Morning musings

Some people have morning sickness while I have morning musings and this morning I have been musing about the rights and perquisites of people with special needs, in particular people with challenges in the mental ability department.

So most of us come into the world with nothing, make our eventually independent way, often acquiring property of one sort or another, and settle our account on the way out, often having some positive amount to dispose of. Some of us breed and help others onto their eventually independent way.

But some of us don't make it all the way and are never independent. We will always need the support of others in order to survive. In primitive societies one suspects that we would not have survived; in such societies life is too hard to be able to accommodate people who cannot pull their weight and obviously incompetent infants are apt to be exposed and incompetent seniors might chose to expose themselves - such practises have been alleged in more than one film that I have seen about North American aboriginals. I have also heard of aboriginal tribes in somewhere like Outer Borneo in which seniors who can no longer pull their weight are quietly knocked on the head as they go about their daily business.

However, a mark of more civilised societies is the way in which we give house room to the less fortunate amongst us.We include people who do not or cannot pull their weight and we do not exclude people who have stopped pulling their weight through age or infirmity. So the muse is how does one judge how far to go?

Or to be more specific, what right does a person with a severe mental handicap have to a home of their own? Or put another way, when is putting such a person in a home of their own the right thing to do? Is it right when such provision is considerably more expensive than some kind of communal provision, of the sort which used to be provided in our asylums?

An even harder question, at least for me, is what right does such a person have to a family of their own? Assuming competence in that department, when is it right to allow such people to exercise that competence? When is it right to take active steps to stop such a thing happening, quite possibly against the will of the person concerned?

Maybe the answer to the first question is to try it, as indeed we are, and see. It seems fairly clear that many handicapped people would much prefer to live in their own home than to live in a communal home, however nicely this last might be appointed. I would sooner have my own muddle than somebody else's niceness. So it seems right to give it a go, to test the boundaries and feel our way to some workable and affordable new customs, to replace those of the lost asylums.

And perhaps there would be something to be learned from analogy with triage; the response of medical services to demands which are threatening to overwhelm them. As practised by field hospitals and A&E departments.

But I do not have an answer to the second question. Perhaps the cop-out is that it does not arise very often in practise and that we can get by on a case-by-case basis. But I do worry about the fate of a normal child born into a very abnormal family as I suspect that an otherwise normal child of physically abnormal parents is apt to have problems on that account and I also suspect that this is going to be worse in the case of mentally abnormal parents. Is it fair to take the risk of allowing such a child to be born in the first place? Don't the rights of the unborn child trump those of the abnormal adults?

A third question is about property. When and to what extent do we allow someone with a mental handicap to own property? Do we let such a person have their own bank card and PIN number? Does the bank respect their autonomy & privacy and refuse to talk to a support worker about such a person's banking affairs? Are we in danger of disappearing up ourselves in red tape in such cases? This is left for another occasion.