May 28 2008
The State Makes A Bad Parent
Yesterday I read about the ongoing case of Nate Tseglin at Kristina Chew’s blog (Autismvox). Nate is a seventeen-year-old boy with Aspergers Syndrome who was forcibly removed from his home essentially because his parents would not treat him with drugs the way his school and the state deemed appropriate. He ended up in a mental institution, under restraint and being pumped full of psychotropic medications that had been proven by the family to have adverse effects. He’s going home today as the Autism Self-Advocacy Network reported, but the story goes back to at least February. That’s a lot of months of suffering for a kid who did nothing more than be born with different wiring.
This story reminded me of another a few years back that occurred in Tuckahoe, NY. A woman I knew had a daughter attending the same private school as my son. Over the course of time, I learned that the school district had petitioned to have her daughter taken from her and placed in a mental institution. Last I had heard she had lost custody of her daughter and was fighting to have the little girl returned. But she was a single parent, and did not have a lot of funding behind her. The father - a deadbeat - offered no support to help his daughter. Presumably more convenient to have her locked away.
It’s cases like these that scare me enough to at least give the impression that I’m going along with the system. What gives these people the right to take your child for refusing to medicate and educate and raise your children the way they demand? It’s criminal and discriminatory the way these disabled children and many others like them have been treated.
