Book notice #1

Occasionally we will post about a book relevant to Social Role Valorization–sometimes a new book, sometimes an older and still relevant one. If you have suggestions for such items or comments on the titles we post, please post a reply! Note these will be notices, not book reviews, though we don’t rule out reviews in the future.

Here’s our first book notice:

Management of the Family of the Mentally Retarded: A Book of Readings edited by W. Wolfensberger and R. Kurtz (Follett Educational Corporation, 1969)

This is an interesting and useful book in and of itself, but also in relation to one of Wolfensberger’s more recent books, entitled The Future of Children with Significant Impairments: What Parents Fear and Want, and What They and Others May be Able to Do About It (Syracuse, NY: Training Institute for Human Service Planning, Leadership and Change Agentry, 2003– see review here). I found it interesting to see how many issues we discuss today (e.g., about genetic counseling, brothers and sisters of people receiving services, parents helping parents, and so on) are included in this 1969 book. Keep this connection in mind, and the date of publication, as you scan the table of contents (see below).

If you read the book when it first came out, what impressions do you remember of your first read? What connections do you see between the topics covered in this book and the realities which families of people with impairments face today? What new issues have arisen since 1969?

An excerpt from the preface which is relevant to the title:

Management of the family of the mentally retarded implies to us the entry of persons or organizations in an official, or at least widely sanctioned, capacity into the lives of members of families of the mentally retarded, purportedly for the benefit of either these family members, of the retardate himself, or of the community. The activities subsumed by this definition include referral, fact finding, case evaluation, counseling, psychotherapy, guidance, tuition, education, casework, direction, supervision, and control. In the course of discussing this book with colleagues, we have found that several have objected to the term ‘management’ because of its authoritarian overtones. However, we feel strongly that this term is the only one that is broad enough to subsume the range of appropriate services; furthermore, we feel that the term is the only honest one to describe the realities of the field. (p. iii)

Abbreviated Table of Contents:

Part I The Background

Section A The Challenges and Demands of Family Management

Section B Through the Parents’ Eyes

Section C The Old Way

Section D The New Way

Section E The Manager

Part II Parental Dynamics Relative to Management

Part III Management in Conjunction with the Diagnostic Process

Section A General Considerations

Section B Early Contact Phase

Section C Feedback Phase

Part IV General Principles of Management and Counseling

Part V Special Management Techniques

Section A Group Approaches

Section B Home Management Techniques

Section C Long-Distance Management

Section D Training the Parent in Operant Behavior-Shaping Techniques

Part VI Special Types of Guidance

Section A Genetic Counseling

Section B Religious and Pastoral Counseling

Part VII Management Considerations for Various Disciplines

Section A Educators

Section B Nurses

Section C Physicians

Section D Psychologists

Part VIII Management of Special-Problem Groups

Section A The Limited Family

Section B The Family with a Mildly Retarded Child

Section C The Family with a Mongoloid Child

Section D The Family with a Phenylketonuric Child

Section E The Siblings of the Retarded

Part IX The Parent and the Institution

Section A The Placement Decision and its Alternatives

Section B Management During the Placement Process

Section C The Management of the Institutionalized Child’s Family

Part X Parents Helping Parents

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video of speech by Dr. Burton Blatt

Thanks to Guy Caruso for sending me notice of this link to the text and video of a speech given by Dr. Burton Blatt in 1984 in Pittsburgh. It is 6 parts, so you have to click on each one. Dr. Blatt was the author of the well-known Christmas in Purgatory. See this site for more about Blatt. Dr. Blatt recruited Wolf Wolfensberger to come to Syracuse University. Thanks also to the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities for making available this important video as well as another video by Dr. Wolfensberger on the same website.

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Overcrowded emergency rooms

Steve Tiffany sent me links to two articles (here and here) in The Gazette which describe recent deaths of patients in Quebec (Canada) emergency rooms, largely due to lack of care related to overcrowding. Most of the patients mentioned in the articles who died were over 65 years old. Steve pointed out that this speaks to the heightened vulnerability of older people. In this case, that vulnerability comes perhaps from age and health status as well as devaluation of elders, maybe even particular devaluation of certain types of emergency room patients.

Reading these articles also raises the issue of programmatic and non-programmatic factors; in other words, what is related directly to in this case medical care, and what is related to issues like funding, administration, etc.

The answer offered in the articles is more human services: more beds, more hospitals, and so on. That may be part of it but it is not an adequate response to social devaluation.

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Ethnography and communication: social-role relations

This looks like an interesting article, at least from the abstract. Can a reader access it and then report on it? I do not have access to the full article.

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blog by Alex Schadenberg

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition in Toronto, regularly blogs on topics related to the vulnerability and deathmaking of socially devalued people.

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UN report on social integration and NGOs

Recent report on social integration and NGOs. Interesting to compare how the report defines social integration with how it is described in SRV.

From the report:

Social integration is the process of building the values, relations and institutions essential for the creation of such an equitable and dynamic society, where all individuals, regardless of their race, sex, language or religion, can fully exercise their rights and responsibilities on an equal basis with others and contribute to society.

The above definition is focused on the societal in comparison to the personal level.

The Social Role Valorization (SRV) monograph (2004, p. 123) describes integration as:

valued participation with valued people in valued activities that take place in valued settings

The above report is concerned with socially devalued people, such as poor people, minorities, migrant populations, impaired people, elders, etc. It cites the following barriers to social integration:

The responding organizations identified many barriers to social integration. The three most frequently cited barriers to social integration were lack of education, gender bias and inequality and poverty.

The report recommendations are almost entirely focused on getting the government to do something, which is certainly one valid strategy but not one where I would necessarily put my primary efforts.

The report includes so-called ‘best practice’ examples from international projects working toward the goal of social integration. There are some interesting references within these examples to competency enhancement and leadership roles. Some of the examples include programs supporting large scale integration (e.g., homeless shelters, soup kitchens) as means toward social integration! Pretty deep unconsciousness in those cases.

One of the examples of a ‘best practice’ from Thailand concerns a program that started a school for extremely poor children. They made sure the kids were given student IDs, and mentioned that no one calls them ‘street children’ anymore (relevant example of possessions and personal impression).

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Joblessness (loss of the valued social role of worker)

Atlantic magazine in March 2010 ran an article entitled ‘How a new jobless era will transform America.’ It struck me when reading it how much the article was about the loss of (or about the ‘never having had’ in the first place) the valued role of worker.

SRV encourages us to think about working on the level of the: individual, primary and secondary social systems (i.e., family, school, workplace, etc.), and the level of society as a whole (SRV monograph by Wolfensberger, pp. 78-80). This article addresses the likely impacts of the loss, or the ‘never had,’ of the worker role on individuals, communities, and society.

The Atlantic article touches on the following SRV relevant points:

• Wounding as a result of social and societal devaluation. From the article:

Being involuntarily out of work for six months or more … is the worst thing that can happen … equivalent to the death of a spouse, and a ‘kind of bereavement’ in its own right.

Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home.

All available evidence suggests that long bouts of unemployment-particularly male unemployment-still enfeeble the jobless and warp their families to a similar degree, and in many of the same ways.

• Heightened vulnerability. From the article:

Graduates’ first jobs have an inordinate impact on their career path and [lifetime earnings] … People essentially cannot close the wage gap by working their way up the company hierarchy … They don’t catch up … Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate.

But regardless of age, all men (who had been laid off) were left with an elevated risk of dying in each year following their episode of unemployment, for the rest of their lives.

• How physical settings and personal appearance communicate role expectancies, personal unconsciousness. From the article:

Some neighbors were at the Walmart (where he worked) a couple of weeks ago, he said, and he rang up their purchase. ‘Maybe they were used to seeing me in a different setting,’ he said–in a suit as he left for work in the morning, or walking the dog in the neighborhood. Or ‘maybe they were daydreaming.’ But they didn’t greet him, and he didn’t say anything. He looked down at his soup, pushing it around the bowl with his spoon for a few seconds before looking up at me. ‘I know they knew me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in their home.’

• Impact of the lack or loss of valued social roles on the level of an entire community. From the article:

Communities with large numbers of unmarried, jobless men take on an unsavory character over time.

• The impact of devaluation on the level of an entire society. From the article:

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults–and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well.

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Question about social roles posted on Yahoo

I always wondered who asks these questions and why? Nonetheless, someone posted a question on Yahoo answers about social roles that women play in Britain and Russia. Anyone out there have an answer?!?

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Discussion of SRV on Inclusion Network Ning site

There has been some recent discussion of Social Role Valorization on the Inclusion Network Ning site as well as a new Facebook page entitled SRV (Social Role Valorization).

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Social devaluation spanning the centuries

We know that societal devaluation of a particular group of people can span the centuries. A recent book review in the NY Times Book Review (14 Feb 2010) looked at a book entitled The Devil and Mr. Casement by Jordan Goodman. The book describes the rubber trade and the native peoples in the Congo in the 20th century, which involved a mix of slavery, imperialism, racial prejudice and capitalism.

The reviewer Greg Grandin writes:

Roger Casement…a career diplomat…traveled to the Amazon, collecting evidence of whipping, torture, mass rape, mutilation, executions and the hunting of the region’s Indians, whose population Casement calculated had fallen to 8,000 in 1911 from 50,000 in 1906.

Grandin concludes:

a kind of slavery still remains in force in the Amazon. Thousands of workers, for instance, trapped in conditions nearly as dismal as those documented a century ago in the Putumayo, make the charcoal used to forge pig iron, which is then purchase by international corporations to produce the steel used in everyday products, including popular makes of cars.

This review (and the book apparently) give us an example of long-term social devaluation, and the inevitable wounding which accompanies it, as well as the economic and societal values which can drive devaluation. A potent reminder to interrogate the values of our own cultures today: what are the dominant values of our culture? what are the opposites of those values? what groups of people represent the opposites of the dominant values? Those groups are likely to be socially devalued. (NB: these questions are typically explored in multiple day Social Role Valorization workshops as developed by Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger)

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