable to being devalued in contemporary Western societies, the expressions of social and societal devaluation (‘most common wounds’), and the typical effects of being wounded

3. Detailed introduction to SRV, including the rationale behind SRV and an overview of facts relevant to SRV

4. The ten themes of, and for, SRV

5. Implementation, benefits and clarification of SRV, plus ways to learn more

As you can imagine, to cover this material in a way that is oriented toward leadership development takes a commitment of time. For an SRV workshop for example, this requires at least 28 hours of content coverage (note that this is content coverage; a workshop involving discussion groups would necessarily be longer)

More on leadership development, especially as regards SRV and PASSING, in some upcoming posts.

Marc Tumeinski

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Physiological reactions to the wounds of rejection, distantiation

This essay from the NY Times Sunday Review describes a study which pointed out one of the involuntary physiological reactions we have to being rejected, excluded, cast into societally devalued roles (such as ‘other’): namely, a drop in body temperature in our extremities (such as our fingertips). This study underscores the reality and depth of the hinge wound of rejection (so described by Wolfensberger), which affects even the autonomic nervous systems in our bodies. We human beings so deeply need acceptance and belonging, and are so wounded by life-defining rejection and exclusion. Sadly, such rejection is part of the life history of so many societally devalued people, even those who receive services. This is one of the key lessons taught in SRV and PASSING workshops. The study can also emphasize for us the imperative to help societally devalued people to gain valued social roles, which are the key to belonging, acceptance, personal social integration and valued social and societal participation.

Marc Tumeinski

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SRV in the News – Disabled Children are More Likely to be Abused

Disabled Children are More Likely to be Abused: Report

Why are children with disabilities more likely to be abused than children without disabilities? According to the above article, disabled children in Australia experience abuse at a rate 3 times higher than non-disabled children.

While there are many variables involved in such a statistic, students of SRV can look to Wolf Wolfensberger’s writings on societal devaluation and, more specifically, what he wrote about the wounds of devalued people as a way of interpreting the data.

According to Wolfensberger (1998) “Our society values competence, independence, and intelligence. Thus, incompetence, dependence, and low intelligence are devalued, especially if long-term” (p. 7). This is not to say of course, that disabled people are of inherent less value than non-disabled people. Rather it is simply that societal preference for competence, independence, and intelligence ensures that the opposite will be devalued by a society, and pushed to its margins.

Wolfensberger postulated an “if this, then that” articulation of SRV as a method of describing the phenomenon of societal devaluation. Thus, if one is devalued, then bad things are likely to happen to that party. If we are to agree that the disabled children in the above report are devalued, then we must concur that probabilistically, bad things, or “wounds” will be inflicted upon them. Of course, the opposite can be stated with confidence as well: If a disabled child is a valued member of the community, then good things are apt to happen to them or for them (Osburn, 2006).

 

Steve Tiffany

 

References:

Osburn, J. (2006). An overview of Social Role Valorization theory. The SRV Journal, 1(1), 4-13.

Wolfensbeger, W. (1998). A brief introduction to Social Role Valorization: A high-order concept for addressing the plight of societally devalued people, and for structuring human services (3^rd ed.).  Syracuse, NY: Training Institute for Human Service Planning, Leadership & Change Agentry (Syracuse University).

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NY Times Magazine article: Autism, Inc.

The 2 December 2012 NY Times Magazine article ‘Autism Inc.: How Thorkil Sonne discovered that his son’s disability could be turned into a competitive advantage‘ could make for an interesting read to analyze from a Social Role Valorization (SRV) perspective. For example, the article focuses on the role domain of employment (Wolfensberger, 1998, 30). It mentions the idea of ‘valuable roles’ in terms of employment and uses some role language (e.g., consultant, specialist). The article raises the importance of SRV-relevant concepts such as perception, expectations and interpersonal identification. It talks about the financial benefits of the worker role. And so on.

Other ideas to explore:

• What about image enhancement as a strategy of building and supporting valued social roles?

• What role communicators are mentioned in the article?

• Are any negative stereotypes reinforced?

• What programmatic factors are discussed in the article? What non-programmatic factors are mentioned or discussed?

And so on.

 

Marc Tumeinski

 

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