In Australia, the Australian government recently offered A$6,000 assistance per year for two years for families with a child under 6 identified as autistic - the goal being to assist in remedial therapy to assist the child cope as well as possible in a normal education and social setting. A great step forward, but put in perspective by experts who suggest it would fund only about 10% of the time-consuming remedial therapy that the Australian government's own report suggests is necessary.
There are a lot of questions raised by this, but the big one that sticks out as the hard question is whether society (or a government representing it) should provide or fund the provision of whatever is necessary or possible to redress the balance of a disability, such as autism?
Not at all sure of the answer, but think the following are some of the factors that might need to be considered:
- Is there any reason to think that providing such assistance would increase the identification (and particularly the false identification) of such disabilities? If so, how can this be addressed? One way might be to focus on identifying the symptoms that can be remediated by therapy rather than the larger identified group of symptoms - ie provide speech therapy when there is an addressable speech therapy deficit irrespective of whether the "cause" is autism or something else.
- How stable are experts' view of what is best practice to remediate a disability or deficit? Some moderating expert body would probably be needed to conservatively identify best practices away from the hip pocket pressure.
- In the big picture, how does such an approach fit with recognition that evolution and to some extent human and social development have relied on encouraging or allowing "better adaptations" to flourish? Is support for remediation diluting this progressive force? Is this a problem? Is concern about this why such funding has been so little supported in the past?
- How can these issues be discussed without losing the big picture but also without losing humanity?
- What is the right principle - equality of opportunity? If so - at what age? Does this apply ony within a national boundary or internationally?
- What place does means-testing have in the social provision of these therapy services? How does this relate with the carer's motivation - can some carers be unaware or uninterested, and if so should the children suffer for this?
What do others think?
Contributors - jawbone
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
| < Prev |
|---|
