This is for a school project: My class and I visited the Museum of Disabilities, where we learned a lot. I put this presentation together, to spread the information and to also advocate for no longer using the "R-word" and to start using "people-first-language." I hope you watch this and learn a little something from it. Thanks!
2. Hey boy! you should stop saying the R-word… not only is it out of fashion, it’s not nice at all! Hahahalook at his wheelchair, what a Retard!
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4. Some “treatments” use to cure the mentally ill back then: Alcohol and Opium considered to be a treatment method for mental illness Lobotomy treatment of the frontal lobe The spinning treatment. Others practices included: bloodletting, purging, blistering, and frightening the patient Water considered to be a treatment (“hydrotherapy”) Mild electric shocking
5. Luckily, some nice individuals took the responsibility to help people with disabilities! Just to name a few… Dorthea Dix: She advocated for separate facilities for people with disabilities after working in jails. Benjamin Franklin helped set up the Hospital in Philadelphia. It was the 1sthospital to create a section for the mentally ill and retarded. (yet it eventually mistreated the individuals) Anne Sullivan taught Helen Keller, whom was blind and deaf.
6. Remember how great it was that hospitals, institutions, and asylums were created to treat the mentally ill?....well NOT SO GREAT! Let’s find out why… you’re going to be shocked!... Newark Asylum for “feeble-minded” women of child-bearing age. It tended to the "inherently promiscuous women and their crime prone offspring." Philadelphia Hospital NYS Asylum for Idiots
7. Some institutions shackled patients to the wall & people could pay money to look at the “idiots”! They were even restrained & required to wear straight jackets like what I’m wearing! Many patients were neglected, due to the common 1 staff per 40 patients ratio Asylums were more like prisons for these people Women were sent to institutions if they were prostitutes, pregnant and had a disability, or even if they’re husbands thought them to be “unfit wives.”
8. Ever hear of “Eugenics?” Laws were passed to sterilize people with “defective” traits: “criminals, idiots, morons feeble-minded.” It was named unconstitutional later in history. Well this guy Sir Francis Galton came up with the theory that mental and moral traits were hereditary. He advocated for the restrictions on the “breeding of the feeble minded.” Many professional embraced Galton’s theory. The world began to try and breed the “perfect race.” The Nazis took it to an extreme level with extermination. Immigrants with disabilities were restricted from coming into the United States
15. Want to know the correct way to refer to people that have disabilities? It’s called “people first person language.” You should refer to the person first and then the condition they have, because after all, they are people first. The disability doesn’t define who the person is. For example: “a person who has a hearing impairment” Okay, I’ll make sure I do that from now on. I feel bad, people with disabilities were called awful names back then.
16. I’m sorry about earlier, it was wrong of me. I’m going to pledge to stop saying the R-word and use people first language and I’ll tell my friends too! It’s okay, I’m just like you, except I can’t walk. Want to play basketball with me later?
17. Spread the word to end the word! Our language frames how we think about others. Help eliminate the use of the R-word in everyday speech! R R R Like the Canisius College Facebook Page!
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19. I can’t believe America allowed sterilization laws to go on. That’s such a violation of those people’s rights.
20. I never knew how bad the institutions could get. Those people were treated so poorly.
