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Stop Canceling Options for Severely Autistic Adults
While our country faces a catastrophic shortage of supports, “activists have doomed many disabled individuals to receive no services at all”
By Susan Jennings
The words “Willowbrook” and “Pennhurst” conjure images of horror in the public mind — visions of naked, vulnerable, disabled people wallowing in their own filth, abused and neglected in large, cavernous warehouses whose very names have become bywords for suffering and human misery. Lest we forget their manifold horrors, we are periodically reminded of Willowbrook and Pennhurst by scolding articles and shocking documentaries, ostensibly meant to ensure that their atrocities are never repeated again. If that were indeed the purpose of the exercise, it would be a good and noble one; but there is a darker agenda at work, hidden from public view, one that — should it succeed — will result in human suffering on an unimaginable scale.
My severely autistic son had his own horror show, and it began when he aged out of the educational system. He suffered a broken eye socket, was given stitches in the back of his head, was exposed to pornography, was afraid to take off his clothes to shower, was deprived of clean towels and even a bar of soap, and slept on a bare mattress in his dirty street clothes and shoes. He was toxically overmedicated, the side effects of…