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table of contents - home page - text-only home page Disability Buzz Disability Worldhas just received a Changemakers Award from the Ashoka Foundation in recognition of this website's leading role in promoting social change. Check out their banner on the front page and find out how the Ashoka Foundation supports social change and social entrepreneurs around the world. What's going on at the U.S. disability dot.coms? In general, the dot.coms seem to be adding sex columnists, reducing their original news coverage, relying more on the wire services, and redesigning their sites to lead you more quickly to the products and services for sale. Nearly all claim to be the leading online "community" for people with disabilities and most now feature resume banks and job-search assistance. Some doors have closed and others opened:
Congratulations to Support Coalition International, who after two years of efforts were accepted by the United Nations in January as a Non-Governmental Organization in Consultative "Roster" Status. SCI represents people labeled with psychiatric disabilities, sometimes called psychiatric survivors, and is comprised of around 100 grassroots groups in 14 countries. According to Rae Unzicker, a U.S. representative, discussion of their status came at the end of a 12-hour UN meeting where it became clear no one knew what psychiatric survivors were or why their human rights were in question. Saving the day was member Kate Millet, renowned author, who was called to the front of the room to take some rather skeptical questions from country delegates. After the vote Millet stated, "This is a great victory; it changes our status now that we have official recognition as human rights workers against abuses in the psychiatric system." One of the focuses of SCI is to alert the international human rights community that involuntary drugging and electroshock amount to torture under the UN's own definitions. Human Rights & Mental Health in Mexico/Derechos Humanos & Salud Mental en Mexicowas published by Mental Disability Rights Internationalin September as a bilingual edition, available for $20 per copy from www.MDRI.org This is a comprehensive report documenting the human rights conditions (both deficiencies and recent improvements) in Mexico's mental health system, based on fact-finding missions conducted in 1996-1999 by an MDRI team of attorneys and psychiatrists. Also available from MDRI for $20 is an excellent 10-minute video, Forgotten People: Video Documentary on International Human Rights of People with Mental Disabilities, narrated by Susan Sarandon with footage from Hungary, Armenia, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine and the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights. In this Issue We have our usual variety of reports from around the globe in this issue of DisabilityWorld, but were especially impressed with the number of articles documenting the adoption and impact of disability-related legislationin Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Don't miss the interview of South Africa's Human Rights CommissionerCharlotte McClain; Lucy Hernandez-Wong's analysis of progress in India and South Africa; Lex Frieden's insights about the USA's new legislation to increase incentives to workamong the disabled population; articles about Brazil's new accessibility legislationand legal actions to improve transport; a discussion of the impact of Personal Assistance Services (PAS) legislation in Finland; the preview of proposed U.K. legislation to increase inclusion and accessin their schools and universities; and the announcement of El Salvador's new employment quota. Disability History Corner About 1000 people a day are visiting a museum exhibition in Dresden, Germany that highlights centuries of discrimination against people with physical and mental disabilities. The exhibition, organized by Aktion Mensch, has an assortment of artifacts, such as an ear-horn used by Beethoven, Barnum & Bailey "Freakshow" posters from circa 1900, and some 100 year old needlework designs by a Swedish mental patient that only after she died were recognized as viable blueprints for aircraft. The Los Angeles Times reported on the exhibition, which will be open through August, and the article can be read online: www.latimes.com/print/asection/20010217/t000014389.html On the disability advocacy and research listservs, there has been a lot of praise voiced recently for two publications. The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler is a book by a physically disabled woman, originally published in 1943 and just reissued by The Feminist Press. Writer Nancy Mairs says in an afterword that this is a "nuanced inquiry into the social, psychosexual and spiritual realities of disability, half a century before disability studies emerged." Historian Paul Longmore and David Goldberger have just published a detailed examination of "The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: a case study in the new disability history,"in the Journal of American History, December 2000 issue. The article, which does a yeoman's job of unearthing details that bring this group to life, can be read online at www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/87.3/longmore.html table of contents - home page - text-only home page |