At last I have completed my studies to be a professional disability support worker. It has been an amazing journey and my teachers were excellent in their teaching abilities, passing on years of disability support workers experience.
One of the topics we learned about was deinstitutionalisation. The closing down of mental institutions that supposedly cared for people with mental illnesses, intellectual disabilities, ABI (acquired brain injury) etc.
The community in general felt it was better to have people with disabilities put into institutions so that they can be taken care of and put out of harms way. But whose harm were they thinking of. They weren't thinking about a persons dignity to be treated like a human being. They were thinking about the community in general of so called normal people. But what exactly is normal?
