This is sort of a blunt book written by a former Miami cop and FBI agent who switched to criminal defense. This section is related to social-work services. It made me think of a friend who's in a group home right now and is facing every one of these things, and it's also an NT talking about things that people on here have been upset about, so maybe a useful rhetorical resourse.
"Getting [social services] sometimes means getting help. Often, however, it means getting your brain fried with drugs and then being dumped into juvenile detention facilities and foster homes.
"Always it means that the state will gather an enormous dossier of information on you. A gigantic file, your 'jacket,' stuffed with medical reports and 'expert' opinions of your neuroses, psychoses, hang-ups, allergies,food preferences, IQ, and personality, will follow you around for life. You’ll be officially certified as damaged goods. You’ll be in the computer, in the system, for life, even if you never actually get arrested. Juvenile criminal records are generally separated from adult records, but in most states prosecutors can get to them. This means that, when you’re on trial years later as an adult, a prosecutor can point out to the judge what a loser you’ve been practically since the day you got the diapers strapped on.
"The social services system and its affiliate, the public schools, are obsessed with definitions of what is normal. This definition is narrowed every day by new studies, new expert opinions, and batteries of ever more subtle psychological tests. Anyone outside the acceptable range of behaviors is, by definition, abnormal and subject to state intervention, supervision, and labeling. I call this the tyranny of normalcy."
The book is free here (and cheap on Amazon): http://www.scribd.com/doc/12487284/arre ... f-yourself
29 Nov 2012, 5:03 pm
