BIA TALKS ABOUT “AUSTRALIA’S DISABILITY STRATEGY 2021 – 2031”

Highlights

Australia’s Disability Strategy 2021–2031 “is a plan to make life better for people with disability…Building positive community attitudes towards people with disability is central to achieving an inclusive society…However, lack of social and professional acceptance of disability and limited disability literacy remain issues which often create barriers for people with disability.”

Perhaps because of his background in journalism, Brain Injury Australia’s (BIA) Executive Officer Nick Rushworth was invited by the Australian Government’s Department of Social Services to address a forum on how the media can assist with the Strategy’s efforts to build an “inclusive society”.

Here’s a bit of what Nick said: “The following free advice to journalists is about as useful as any other dinosaur’s complaint about asteroids. But here goes nothing.

  • Because they can’t all be seen, not all peoples’ disabilities readily lend themselves to visual media – to television, to print and such.
  • Not all people with a disability are paralympians in the making.
  • Not all people receive their disability as a gift, let alone as their ‘superpower’.
  • Not all people fall in love with their disability.
  • Not all people with a disability fall in love.
  • (And, as someone whose first real job out of school was running holiday programs for children with autism) I feel confident to say not all the boys I met grew into ‘Rain Men’, not all the girls into Greta Thunberg.

My point? Sure, any numbskull can take potshots at any one story about disability. Rather, it’s the media’s newly limited appetite for stories that’s in my sights. And, insofar as those stories reflect “community attitudes”: that people will ordinarily transcend their disability.”

FULL Presentation

There’s no more certain death to an audience’s attention than wasting precious time in talking about what you’re NOT going to talk about. (But) I think, I think, I think the reason I scored this invitation is my combining LONG SERVICE as an advocate, with lived experience of BOTH disability AND journalism: specifically what, IF ANY, part I thought the media could play in – QUOTE “BUILDING POSITIVE COMMUNITY ATTITUDES towards people with disability”. My only qualification, my ONLY qualification for so doing is that, like a lot of journalists – current or former – I watch way too much television, prefer ALMOST ANY radio over silence and seek relaxation in front of…my PHONE.

As far as media DEPICTIONS of people with a disability are concerned, all I can say is that I think, I think tastes ARE changing, HAVE changed. While “bad news” remains stock in trade, there seems to be less competition in what I once heard referred to as the “misery olympics” of disability – media seeking to best their opposition with tales of people with a disability in ever greater hardship. The CURRENT craving, borrowed from HEALTH reporting perhaps, is for narratives about “overcoming” disability (a bit like “beating” cancer).

If, if…I’m right you’ve got to remember that journalists – INCREASINGLY? given the explosion in media competition – journalists think of themselves as commercial animals, also: that they SERVE, rather than DRIVE (to ADVERTISERS?) the demands of their audience.

WHICHEVER. It takes two to tango.

It may be the case that, faced with an excess of “bad news”, no journalist wants anyone to choke on their cornflakes or their chateaubriand with depictions of disability that are too much of a…”downer”.

Brain Injury Australia’s constituents – My views

(Though there’s still no time to spare, I need to hit the pause button – on behalf of Brain Injury Australia: to say that what follows ISN’T THE COMPANY’S LINE. It’s mine. But because I’m here on Brain Injury Australia’s dime, I feel duty-bound to beat the drum for the over 700,000 Australians, living with this ACQUIRED – rather than CONGENITAL- DEVELOPMENTAL – disability. And what’s often an INVISIBLE disability. Around 2 in every 5 people make a good PHYSICAL recovery from severe brain injury.)

Limited appetite for stories other than people will ordinarily transcend their disability

Given what I’ve just said, the following free advice to journalists is about as useful as any other dinosaur’s complaint about asteroids. But here goes nothing:

  1. Because they can’t all be seen, not all peoples’ disabilities readily lend themselves to visual media; to television, to print.
  2. Not all people with a disability are paralympians in the making.
  3. Not all people receive their disability as a gift, let alone as their “superpower”.
  4. Not all people fall in love with their disability.
  5. Not all people with a disability fall in love.
  6. (And, as someone whose first real job out of school was running holiday programs for children with autism) I feel confident to say not all the boys grew into “Rain Men”, not all the girls into Greta Thurnberg.

My point? Sure, any numbskull can take potshots at any one story of disability. Rather, it’s the media’s newly limited appetite for stories that’s in my sights. And, insofar as those stories reflect “community attitudes”? That people will ordinarily transcend their disability.

If, if, if I’m right, that still doesn’t make me anywhere near as nervous as a new, what, MERCANTILE TROPE in the way that GOVERNMENTS talk about people with a disability – specifically in response to panics about QUOTE “cost blow-outs” in the National Disability Insurance Scheme – that people with a disability should be seen, INSTEAD, as “INVESTMENTS”. In the context of INDIVIDUALISED funding, that’s a hair’s breadth away from communities – communities of taxpayers – looking for a RETURN on EACH OF THEIR INVESTMENTS, PAY-OFFS for each TRANSACTION.

Problems with the second anniversaries

Instead – FINALLY, instead – I’d much rather talk, AND WITH HER PERMISSION, about one of Brain Injury Australia’s constituents. (Brain Injury Australia fields around 200 inquiries – by phone or email – each year.)

She contacted Brain Injury Australia last month because…HER horse had…fallen on her head. Certainly, a severe brain injury. And a non- compensable one. But she’d been able to afford her own rehabilitation specialist, someone senior, experienced in brain injury, someone you’d imagine would be up on the latest research, someone well-acquainted with brain injury as a disability that often occurs in the prime of life, precisely at that point of entry into ADULT life and everything that promises – as was the case with this YOUNG woman – and given both his expertise AND experience, someone REFLEXLY able, you’d imagine, to transplant himself, in imagination, into the life circumstances of a person trying to imagine what it would be like to come to terms with their RECOVERY COMING TO AN END, let alone the INJURY itself and, thus, someone to whom such experience had taught the light touch, the HUMAN, the HUMANE touch with such a…“patient”.

When asked what KIND OF RECOVERY she could expect, HOW LONG IT WOULD LAST – common enough questions, you’d figure – he told her that she could QUOTE “bake a cake” for the second anniversary of her injury and the way she was THAT DAY would be the way she would remain for the rest of her life.

I should pause here, again, to state the bleeding obvious. I didn’t witness the exchange. Perhaps few groups of people understand better than you the vagaries of memory: that it ordinarily plays tricks; that post-traumatic memory positively bedevils; and to never underestimate the memory-distorting potential of early-stage grief. But I’ve heard often enough about patients and family members being PRESCRIBED the MYTH that recovery from severe brain injury lasts just “two years” that the truth of such experiences takes on a, what, iterative quality. And look, chances are the cake-baking advice came with, what, a bit more HAIR on it than she remembers. And, given the context, can anyone really make misinterpretation-proof, as it were, what for the clinician counts as no more than an opinion informed by experience, by what he read somewhere, sometime.

Well, no.

But it’s been my repeat experience that statements – such as the cake- baking one – are hastily stored away by patients, their families, taken out regularly, a…MILLSTONE dusted off, re-examined, held up to the light of recovery and recovery measured against it – in the hope they’re proven wrong, or in dread, right.

However it was presented, I have so many problems with the second anniversary cake it’s hard to know where to start.

FIRST, it’s wrong. From what I hope is something a little better than the UNCRITICAL OSMOSIS of what I’ve read of the latest research, recovery from brain injury – in some shape or form – can continue beyond 2 years post-injury; for 5 years, for 10 years or more.

SECOND, you want to learn the first rule you’d know if you’d ever spent a day in your life in the company of people recovering from ACQUIRED disability? Prepare to be surprised: that the very nature of bell curves is they comprise BOTH normal distributions and outliers.

THIRD, and this comes at how crucial hope – REALISTIC hope – is in the recovery from, and adaptation to, brain injury, why would anyone – their imagination bypassed, or otherwise – CONSIDER SAYING SUCH A THING AT ALL, even out of the most pressing need to inject realism into a patient’s prospects for recovery, or even – and I’m bending over backwards here, I know – as some kind of PERVERSE REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY, that the patient will somehow, with a drop-dead date threatening, work even harder on their rehabilitation with the recovery time they have to spend.

Community attitudes

Just two quick points, to end. There’s no more certain death to an advocate’s welcome than to bite the hand that feeds, attack the brief they’ve been handed. But I’m just unconvinced that a government- auspiced ANYTHING can budge the needle on something as deep and wide as “COMMUNITY ATTITUDES”. Take this rehabilitation specialist, for example. I’d bet no amount of DISABILITY attitude adjustment, let alone CONTINUING MEDICAL EDUCATION, would cancel his licence to treat like an unfeeling arsehole. And if so, what HOPE is there for the rest of…US. Besides, recent government TILTS at “community attitudes” don’t hold out much hope. Who could – WHO WILL EVER BE ABLE TO – forget the “Respect Matters” campaign to inform children about sexual consent. Using…milkshakes.

But, if governments still believe they’ve got the horses for “BUILDING POSITIVE COMMUNITY ATTITUDES towards people with disability” any “building” – AND HOW IT’S MEASURED – has to aim to be at least as WIDE as it is HIGH. Brain Injury Australia – like all?, most? other Disability Representative Organisations – signed on to/ drunk the Kool- Aid for “the social model” of disability; that whatever stands in the way of the full participation of people with disabilities is SOCIALLY CREATED, to be met by SOCIAL ACTION. But any and all ACTION needs also to be informed by those places of friction between society and the SPECIFICS OF INDIVIDUAL DISABILITIES.

With the MEDIA’S narrowing appetite, described earlier, top of mind…for GOVERNMENTS who intend staying true to their vows to DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION, then disability TYPE – TYPE not DIAGNOSIS – also matters. As to which, and how many, types will feature in the fight against attitudinal barriers I’ll leave that to bigger brains and fatter paychecks to figure out.

I hope that made sense. Thank you.

Nick Rushworth
EO Brain Injury Australia