Abstract
Anne McDonald was born with cerebral palsy. She was placed in a hospital at the age of three and remained until her eighteenth birthday, locked into a hospital regime that might have led to her death. In the preface to her book, Annie’s Coming Out she writes:
To be imprisoned inside one’s own body is dreadful. To be confined to an institution for the profoundly retarded does not crush you in the same way; it just removes all hope.
I went to St Nicholas Hospital when I was three. The hospital was the state garbage bin. Very young children were taken into permanent care, regardless of their intelligence. If they were disfigured, distorted or disturbed then the world should not have to see or acknowledge them. You knew that you have failed to measure up to the standard expected of babies. You were expected to die.
Never seeing normal children, we were not sure what they were like. Where did we fall short? In your ugly body it was totally impossible that there could be a mind. Vital signs showed that your title was ‘human’; but this did not entitle you to live like normal children. You were totally outside the boundary which delineated the human race. (Crossley and McDonald, 1984)
In this short extract Anne McDonald summarises her experience at the receiving end of the social rejection and segregation mechanism. The tactic was to dehumanise those who were different and therefore failed to measure up. The aim of this dehumanisation was to enable society to rid itself of guilt and to provide a moral justification for discarding ‘rejects’ by removing them from human society and eventually from life.
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© 2003 Shula Wilson
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Wilson, S. (2003). Cultural, Social and Personal Aspects of Disability. In: Disability, Counselling and Psychotherapy. Basic Texts in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21450-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21450-7_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-96496-5
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