Why Students Praise the Judge Rotenberg Center

If I don’t look directly at people, and don’t listen to what words they are saying, I can tell a lot about their body language and tone of voice. So one thing I did when watching an interesting set of videos from the Judge Rotenberg Center, was look slightly away from the video and not bother to turn on language comprehension. The following is what I saw.

There were two people near each other, a woman on the left and a man on the right. When one was talking, the other was backing them up through movement. Their movements were coordinated with each other and sort of bouncing off and reflecting each other all the time.

The movements of the woman were quite often something I don’t know all the words for but know when I see it. There were some incongruous movements in there that were presumably to mask something or other. The rest of the movements and noises she was making were quite often to convey a sense of “I’m superior to these students, they are doing all these, sort of silly kid things, and I am laughing in exasperated tired adultness as they go through all these different things.” This is a knowing sort of movement, designed to convey a connection to the person watching it, sort of like, “We all know what this is like,” inviting the viewer to join in the knowingness.

The man moved in more subtle ways, but they conveyed precision and confidence, very much the way many psychiatrists or scientists move. He moved in such a way as to say, “We know what we’re doing, we do not even need to be forceful in arguing anything, because we know exactly what we’re doing.” His voice reminded me strongly of something a friend calls the “male human services accent,” and also conveyed a great deal of precision in the way that he pronounced words. Sometimes it acquired condescending tones, or his equivalent of the woman’s “knowing” tones.

The overall effect is, “We know what we’re doing, even you ought to know what we’re talking about a good deal of the time, and we agree with each other totally on this stuff, seen it all before. We’re not only in control, but it is only natural that we are in control.”

What video am I talking about? It’s called Why Students Complain To Families. It sets forth a set of expectations in parents for the meaning of their children’s complaints about the Judge Rotenberg Center, and asks parents to collude in the dismissal of complaints and the shaping of their children’s behavior to include fewer complaints about the JRC and more compliments. The two professionals in the video are Dr. Timothy Paisey and Dr. Patricia Rivera.

The video is broken up into sections: Introduction, Program Structure, Complaints chapter 1: the Structure, Complaints chapter 2: the Treatment, Complaints chapter 3: the Education, Complaints chapter 4: the Staff, Complaints chapter 5: the Program, Complaints chapter 6: My Things, Complaints chapter 7: Professional Staff, Complaints chapter 8: the Food, and Complaints chapter 9: Safety. Each section details precisely why parents are not supposed to worry about the complaints, and then describes ways parents can react to the complaints.

Some quotes throughout the video on this topic:

From the introduction:

Young people often make complaints about the structure of their school no matter what environment they’re in. The more structure and consistency that the school provides, the more the students tend to complain. (Dr. Rivera)

They argue that children, possibly emotionally disturbed children in particular, are natural complainers, and would complain no matter where they were. This is meant to bring up images of children at school complaining about the cafeteria food, or complaining about reasonable rules and limits set on their behavior. It’s meant to evoke memories in parents of their children doing these things, and to tie those memories to anything the children might say about the Judge Rotenberg Center.

From Program Structure:

And as many parents can attest, most students do not like rules. (Dr. Rivera)

Of course as a parent you may have experienced that yourself, in terms of trying to impose rules or structure. (Dr. Paisey)

These make the parents identify with the professionals at the JRC.

From Chapter 1:

In some ways, if the student is complaining about the structure, and complaining about the intensity of the program, they are complaining about the very things that are effective treatment for them. (Dr. Paisey)

Exactly. Or else they wouldn’t be here. (Dr. Rivera)

Absolutely. (Dr. Paisey)

This makes it sound as if any complaints are because of the student’s lack of understanding of what is good for them.

From Chapter 5:

Some other concerns that we come across quite frequently involve general complaints about the program. Students will complain that they are physically held or restrained for no reason, and they will claim that they didn’t do anything to justify or provoke this. They will claim quite often that their behavior contracts were broken, also for no reason, or for no good reason. (Dr. Paisey)

And usually the problem is that the students don’t connect their own behavior with the consequences or structure of the program that has been put in place for them. (Dr. Paisey)

And that’s where you hear the complaint of “Staff are too strict” or “I was restrained for no reason,” because they’re not initially making that connection. (Dr. Rivera)

Of course, being restrained and otherwise punished for no reason, and then having it written up otherwise, is an incredibly common experience in institutions. It is convenient for them to have such a facile explanation for the whole thing.

From Chapter 8

Now young people complain about food all the time, in fact young people complain all the time in my experience, about everything. (Dr. Paisey)

This is true. (Dr. Rivera)

So if they weren’t at JRC, they’d probably be complaining about different things in different places… (Dr. Paisey)

Actually, the JRC imposes a strict diet on the “students”, regardless of their prior dietary preferences, and while it allows “other food” sometimes (sometimes contingent on good behavior), this is still an unreasonable restriction.

Chapter 9:

Nonetheless we will have students who do report to families that they are going crazy, or that they are going to hurt themselves, or they’re gonna run away, or they will make claims that staff abuse them, or they will say that they have marks on their bodies as a result of a restraint procedure. And they will sometimes claim that they were hurt by other people on purpose. (Dr. Paisey)

Because things like this happen in every institution I’ve seen.

And here is the big one, the one that explains everything:

If you have a telephone call or a face to face meeting during a visit with your son or daughter and they make some complaint, the first thing to do, I would suggest is to ask yourself, “Is this one of the complaints mentioned on that video I saw?” And then perhaps that will guide you towards the next step, which might be to listen briefly to the complaint. If you can, try to minimize your reaction to it. You can ask for specific details, specific contents, briefly. And then move on. Move on to something more appropriate and positive. If you think you need more information, contact the case manager. (Dr. Paisey)

See, the first thing to do is see if the complaint is mentioned on this video. If it is, then obviously it’s not a valid complaint, or something.

But in the course of the conversation with your son or daughter, try to move on. The reason is because the attention we give to what our children say is itself a reward, it reinforces that kind of behavior. If we’d like to hear more complaining, then all we have to do is pay attention to complaining. If we’d like to hear more good news and positive reports, then what we could do, is to pay a limited amount of attention to complaining, and then move on, and ask “What has happened that is appropriate and positive?” And in fact, if you start by attending to the complaint, and then move on to the more positive information, over time, perhaps the attention to the complaint that’s less, and the attention to the positive information that’s more, and you can teach your son or daughter to pay more appropriate attention and emphasis to reporting positive news. (Dr. Paisey)

That is a description of using behavior modification to get students to say good things about the Judge Rotenberg Center. In other words, a form of brainwashing.

So what we’d like to do is to actually ask your help, in assisting us to teach these students how to do this. (Dr. Rivera)

And that makes parents feel as if they are doing something helpful for brainwashing their children.

We would encourage limited attention to complaints. We would encourage you to make a note of complaints. If you detect a pattern in the complaints, share that information with the student’s case manager, because then, if we need to, we could even adjust his or her program to take account of this. Those are some active ways in which families can become more involved in treatment and some active ways in which the student will not be able to manipulate others to cause the treatment that they truly need to stop. (Dr. Paisey)

Here, it talks about how they can adjust the student’s “program” to deal with the complaints. Presumably not to stop the bad things going on, but to stop the complaints, of course.

So, as you can see, one reason that students praise the Judge Rotenberg Center is that they have been, literally, systematically trained to say positive and not negative things about the place. (I have experienced similar training, it’s nothing to take lightly.)

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Why It’s So Hard To Write Directly About My Life

Outposts In Our Heads

Keep in mind that my state of mind these days is not like it was when I wrote either of these things. But I still think they’re important things to have written.

Outposts In Our Heads

“It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.” – Sally Kempton

I’m looking at a webpage with links to reports about human rights abuses in psychiatry. I could read these reports, but they’d just make me angry. Not the kind of productive anger that makes it easier to write stuff and change things, but the kind of futile undirected rage that would tear me up inside, make me kick doors and yell at my friends. I already know about these things, and don’t need to be reminded, but what we’re reminded of in the first place is selective. There are tremendous human rights abuses going on in certain institutions, yes, and they need to be fixed as soon as possible. But the nature of these reports worries me. They make it look like if you just cleaned up the walls, gave the inmates food and medical care, and stopped beating people, that these places would be acceptable. While these are basic human needs, meeting these needs does not mean freedom. It doesn’t even mean freedom from abuse.

Institution survivors are all too willing, sometimes, to share what seem like the worst of our horror stories. I don’t know about everyone else, but I do it because those abuses are the most tangible. It is easier to write about the mark of drugs and electroshock on the brain or restraints and beatings on the rest of the body than it is to write about the mark of the institutional environment and psychotherapeutic control on the mind. The former are solid and quantifiable; the latter are elusive, insubstantial, and sometimes more terrifying and longer-lasting.

I have a recurring nightmare. I am in a beautiful building with a hushed, playful atmosphere. I have been there as long as I can remember. Everything I could possibly need is there. There are no locks on the doors. People follow me everywhere, but just out of sight, to give me the illusion of freedom. They want only the best for me. I can go outside and play in the woods, and I climb trees. And they treat me like a child. Everything is controlled perfectly. Nothing seems to be wrong, but nothing seems to be really right, either. Everyone is very sweet and very kind and very nice and very forgiving, but there is no freedom. Anywhere. This makes the apparent happiness of the place empty, shallow, and false. That, to me, is the essence of the intangible horrors I fear. Only when I wake up from this nightmare do I realize it’s a nightmare, and that in turn makes it all the more frightening.

I was forcefully reminded of the less tangible aspects of institutionalization last week. During a period of flashbacks, the wrong person heard I was having trouble. I spent the night and part of the next day in a psych ward before I could, along with my support staff, convince them that I was better off out here. If I weren’t in the developmental services system, I might have stayed there, but psych wards don’t like dealing with people with developmental disabilities. All the real but unquantifiable horrors came rushing back at me even during that short stay, and they need to be documented just as surely as the tangible ones do.

I wish I could be the one to document them extensively. I’ve tried, but whenever I do, the words slip away from my mind and I’m filled with an uneasy dread and the smell of that place. I’ll try as much as I can — both things from that place, and elsewhere — in list form:

• Control.
• Infantilization.
• Constant monitoring.
• Fear of staff because of what they could do, and inmates because of the staff.
• Smells.
• Screams.
• Begging for basic items, and for “privileges” that those outside see as rights.
• Looking forward to tiny things to relieve monotony that’s impossible to relieve.
• Everything you do, say, and think being put in psychiatric terms (“No, no, no, I’m not anxious for my meds, I just know that being late on that one gives me migraines, and I don’t know anyone in the world who likes migraines.”)
• Separation from everything and everyone familiar.
• Not being allowed my own staff, advocate and cognitive interpreter (whom I have a right to under the Americans with Disabilities Act as surely as a sign language interpreter), watching her have to fight to get in outside of visiting hours.
• Having people control when, where, whether, and how I can speak to familiar people and advocates.
• Discouragement of bonding among inmates or between inmates and staff.
• Catch-22 on displays of emotion — every emotional display has a corresponding psychiatric label, but a lack of emotional display is considered a sign of depression.
• Being told what you’re “really” thinking and feeling, as opposed to what you are thinking and feeling.
• Having your motivations constantly questioned and scrutinized.
• Backwards language: ‘Getting with the program’ is a ‘good step toward independence’, but making your own decisions is ‘non-compliant’, ‘manipulative’, or ‘attention-seeking’.
• In this case, some of staff’s inability to grasp that I was genuinely abused in previous settings and I didn’t just think I was (I told the near-death horror stories when asked; I knew they wouldn’t understand the subtleties), and that it was mainly staff, not inmates, who perpetrated it.
• Assumptions on the part of staff that if abuse was perpetuated against me in the psych system, then it was my fault, and asking questions about what I had done to cause it.
• Condescending chatter from staff who think they’re being nice but who’ll become suddenly grouchy if you show any sign of not liking it.
• Trying hard never to be noticed, ever.
• Knowledge that whether I stay or go free is contingent upon other people’s desires and other arbitrary factors, and that false reports can easily be written and justified.
• Knowledge that my housekeys and wallet are in a locker in the nurse’s station.
• Fear of thinking one’s own thoughts or feeling one’s own feelings, and constant questioning of whether they’re real or delusional.
• Fear of speaking out, feeling — and sometimes being scolded — like an ungrateful child if you do.
• Being patronizingly told of the seriousness of your actions or thoughts, as if you’re unaware of this fact.
• Knowledge — from previous experience — that if I stay too long, I will have to either kill all desire for freedom; or go berserk, violent, and self-destructive and risk dying or being kept even longer.
• Knowledge that most of the world still condones this, either overtly by calling it ‘treatment’ and ‘necessary’, or by never having to think about it.
• Control.
• Control.
• Control.

The defining element here is control. If you strip away the abuse and neglect that is considered more obvious, there are other aspects of institutions that can be much more insidious. The idea of staff control over so many aspects of inmates’ lives — no matter how benevolently constructed — leads to a situation in which the inmates will feel controlled. And rightly so. The problem is that in many of these environments, the control is so covert, ever-shifting, and confusing, that the inmate may doubt that there is control going on at all. If you are beaten, you know you are being beaten. Mental and emotional abuse — intentional or unintentional — can be strong and subtle at once.

You start to doubt yourself. You believe these people are doing you a kindness, and some of them sincerely believe that they are. All your schooling in the value of good intentions comes into play, and you find yourself wrestling with whether or not it’s okay to object. People are always there. They are too there, too eager to be of help. You wonder harder, “Are they hurting me? Or are they just being nice?” The concept that they may be hurting you while trying to be nice to you is hard to grasp, and once you do grasp it, you don’t know what to do with the information.

That is only one of the best-case scenarios. Many people aren’t even trying to be nice.

These things don’t describe it adequately, but they’re better than nothing. This doesn’t get into many of the details, and many of the long-term effects. There’s no easy way to describe the way these things encroach on your mind, to anyone who hasn’t been there. I’ve lived through the traditional horror stories, the ones that are, paradoxically, easy to talk about. I can get used to saying that they almost killed me, and if I harden my mind in the right places I can describe how.

But how can I get used to saying that they trained me into ways of thinking, degrees of self-hatred and self-denial, that, without diligence on my part and support on the part of others, could come close to killing me every day of my life for the next seven years or more? This is where the outposts in our heads come into play. We are trained in these destructive ways of thinking, by both well-meaning and cruel people alike. One of the most dangerous thoughts among them is the belief that these thought patterns are just about anything — ‘delusions’, ‘organic psychiatric disorders’, ‘signs of pathology’, ‘manipulation’ — as long as they are not the responsibility of the people who teach ‘patients’ these ways of thinking. But one of the most important things to learn is that it is their responsibility. These mental outposts that destroy so much of people’s lives are not the fault of the people whose lives are destroyed. They are the responsibility of the people who perpetuate them and the systems that support them.

These things are, of course, difficult to say. I have to fight my training all the way, and for someone with a lot of Special Individualized One-On-One Training ™, that isn’t easy. I can, as I type this, almost hear the words of my psychotherapists in my head: “You were delusional. We were desperate. We thought we were going to lose you. If you get paranoid about things like this, check them out with me.” That last sentence is the catch. I have checked out my observations with other people, and they have been confirmed several times over. I was taught not to trust my own thoughts, but now my thoughts are confirmed. This is not a delusion. This is hard, scary reality. And it’s a reality that I can think for myself. I don’t need a psychologist hanging over me telling me that my belief that he is abusive is a delusion and an exaggeration. But I have to fight the “Don’t think for yourself” training I got all the way. I was told that my psychologist would get in my head and never get out — that he would build these outposts in my head — so that I would be sane. It seems to me that the sanest thing I ever did was start kicking him out of my head at the earliest opportunity. But he holds on tight, and sometimes it’s hard to defy him even though I haven’t spoken to him in years.¹

The things he told me are confirmed by the majority of the culture around me. People believe that some people — sometimes me, sometimes not, but it doesn’t matter — need to be treated as I was treated. There are entire books written on miracle cures like me, books that make my blood run cold because they look like the therapist manipulated the patient until they acted a certain way. Just like me. These books sell a lot because people like that this happens. The brilliant therapist saves the incurable schizophrenic (or multiple personality, or autistic, or whatever) from a life of certain institutionalization. People like my abusers are considered heroic. People like me are considered weird bags of flesh without real value until someone comes along to give it to us. Then we are supposed to feel grateful for the abuse that has been heaped on us. People tell us where we would have been without it — sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not, but it doesn’t matter — and think that anything less than fawning gratitude is a sign that we’ve still got problems.

Difficult as it is, someone needs to talk about these things. Maybe not everyone, certainly not anyone for whom it’s simply too painful or dangerous to think about at the moment. But it has to be someone. Otherwise, we will succumb to the belief that cleaning up institutions makes them humane, that changing their outer trappings makes them no longer institutions, and that mental and emotional invasion and abuse only happens in a few isolated cases. An institution can be the size of a single room, and can take place even under the guise of utmost kindness. To paraphrase a friend, the restraints they put on our minds can last for long after our bodies are untied and sent home. We must not forget this, or those who come after us will live in the clean, beautiful, sanitized hell that haunts my nightmares.

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Copyright © A M Baggs, 2003

I began to write this in July 2003, shortly after a stay in a psychiatric ward brought on by the wrong people hearing the wrong things and my own trained submissiveness that made me go along with something I should have fought. I finished it in October 2003.

¹ This particular institution he worked at was one of the remaining holdovers in the mid-90s of the era when autism was a part of the nebulous and fairly useless label schizophrenia.

For a detailed description of the intangible horrors of one institution, read Congratulations! It’s Asperger’s Syndrome by Jen Birch. It’s in part her work that made me able to write this, because she wrote so purely about the mental control techniques and so little about physical brutality. I have also tried my own description of one of the effects of this mental abuse, called Why It’s So Hard To Write Directly About My Life.

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Why it’s hard to write directly about my life.

The truth about my life is, to me, straightforward. But it is also, as it is for most autistic people, unusual. It has a couple of points in which I’ve traversed some developmental trajectories that are unusual even for autistic people — although not as unusual as I’d expected. But I am still afraid whenever I tell anything but a few parts of the truth about my life.

I have spent a good deal of my life institutionalized in one form or another. First I was institutionalized in the ordinary way most American children are institutionalized, which is to say I went to school. School is a surprisingly good training ground for the next kind of institution I wound up in, the kind with locks on the doors, Thorazine, restraints, and seclusion rooms. After that, I was institutionalized in ways that, while the power dynamics were exactly the same, took place without locks on the doors. These last places not only presented the false front of not being “true” institutions (when in fact they were), but left me permanently uncertain about when, if ever, I was let out of institutions for good.

I have spent a good deal of my life, within all of these settings, being told who and what I am. I have spent a good deal of my life under the direct control of people who told me who and what I am. These people have had absolute power over me up to and including whether I live or die. They have told me that I am not thinking what I am thinking, feeling what I am feeling, or experiencing what I am experiencing. They have looked at my outsides and filled in the gaps with their own prejudices, then tried to force me to conform to their prejudices. They have trained me to second-guess every thought in my head, to say that true is false and false is true.

Whenever I speak about the day-to-day reality of my present life, or certain aspects of my past, ghosts come out to haunt me. They feel real. Sometimes, with the help of flashbacks, they even look or sound real. Sometimes they superimpose themselves over real people, people I know today who believe in me.

I see the classmates who bullied me, especially the girls who did things to me and then later told me (and of course teachers) that they’d never happened. Relatives and ‘friends’ who abused me, or who didn’t know me that well and made their own assumptions. Mainstream and special-ed teachers and principals with their agendas for me and their narrow and conflicting views of my abilities and impairments. Counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists with their views of what my mind was “really” like and what I should do about it. Psychiatric nurses and psychiatric technicians who wielded control over my life direct and total enough to corrupt nearly anyone, and with the insulting and inaccurate motivations by which they were trained to interpret my behavior. Doctors who told me that my internal experiences (including non-verbal thought), by virtue of not meeting their expectations, were completely invalid and impossible. Autism “experts” with their own ideas of which parts of autism I should be concerned about (social skills) and which were just me being lazy or willful (everything else). Random people who told me that communication is impossible for an autistic person.

Without fail, these are the people who appear in my head every time I write an article for public viewing. The closer I get to the real truth about my life¹, or to living my life the way that best suits me, the stronger these voices out of my past call me a liar. I have nightmares about them. They tell me I’m too crazy or dramatic to understand myself. They say that documented events never happened. They threaten me, telling me to shut up right now or else.

This mirrors exactly the times when they, in their real-life people forms, asked me what I was thinking, I told them the truth, and they told me it was a lie, or that I lacked insight. Then they told me to say something that I knew was a lie but call it the truth. They told me they knew me better than I did. They had a lot of power over me then. They don’t now. But I am well-adapted for a time when they had power over me. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be alive to describe it. My fears mirror the strategies I learned for survival — telling the truth is dangerous.

Perhaps because of this exact phenomenon, my heart rate is skyrocketing just writing this down. But someone has to document this. This is the kind of damage that is done to people all the time, the kind that messes with our minds rather than our bodies. It is the hardest kind to write about, and thus is often not written about in detail. It is intensely personal and by its nature evokes an extreme sense of vulnerability.

There are other people out there who have experienced this kind of total domination. There are autistic people who cannot write the whole, non-stereotypical truth about our lives because terrible things will happen when we do², or because terrible things happened when we did in the past. There are institution survivors who can write about being beaten up by staff but who freeze up completely when we attempt to write about the domination and invasion of our minds. It is so much easier for many of us, in comparison, to stick to the stereotypes. Or the more spectacular but often less invasive physical torture we’ve endured. Every one of us who breaks this pattern is taking a tremendous risk, either in our minds or in present reality.

It is important to know that when you read something by someone who’s a member of a group that’s been dominated and oppressed as heavily as this, you may be missing the whole story. Particularly if you’re one of the people with power over us. This is not out of deceitful natures on our part, but out of terror of what will happen when we reveal certain things. It is important to know that some of those of us who appear to approve of horrible things that were done to us, are people who are afraid — sometimes legitimately afraid for our lives — to say otherwise. Or worse, many have forgotten how to say otherwise, or have only been taught to communicate in ways that validate those who have harmed us. How many communication “interventions” for autistic people teach us to say “No” or “You’re wrong”?

It is important to know that uncounted people are suffering in silence while dominated by people (regardless of intentions) who have belittled us and called our every truthful word a lie. They may look calm, compliant, cooperative, and happy, but under the surface be terrified or secretly defiant. I remember all too well a day when my life was threatened. The Orwellian language of my psychiatric records describes it as a day when my compliance level started improving. For my part, this was the point at which I gave up all hope and cooperated out of fear and despair.

It has taken years to get up the courage to write this. I have tried several times and ended up curled up in a ball on my bed crying or banging my head on the wall, surrounded by the ghosts of psychiatric nurses. Often after only writing the first sentence. I don’t know what has made me able to write about it tonight, but I’m taking full advantage of it. I want people like me to have words and concepts for what has happened to us. I want other people, particularly professionals, to understand the damage they have inflicted and may still be inflicting on us. I want to be another person to break the silence around the things that are harder to describe and harder to endure. I want to defy the people I fear the most.

Writing this is part of my commitment to the truth, and my efforts to conquer the hold of these attitudes — not only on me, but on all the other people who are trapped within the mental prisons others have created for them. Now that I am free of these people’sdirect control over my life, I feel an obligation to speak up for people like I was who are still under that level of control, and for the truth that other people have forced them to bury.

Our lives or circumstances may be (or seem) unusual, but that does not give anyone the right to force us to lie and pretend that we are someone else. It does not give them the right to redefine the truth about us to reinforce their power over us or their stereotypes of what our diagnoses dictate we should be. It does not give anyone the right to inflict the kind of mental torture that leaves a lot of us begging for something as straightforward as a simple uncomplicated beating.³

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Copyright © A M Baggs, 2003

¹ Particularly the truth that says “This happened” when people want me to think it didn’t; or the truth that says “I can’t do this” or “I can do this” when people have thought otherwise in the past or when it’s an ability that has changed or fluctuated over time. These are all things that other people have strong investments in not being true, for some reason, and they have therefore tried to create in me an investment in not telling the truth about them. This also extends to asking for certain kinds of assistance or refusing other kinds of assistance.

² As long as services, formal or informal, depend on meeting a very narrow, stereotypical set of traits to a degree that no person truly meets, many will continue to have to hide the traits in themselves that are not stereotypical, in order to survive. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle in which service providers require stereotypes, people hide non-stereotypical attributes (which every last one has), and stereotypes are perpetuated. Autistic people who can talk or type independently, and/or who were diagnosed after the age of three, and/or who scored over 70 on an IQ test at some point in their lives, are at high risk for being excluded already regardless of need, because those are non-stereotypical attributes in themselves.

³ This is not intended to be an endorsement of physical violence. Physical abuse is horrific and needs to be stopped just as much as what I’m talking about does. But many of us find it as taken on its own, as long as it doesn’t kill us, easier to recover from than the more mental forms of torture and coercion and the resulting thinking patterns.

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