ACTION: Call to oppose the 19th-century cures embedded in the 21st Century Cures Act

Today a huge omnibus bill that reflects the worst of American lawmaking is going to move through the GOP Congress, probably with wide bipartisan support, and then will be signed by the president. It surely has many perfectly good things in it, but is intended to make it easier for Big Pharma to test drugs, restricting the FDA. It's a splending "No Lobbyist Left Behind" act, the kind of thing Congresses love to pass quietly in December with a lame duck president.

Yes, I'm not a fan. Call your Senator. Do it today. I put a script at the bottom for emails/calls (but calls work best).

Worse, the bill acquired some of the language from the so-called Murphy Bill, a piece of legislation designed to make involuntary committment easier for caregivers of people with mental health conditions. This is, as I wrote about a year ago, the wrong way to go about it.

“This is out and out promotion of irrational prejudice based upon disability,” Mike Bachluber, Co-Chairperson of National Council on Independent Living ADA/Civil Rights Subcommittee, told me about the bill. Robert Bernstein, president and executive director of the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, said that Ryan’s bill is not only “misguided” but “fails to address the real problems in the mental health system.”

We do have plenty of problems in that system. Bethany Lilly, a policy attorney at Bazelon, told me that right now the system has substantial gaps in services, and H.R. 2646 would just pour more money on the most coercive elements of how we respond to people in crisis: court-mandated treatment and asylums. Instead, she said, “We need to invest in intensive community-based services that people need,” such as access to providers, supported housing, assertive community treatment teams that help individuals live in a community and many other services intended to help people from getting into crisis in the first place. Such services are both cheaper and more effective than institutions or forced medication. But they also require embracing the principles of inclusion and accommodation.

Instead, the Murphy-approach is to institutionalize. Here's a piece from NCIL (National Council on Independent Living) on opposition to Mental Health Provisions.

The inclusion of language from H.R. 2646 in the 21st Century Cares Act will be incredibly dangerous for our community. While some of our concerns with H.R. 2646 were addressed prior to its June passage, the Murphy Bill is still harmful to people with disabilities. The language related to mental health that is included in H.R. 34 still promotes institutionalization, still increases funding for involuntary outpatient commitment, and influences new HIPPA rules to lessen privacy for people with psychiatric disabilities. It is important to note that the bill pays for more institutionalization of children by requiring states to use Electronic Visit Verification systems, which can make people who use personal care or supportive home care prisoners in their own home. We cannot let this dangerous language become law!

Some coverage of 21st century Cures:

• Massive giveaway to drug industry
• Who wins and loses (spoiler: lobbyists)
• Future of Medicine is "Inject and See"

 I called Senators Kirk and Durbin in their Chicago offices yesterday. Call your Senators today. Here's a script written by a friend who did not want to be named.

My name is [your name]. I am a constituent of Senator [Senator’s last name]. I am a [your relation to disability community]. I am calling to ask Senator [Senator’s last name] to oppose the 21st Century CURES Act.

The bill has mental health provisions that will hurt people with mental illness by increasing crisis care in hospital settings. Little data exists on the quality of crisis care in these settings. People with mental illness should get community-based crisis prevention to have a better quality of life.

The bill also provides for an electronic verification system for people with disabilities who use service providers to help with their needs. The verification system only works from a home landline, and it will hurt many people with disabilities’ ability to move throughout the community. This will impact their quality of life.

Thank you for listening. I hope the Senator will consider my concerns, and help keep people with disabilities out in the community by opposing the 21st Century CURES Act.

Bannon on Mental Health: Spank Your Children More

Steve Bannon's long history promoting sexist, antisemitic, and racist views are very much in the news right now, appropriately. I've been saying it's the first major test/fight of the President Trump era. He can place this man in the heart of American power. There's no Congressional approval. But here is where we find out if the media has learned anything from its normalizing of Trump during the long campaign, if the GOP has any qualms, if the Democrats can learn to fight.

Let's talk ableism, because where you find one (or more) form of oppression, you tend to find others, but ableism doesn't always track with partisan divides the way racism/sexism do. GOP ableism tends to be in the form of 1) disabled people are lazy 2) people with invisible disabilities are spoiled 3) disability supports are mostly vehicles for fraud 4) Defunding programs that keep people alive or out of institutions.

Here's what I've got on Bannon so far. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network put out a statement on Bannon which highlighted this passage from The Hill: 

In December 2015, weeks after Ryan became Speaker, Bannon wrote in an internal Breitbart email obtained by The Hill that the “long game” for his news site was for Ryan to be “gone” by the spring.

In the Dec. 1 email, Breitbart’s Washington editor, Matt Boyle, suggested to Bannon via email that a story promoting Ryan’s planned overhaul of the mental health system would be a good way to “open a bridge” to Ryan.

Bannon wasn’t keen on the idea.

“I’ve got a cure for mental health issue,” Bannon wrote to Boyle. “Spank your children more.”

This comment was made in the context of trying to get Bannon behind the "Murphy Bill," a bill I do not support. I have been persuaded by experts, as I wrote here, that stripping away rights in favor of incarceration of people with mental disabilities will in fact not radically improve mental health outcomes and will lead to increased stigmatization and loss of basic human rights.

But although I don't especially want Bannon to back it, the slur is telling. For him, mental health is just about spoiled children. The solution is violence and abuse.

Keep in mind that there are millions of Americans who have various forms of mental illness [note: ableist jokes mean I'll ban/block you] or have family members who do, including lots of Republicans. Many of them likely lack appropriate services. Trump just appointed someone making fun of them to the White House. Will they care? Will Republicans speak against this particular slur?

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I searched Breitbart for terms related with disability and found mixed results, often leveraging anti-ableist rhetoric in order to attack the left. Search, for example, for the word "retard," and you'll find article after article detailing lefties of various sorts using the word "retard" or related stigmatizing language. What you won't find, though, is anything on Anne Coulter's consistent use of the word, or, of course, Trump's many instances of using that word.

Other searches yielded claims that Social Security programs are vehicles for fraud and should be defunded. And then there's this defense of the eugenicist Center for Immigration Studies. Their eugenic ideas detailed here from the Anti Defamation League.

On mental illness, the site has no consistent ethic, as it both wants to blame US gun violence on mental illness while trying to blame Islamic terrorism on Islam, decrying attempts to blame it on mental illness (sometimes).

I mostly left the Serge Kovaleski story out of this search. It's whole different set of epistemologies. Disability is a space where, unlike other forms of bigotry, even the racist right is uncomfortable using pejorative language in public. That's why they spent so much energy denying that Trump mocked the disabled reporter (he did) and trying to claim that Clinton mocked disabled children as First Lady of Arkansas (she did not).

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What I find significant about Bannon's nasty slur is that it reflects broader GOP epistemologies surrounding disability. There's a tendency to divide disabled people into the "good disabled" - people with obvious conditions such as Cerebral Palsy and Down Syndrome - and the "bad disabled" - including people with invisible disabilities. Policies reflect suspicions that people who need benefits are just faking it or (to use the UK term) are scroungers. GOP pro-disability policies tend to reflect the needs of white, affluent, parents of kids with disabilities, but even there under highly limited contexts.

Bannon's "spank your children more" is just a quip, but it's a quip that leads us into a nasty place where people are denied care and subject to abuse.