How to Get On: New Pages for 2021

Home Care

Sample Care Plan for Increasing Hours 

Lilac’s Doctor’s Letter for Increasing Home Care Hours

ME/CFS

Find ME Groups on Facebook

Social Security disability

The Dazzling Disability Doctor Letter of Miss Ruby Fierce

How to Determine Rent if You Live with the Homeowner (SSI Regulations)

Disability Accommodations

Doctor Letter for Extra Bedroom for Exercise & Equipment

Patient Letter for Extra Bedroom for Exercise

Doctor letter for higher voucher

Hibiscus’ Letter for Higher Voucher

How to Use Your Housing Voucher to Rent a Room in a House

Doctor Letter for Breaking Lease Early

Orchid’s Letter for Breaking Lease Early

Dahlia’s Request for Higher Voucher

Housing

Where Can I Find a Case Worker or Advocate to Help Me With Housing?

Letter if Housing Agency Did Not Exclude Your Pandemic Unemployment Pay

Letter if Your Income Lowers and Your Housing Worker Refuses to Lower Rent

Sample Letter to Exclude Income from a Caregiver of Someone with Developmental Disabilities (HUD & Section 8)

ART

Amazing artwork on this page by Robin Mead and Elizabeth D’Angelo

Strengthening Care Delivery for Persons with Disabilities who are LGBTQ+

Registration: For Complete Post, click here…

Everyone has visible and invisible identities. From being a person with mental health and substance use care needs to being someone who has a disability and is LGBTQ+, the intersections that shape a person can be limitless and may only be known when disclosed by that individual.

Organizations and providers across the country are working to ensure they are providing LGBTQ-affirming, anti-ableist care for persons with mental health and substance use challenges but navigating the complexities of lived experiences as well as the diverse array of identities can be overwhelming for both providers and their clients.

Join the National Council to hear from individuals with lived experience at the intersection of disability and LGBTQ+ justice in health care as well as a state leader working to strengthen health outcomes and reduce stigma. This webinar seeks to provide insights on establishing affirming relationships among individuals, within communities, and between clients and providers are key to achieve affirming, inclusive care for these populations.

Time: Oct 14, 2021 04:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Insurance companies hasten collapse of Michigan care industry for people hurt in car accidents by not paying

By Tracy Samilton: For Complete Post, click here…

ngd-This was always the point of the “improvements” in Michigan auto insurance. Once the disabled people are dead, the insurance companies will go after the trust fund…

Michigan’s nationally renowned system of care for people hurt in car accidents is breaking down. Former and newly injured people are being denied care in the chaos unleashed by the state’s new auto insurance law.

Care providers across the state say insurance companies are going far beyond what the law explicitly says they can do, and routinely delaying or denying payment for all kinds of post-accident care.

The situation is gravely jeopardizing the care, health and even lives of people like Dan Hawkins, who survived a catastrophic car crash in 1996. He’s paralyzed from the upper chest down.

“I can just sit in bed, but I need another human being to roll me, dress me, transfer me to a Hoyer lift, help me with food, drinking….” said Hawkins.

After the accident, Hawkins’ insurance company, Farmers Insurance, paid for 24/7 home care. But the new auto insurance law lets insurers like Farmers cut payments for home care below the cost of providing the care, as of July 1.

John Beattie said in reality, it’s even worse than that. He’s director of Inspire Home Care, the company that provides Hawkins’ home care aides.

In Hawkins’ case, “we have not been paid one cent for services since July 1.”

Beattie said the fee cuts in the new law will force him to stop providing care for all 38 of his company’s severely injured auto accident survivors. But insurance companies are speeding that day up by paying nothing at all.

The message Hawkins says this send to him, and other people needing care? “You don’t matter anymore.”

Across Michigan, at least 700 injured people have already lost care, according to the Michigan Brain Injury Provider Council.

Like the ventilator-dependent patient who had to be dropped off at a local hospital because his home care agency closed, and he had nowhere else to go.

A severely injured single mom whose children are trying to care for her when she lost her aides.

A severely injured three-year-old boy whose extended family now has to sign up for shifts to care for him.

Denise Sokolowski is Vice President of All About You Home Care. She said many insurance companies are going beyond what the new law explicitly allows, and slashing payments below cost for everything.

“Feeding tube supplies. That’s their food that goes down their feeding tube. Gloves. Needles. Medications that are necessary,” said Sokolowski.

As schools reopen, trauma-informed teaching might be more important than ever

By Sarah Lindenfeld Hall: For Complete Post, click here…

Building relationships can help kids thrive in tough times.

Over the course of the 2018-19 school year, seven parents of students at McGee’s Crossroads Elementary School, which straddles farms and suburbs near Raleigh, N.C., died. Students were struggling with the trauma of losing a parent, in several cases violently. Their classmates didn’t always know how to support them, and in some cases taunted them over these experiences. The principal overheard one say, “I’m glad your dad died.”

During the next school year, the school took a new approach to help kids who might be acting out because of stress and trauma in their own lives. Armed with so-called trauma-informed techniques, school staff focused more on building relationships with students and understanding why they misbehaved. No longer did teachers ask, “What is wrong with you?” when kids acted out, but “What happened to you?” to determine what to do next. Suspensions dropped 52%.

Michigan Developmental Disabilities Institute Podcast: Episode 1: Transitioning to Independent Life

From DDI: For Complete Post, click here…

In this episode, we talk with Elizabeth Janks, Associate Director of Training and Education at MI-DDI, about transitioning young people with disabilities to adulthood and promoting their independence. Elizabeth maps out the steps a parent or caregiver should take to prepare for this life change.

Elizabeth Janks, LMSW

Associate Director for Training and Education at MI-DDI

Email address: e.janks@wayne.edu

Elizabeth has worked at MI-DDI for over 28 years. She is a social worker and educator, and has managed several projects surrounding caregivers of people with developmental disabilities and those that focus on health promotion for people with disabilities. Learn more.

Resources from the Episode

Possibilities Podcast Series

Like polio, the long-term impact of COVID will be measured in disability

By Ainsley Hawthorn: For Complete Post, click here…

ngd- I have a number of friends and know of many other people who contracted polio and who recovered, seeing some symptoms reappear after decades, presumable because there was a kind of aging of the nerves. That is at least a possibility with Covid-19.

Practically everyone, from public health officials to political pundits to social media commentators, has framed the threat of COVID-19 in terms of its mortality rate.

But COVID is going to injure many more people than it kills.

For every one person who dies of the disease, 14 people have health problems that last months after their initial infection, including chest pain, abdominal pain and shortness of breath. One in five patients hospitalized with COVID goes home with a new disability.

The loss of life over the past year and half has been staggering, but this pandemic is shaping up leave its greatest mark on survivors, making it much more similar to polio than, say, the Black Death.

Poliomyelitis, more commonly known by its abbreviation polio, has probably existed since ancient times, but it wasn’t responsible for any major epidemics until the 19th century. Canada’s first recorded case was in 1910, when a little girl was admitted to a hospital in Hamilton, Ont., with what appeared to be rabies.

It was only after she died that doctors diagnosed her illness as polio.

The childhood polio survivors of the 1940s and 1950s grew up to be the disability rights advocates of the 1970s and 1980s. They were proponents of independent living and universal design.

They ensured that the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms included people with disabilities as a protected class, and they jump-started the long process of changing society’s perspectives on physical disability and mobility impairment.

BEYOND BRITNEY: ABUSE, EXPLOITATION, AND DEATH

By Heidi Blake and Katie J.M. Baker: For Complete Post, click here…

ngd-This is part 1, there are two other parts with links through the complete post…

THEY CAN ISOLATE YOU: A teenager with cerebral palsy was snatched from the school gates and hidden from his parents.

THEY CAN BLEED YOU DRY: A successful rheumatologist was declared incapacitated after a bout of depression and lost her million-dollar waterfront home.

AND THEY CAN LEAVE YOU TO DIE: A 46-year-old man died under a do-not-resuscitate order that went against the desperate pleas of his wife.

All three nightmares share a common cause: These people had been placed under the care — and control — of legal guardians. America’s guardianship system was designed as a last resort to be used only in the rare and drastic event that someone is totally incapacitated by mental or physical disability. In those cases, conscientious guardians can provide vital support, often in complex and distressing circumstances. But an investigation by BuzzFeed News has found that the system has grown into a vast, lucrative, and poorly regulated industry that has subsumed more than a million people, many of whom insist they are capable of making their own decisions, and placed them at risk of abuse, theft, and even death.

The #FreeBritney movement has drawn international attention to the case of Britney Spears, and wrongdoing by individual guardians has surfaced in the past, but our investigation reveals the systemic failings behind these isolated stories.

In local courts across the country — often woefully unfit for the sweeping power they command — guardians, lawyers, and expert witnesses appear frequently before the same judges in an established network of overlapping financial and professional interests. They are often paid from the estate of the person whose freedom is on the line, creating powerful incentives to form guardianships and keep them in place.

“The judge knows the lawyers, the lawyers know each other,” said J. Ronald Denman, a former state prosecutor and Florida lawyer who has contested dozens of guardianships over the past decade. “The amount of abuse is crazy. You’re going against a rigged system.”

Civil rights complaint targets Idaho health care rationing

By Rebecca Boone: For Complete Post, click here…

An advocacy group for older adults has filed a civil rights complaint against Idaho over the state’s “crisis standards of care” guidelines for hospitals that are overwhelmed by patients amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The group Justice in Aging asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday to investigate Idaho’s health care rationing plan — contending it discriminates against older adults and especially older Black and Native American adults by using factors like age in prioritizing which patients may get access to life-saving care.

“Older adults are facing serious risk of discrimination, resulting in death,” because of Idaho’s crisis standards, Justice for Aging attorneys wrote in their complaint letter.

Other states have faced similar complaints in recent months. Since the pandemic began, public health officials in Arizona, Utah and northern Texas have modified their crisis care plans amid complaints from Justice in Aging and other disability rights and civil rights organizations.

Idaho activated crisis standards of care earlier this month after a surge of COVID-19 patients exhausted the resources available in most Idaho hospitals.

Crisis care standards are designed as ethical and legal guidelines for health care rationing, directing scarce resources like intensive care unit beds or ventilators to patients most likely to survive. If there is a shortage of resources, other patients may be treated with less effective methods or, in dire cases, given pain relief and other palliative care.

NEW RESOURCE: Peer to Peer: Bridging the Gap Through Self-Advocacy Curriculum

From End Abuse of People with Disabilities: For Complete Post, click here…

People with developmental and intellectual disabilities are at an increased risk of experiencing abuse. They may turn to a variety of support systems in the aftermath of victimization, but barriers that exist within these support systems often create obstacles to healing. Other people with disabilities can make ideal supports for people with disabilities who have experienced domestic and sexual violence because they can provide support on an equal level with the person who has been hurt.

The Peer to Peer: Bridging the Gap through Self-Advocacy curriculum was designed to provide self-advocates with the information and tools needed to support survivors and to act as a bridge between the survivor and the programs in the community designed to serve them. Through four interactive courses, self-advocates will learn peer support skills and information about domestic violence, sexual assault, and the justice system.

8 online experiences linked to suicide in kids and teens

By Rebecca Ruiz: For Complete Post, click here…

New research points to these painful experiences.

When a child or teenager attempts or dies by suicide, it sets off a desperate search to understand why. While that’s the case with many suicide attempts or deaths regardless of the person’s age, a child’s vulnerability and relative innocence creates a particularly heartbreaking contrast with their feelings of hopelessness.

A new study aims to better understand one set of risk factors for youth: their online experiences. Published Monday in JAMA Open Networkthe study analyzes data collected by Bark, a parental and school monitoring app that tracks a child’s online activity and uses artificial intelligence to detect signs of recent or imminent self-harm or suicidal thinking or behavior. Once the system flags concerning activity, like a Google search for suicide methods or harassing instant messages from a peer, it alerts the child’s caregiver or a school official, if the device being monitored is used for classwork.

(T)he researchers found an association between suicide attempts and self-harm and exposure to the following types of content: cyberbullying, violence, drugs, hate speech, profanity, depression, low-severity self-harm, and sexually suggestive language or media, which could depict graphic acts or abuse. When a student experienced five or more of those risk factors, they were 70 times more likely to have a suicide attempt or self-harm alert.