Behaviour complaint abuse in mental disabilities?

Question

After doing a study on service users in residential care, I have noticed that they suffer from dispropotionate amounts of behaviour complaints by comparisome to un-disabled persons.

This would evidently be because of their disability with their brain function, but if the staffs know this, it should mean that these residents are unaccountable for their behaviour.

It started off when I was doing observations; I wondered what the reason was for all the amount of accusations that these residents claim to have experienced was due to.

No matter how I tried, I could not find anything that seemed to be the reason for this problem.

Any person making the accusation simply said that this was the only way that they can get these residents to understand the way that they are behaving.

Answer 1

You have a very good point, and seem to have done lots of good thinking about it.

There's a home-study course for professionals, made by "gsc Home Study Courses", called "Crime Victims with Disabilities--Ethical Issues and Methods of Prevention", course #2052. Order on-line at www.gscce.com for $29.75 US dollars plus $7.95 shipping & handling.

It talks about people in institutions being victims of abuse & the reasons why. You may want to contact the authors to discuss the issue with them, and/or write a follow-up course in more detail with these ideas in it.

Answer 2

I am sorry that I do not have any written reference material for you to verify or compare.  What I have is 20 yrs of managing an ICF/MR group home for Autistic adults. These consumers typically function cognitively from a few months to 3-4 yrs old.

My experience is that the pay, initial training, on-going training, understanding of the disabilities, lack of knowledge of regulations governing treatment, over worked, physical assaults, extremely heavy work load, lack of parental/family involvement, long hours and the wrong people in the wrong job account for most of the abuse in these settings.....Evaluate all the factors and realize the workers are just average people who are just mainly doing a job...very few of the workers...NOW...care....it is just a job to provide a paycheck.  But when you go to the Executive Directors of these sites you will get the runaround.  They are so removed from the day to day operations that all they care about is how many deficiencies you get and how much this/that consumer can bring in per diem.  They want the best help that a wee bit more than minimum wage can get you.  I did my time and loved my job.  But when it was time to go...I never looked back.  I got no party, no card, no fruit basket, no goodbye...after 20 years.