Journalist – Historian – Speaker
On Tuesday, I praised good NYT reporting on CIT training in Portland, a piece that tried to go beyond the usual platitudes. Today, I’d like to criticize their most recent Room for Debate – on mental health facilities. The truth of a vast publication like this is that while there are overarching standards, it’s made …
Every day, my news feed serves up a few stories about local police departments undergoing Crisis Intervention Team training. Yesterday was Northern Wisconsin and upstate New York. CIT is fine. It provides some good resources to police officers, who generally seem to respond well to the training. It’s resolutely pathologizing, relying on a medical model …
Vilissa Thompson, over at Ramp Your Voice, has put together a “Black Disabled Woman Syllabus.” It’s a massive collection of links from various intersectional angles, a living document always ready to be expanded, and a fantastic resource. Thompson writes: Over the past few weeks, I have been approached by individuals who wanted to understand the …
This is a must read piece on the use of “psychoeducational” schools to segregate predominantly black children in Georgia from their peers. At age 7, David was too much for his teachers to handle. So they decided to send him to a special program — unique to Georgia — called a psychoeducational school. He was …
Katie Rose Guest Pryal, one of my favorite writers on hidden disabilities, has produced some awesome work lately on accessibility. She was one of many people to write about the lack of disability content at the big Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, producing fabulous pieces about the nature of accessibility. Now she’s …
So Leicester City won the British Premier League title, which is very exciting for people it excites! I noted in the preview last weekend in the New York Times that there’s an interesting touch of history and nostalgia in their narrative: April 4, 2015 Sitting in last place with nine games to go, it seems certain …
As you likely know, I write regularly about Game of Thrones for Vice.com. I find the show interesting and often compelling. Its terrible on gender, sometimes very good on disability (because Tyrion is so well written, with Jaime also developing well post the loss of his hand), and complicated in its appropriation of medieval ideas. It’s …
I’m flying to San Antonio today to learn more about their approach to mental health. My hope is that I’ll find three things. Efforts pre-crisis to prevent people from going into mental health crisis. Policies to insure that mental health professionals have command over mental-health-crisis incidents, rather than lightly or un-trained police officers (even the …