My discussions with lawyers--many who turned me down felt moral obligation to give me advice. But they unwittingly made clear bthat mental patients are considered inferior creatures> EXCERPT I called lawyer after lawyer. Most curtly told me the case was too difficult. In New Jersey in a state mental hospital–-several lawyers told me-- it is not sufficient to prove the hospital was negligent. I had spoken to one lawyer, Abbot Brown, who said when he read my FB account --which I sent him-- he gasped out loud. “This should not happen to anyone.” He has a social conscience. He spent a day thinking about it and then wrote me that he had instructed his partner who specialized in personal injury law to “begin the representation of Gloria and investigation.” But the partner was more wary--–the obstacles are too great...... In fact one lawyer bluntly told me that: He said that most juries would consider the quality of life Gloria would have living in a psychiatric institution for the rest of her life so low had she not been blinded that losing her eyesight would not make much of a difference! And thus she was not entitled to much compensation for the loss of her eyes. It just goes to show that mental patients are considered inferior beings. Gloria valued her sight as much as anyone, and although the halfway house she lived in left a lot to be desired—blame that also on New Jersey—Gloria cherished her sight, cherished the weekends she spent with Jeff, the shopping they did together, the movies they went to together. What right does any person have to say Gloria’s eyesight is of less value than that of any “normal” human being? This is the kind of reasoning that justified the “euthanasia” of the “mentally ill” by German psychiatrists before the holocaust. Or of the Tuskegee experiment in which young black men were allowed by doctors to die from syphilis, instead of being cured with penicillin. (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment). The rationale is their lives were of less value.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 11:14:54 +0000
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