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I was extremely frustrated at the way that the article demonized the family. From leading with the injured puppy to the wildly unflattering picture of children playing outside -- they had to work to find that camera angle -- to downplaying the actual disabilities. The mother in the family has an IQ of 75, yet the article kept referring to her as having "mild" Down syndrome. There are certainly people worse off, but I didn't see any evidence that she was in sufficient mental health to earn a wage. Similarly, they just said "the grandmother injured a shoulder" and didn't talk about how she'd injured it and what were the effects. You can injure your shoulder in ways that leave you in constant pain. You can injure your shoulder in ways that make it impossible to hold down a minimum-wage job because you can't lift anything. We'll never know, because the article is focusing on how they might be disability cheaters for the grandchildren. These are people in desperate poverty; the grandmother has given up the fight, the mother is incapable of caring for herself or her family, and the children are abandoned by the people raising them. The article was slanted to make it look like they were "welfare cheats" (in this case SSDI) as well.
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Jun 2, 2017 23:33
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:She has Mosaic Syndrome, which is mild Downs Syndrome. People with severe Downs Syndrome are much less functional. I agree that the article took an unflattering slant, but I was most frustrated that the writer didn't indicate any awareness of the unsettling implications of a mentally-challenged woman getting pregnant at a very young age. The puppy thing was awful, no lie. What she has may be mild on the scale of degrees of Down Syndrome, but it's certainly severe enough to be considered a permanent disability. My Googlings on an IQ of 75 say: quote:Limited trainability. Have difficulty with everyday demands like using a phone book, reading bus or train schedules, banking, filling out forms, using appliances like a video recorder, microwave oven, or computer, et cetera, and therefore require assistance from relatives or social workers in the management of their affairs. Can be employed in simple tasks but require supervision. I would like to have seen more compassion in that article. Some sense that "these people are in desperate trouble", yes, but also "and nobody is trying to help." Are there disabled-support services? Is there even a Planned Parenthood? Bootstraps aren't available when you have a disabled minimum-wage worker, a disabled mentally-disabled mother, and three children that nobody has the energy to parent. I worry that articles like these -- and this is one of a series on disability fraud in the Post -- are going to make people say "Screw the poor and disabled, they're cheaters" instead of "What sort of social support could we be providing the disabled"? e: Basically, I worry that "SSDI" is going to become the new "welfare queen". The Trump administration has already floated the idea that SSDI isn't part of "core Social Security" and suggested cuts. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 23:50
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Milosh posted:It's so easy for a kid to get on disability. Poverty/trauma mimics so many other mental illnesses, it also ensures that they get treatment for what they are diagnosed with and not the true issue, poverty/trauma, so they never get better. You're the social worker and I'm not. Aren't poverty/trauma/depression a cycle, with each of them making the next worse? I thought I'd read studies that said scaldingly high percentages of the poor have depression, which both leads to bad physical health and to the belief that nothing can be done. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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Jun 3, 2017 02:39
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I originated from rural poverty.
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Jun 3, 2017 05:00
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Great Metal Jesus posted:I like how the article talks about how impoverished the area is but then the people interviewed are a man described as a megachurch pastor and a dude who owns a loving buffalo ranch. Truly the downtrodden little people, oppressed by a cruel and uncaring government. I wish the NYT had at least done the numbers on taxes out versus services in.
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Jul 4, 2017 21:26
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Nobody but the very rich can afford to treat a life-threatening medical problem. I wish the Post spent half the time on [black | urban | poor ] voters that it did on rural Trump voters. Liberals may need to understand Trump voters, but they also need to understand all the poor people trapped in red states, where voting Clinton was entirely irrelevant to the electoral outcome.
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Jul 5, 2017 05:29
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BarbarianElephant posted:I don't believe black people are very happy about being completely taken for granted by Democrats, because what are they going to do, vote for the party with Jeff Sessions in?
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Jul 5, 2017 19:04
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PT6A posted:No offence but: what the gently caress? My parents explicitly told me that, while they would prefer I not do any drugs at all, for obvious reasons, some are okay and won't kill you, but don't ever loving touch heroin or opiates and avoid cocaine if you can. Lots of doctors believed this story (and Purdue Pharma wasn't the only company that peddled it.) Lots of people were given opioids for chronic pain, because it turned out that it was perfectly sensible to do that. It wasn't. So you get a lot of people addicted to perfectly legal and perfectly respectable medications. Then the Fed does a crackdown, a decade after the fact, on overprescription and overselling of prescription opioids. It doesn't provide any funding for any of the hundreds of thousands of addicts to get off opioids, because spending money on addicts only encourages them. So you wind up with not only an opioid crisis but a heroin crisis. Result! Main Paineframe posted:(really great factual post, thank you) Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 00:53
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