Ash
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Yeah. Not for the first time I'm considering that I there's either absolutely nowhere or nowhere much decent for disabled people who haven't reach the age where it's acceptable to become somewhat disabled to live.
Employing a live-in carer or moving to a care home
- Thread starter Binkie4
- Start date
Ash
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
There are very many people with this need. A great many younger disabled people only don't live 'independently' because they can't. People are hidden from society, living with parents in institutions struggling and failing to maintain inappropriate private accommodation. Struggling with shared housing.
Everyone I know irl with ME was young when they got it and all of us have been insecurely housed or homeless.
Institutions are dangerous and lead to early deaths for disabled people. But many more severely affected are forced into these if they don't have family who are able or willing to care for them.
Younger disabled people are accepted into some housing schemes for older adults where no standard social housing is available or accessible at time of need. But this isn't an accessible route. It's not clear when this is possible or for whom. It's also another unsatisfactory solution for many reasons. In many cases the social attitudes of the older people can make them hostile outwardly or not still obviously toward the disabled people who move in. This is because they don't view themselves as disabled rather just elderly and feel that disabled people are to be kept away from society, including them.
This isn't a case of oversight. Its a political and ideological choice.
Kitty
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I agree with much of what you say, but as an older person whose friends and neighbours are also old, I simply don't recognise this. I hope most younger people don't have this attitude towards us.
I've found older people more understanding and accepting of disability, partly because they get it. They've experienced aspects of it themselves or they live with someone who does.
They certainly don't think disabled people should be shut away from the rest of society. I came across that in my grandparents' generation, sure, but they were born in the 1800s. Things have changed a bit since then. My parents were born in the 1920s, and the rights disabled people (and other minorities) have now are partly the result of the work their generation did to advance them.
Most of my peers have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and some of them are disabled or neurodivergent. Grandparents are often just as well-informed as anyone else, and just as prepared to fight a disabled child's corner.
Ash
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I refer above to the older people who are resentful of sharing their buildings or neighbour hoods with younger disabled people and who express this resentment straight forwardly or otherwise. Rather than those who don't.
But I can see that saying "many" may have given the wrong impression. It's definitely a phenomenon that has been observed often, I wouldn't conclude most older people would be that way though.
I don't think hostility is the dominant attitude. Just that it exists and because it does that is enough to put a younger disabled person at a disadvantage, unwelcome. Un-belonging.
This is where state based policies of exclusion- little to no named official routes for a disabled person to access accessible accommodation at a younger age, more begging and individual appeals for access to accommodation that has been named for someone else- and individual prejudices arising from the eugenic ideology that pervades society.
I'm not referring to an opinion that I have about some negative attitudes that older people may have toward disabled people living amongst them in schemes. I'm referring to opinions shared with me directly by older people who aren't happy with the situation. Also to this phenomenon as relayed to me directly by professionals who've placed younger disabled people into elder age facilities.
Some types impairment and disability are more stigmatised than others.
I think for people with ME specifically this phenomenon could be less of a problem in that we're considered non-disabled 'gone wrong' rather than straight disabled.
On the other hand the 'gone wrong' part may prove a problem for people who 'look well' and leave their homes reasonably regularly. In that people may be considered too able.
More generally speaking, I actually think that previous generations had a better attitude towards disability in many respects. Because social cohesion and solidarity hadn't been smashed to pieces. People had empathy for fellow workers injured and disabled. People understood better the thinness of the line between self-sufficient worker and destitute disabled ex-worker.
But at the same time until the nineties institutions were disappearing disabled people at extremely high rates.
In recent years I see many 'progressive' millennials harkening back to this time as the way to handle 'severely disabled' autism, mental illness.
So I certainly don't want to make a wider point about generational attitudes towards disability that would suggest a straight forward age to attitude picture.
The problem here is just that negative attitudes do exist within older generations and under that the current set up those who do hold such views are part of the majority group (by demographic) giving them advantage, but also more importantly that the younger disabled people don't have any right to access this type of accommodation specifically, yet will inevitably be placed there in some schemes in the absence of an alternative.
Ps Kitty your lot sound lovely!
Sounds like any younger disabled people would have a great time as neighbours and hanging out with them.
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