thatdiabolicalfeminist:

sapphicautistic:

sapphicautistic:

Hearing non developmentally disabled people who get paid to care for DD people talk about their jobs is literally traumatic.

Same about non-MI people who get paid to care for mentally ill people tbh, though they often manifest slightly differently.

But the extreme levels of disrespect they use when they talk about their clients; the way they dehumanize and belittle them; the way they describe suffering adults as naughty children; the lack of anything approaching respect for privacy; the use of their clients as spectacles and entertaining stories; the way they use their jobs as evidence that they’re good people even while they’re describing very personal private things abut their clients in graphic detail to titillate and horrify – it’s disgusting.

I hate how normalized this behaviour is, too – I have literally never known someone who worked with either of these groups who did not talk like this about the people they were supposed to care for, sometimes directly in front of their own clients and always in front of or directly to me, a developmentally disabled mentally ill person. Because it’s just normal to talk about us like that.

I’ve also never seen anyone who wasn’t in the affected group object to it. Which is particularly awful because they will not listen to the rest of us.

this isn’t even touching on the amount of abuse that flourishes in institutions where staff have almost total power over vulnerable disabled people, or how rare it is that these abuses are ever addressed

None of this should be as pervasive and normalised as it is. The dehumanisation of disabled people has got to stop.