Annie in wonderland

    So this is going to be a really interesting post to write as I have covered the topic before but it is a very complex argument to be had around disability and representation in the media. I have the blog post on what is media, but for this post, I am going to narrow it down to   TV, books, and podcasts.   This is so by establishing it as entertainment media we see that people are looking for diverse content but what about the disabled community do we see ourselves represented on screen the answer is not really. We see ourselves presented in a very inaccurate way and at times as a trope being inspiration porn the term that was coined by Stella Young, [i] and it is at times hard for people's mental health as this overcoming and warm and fuzzy, and easy to share content is easy but we don’t see the struggles of disability represented well I know that some dated shows were ahead of their time.   Then we get into the News media that is now inextricably linke...

  This will be a bit of deep dive into what support and care are are, so In a previous post, I talked about active and passive support. There are times when both are appropriate but today I want to focus on active support and what that looks like as it is very different from passive support is when a support worker does things for you instead of with you and this is where things get tricky as it can lead to something called learned helplessness, and learned dependency.     However active support is where the support worker is engaging the clients to build their capacity and skills, or in the case of a higher functioning client to have their skills expanded upon or to not go backward, we see that this often can be the case in some cases where someone goes into a disability service facility. There is an argument to be held around disability and consent and active support and this is where active support becomes support and care so understanding that support is an evolvi...

  This post is one that again I am a bit scared of and yes I am a person who can be scared of my success, in a way, but it is my thoughts on the friendly Jordie’s situation, he is a political YouTuber who has successfully tackled topics that the mainstream media won’t or can’t touch due to funding or other issues such as not being able to give fair and unbiased coverage. I will be the first to say I don’t agree with everything he says but that is where living in a democratic society is a blessing, but we see that actions have consequences and freedom of speech isn’t freedom of consequences.  But now one deserves the consequences of having your home targeted and the mainstream media doxing you, doxing is putting someone else’s private information, on the internet without their express consent with the intent to do them harm, this is a very dark side of the internet culture, and we see that this and cancel culture is on every creator’s mind when we see people taking...

Disclaimer – That these are my own lived experiences and understanding from the research that  I do around the NDIS and health-related topics please be aware that it is informational only and not to be used as a substitute for professional advice or working with a Planner, Disability Advocacy service or talking to your Medical and Allied Health team.    This is an interesting post to write but the NDIS is the National disability insurance scheme and it is a program to improve the lives of disabled people in Australia. However, there are a lot of things that I wasn't aware of in the program that I now wish I was aware of at the time and how to mitigate these risks.  The first one is that Agencies are business and will treat you like a business, some a more person-centred than others but they are a business and will treat you like a number, despite advising to be a person-centred organization, and this is where I have grown to navigate the NDIS, so being able to naviga...

Disclaimer – That these are my own lived experiences and understanding from the research that  I do around the NDIS and health-related topics please be aware that it is informational only and not to be used as a substitute for professional advice or working with a Planner, Disability Advocacy service or talking to your Medical and Allied Health team.   This post and video came from a variety of events happening to me at the same time and one was the realization that I had very little in the way of boundaries around my friendships and I had been taken advantage of due to a person who seems to want to save people from themselves and she gets very frustrated when one of two things happen, She realizes that they can't be cured due to them having a chronic illness and the very definition of chronic illness is long-lasting and persistent.  Or they wake up to what she is doing to them and she has a very nervous energy about her and this nervous energy seems to be something ...

This is a for anyone is a tricky topic and one that we need to avoid but in disability, we can see that they want to protect the person at all costs, and this can have a cost in and of itself and not talking about death being a part of life is a part of that and we see that this is an issue.  This video was made when the announcement was made about the death of HRH Queen Elisabeth the second and we see that this was handled in a very respectful manner it's difficult to see what needs to happen when death is forced into the spotlight.  We see that people need to be aware of how to talk about difficult and challenging topics without triggering emotions in themselves as I have heard heartbreaking stories about people with a disability who have been in care and whose parents have died and they didn't have any concept of death and she asks when her mother is coming back and was kept away from the funeral.  I think it is important to have the person at the funeral as they were ...

so this post is going to look a bit different because it's a very broad topic to do and this is the difference between support and care there is a subtle but fundamental difference between support and care and we see that in support there are several different approaches to support the first being, passive support and this can work for some but not for others and it is suggested that passive support is a much better approach to support and passive support is where a support worker does things for a person and not with the person and this in some cases can be a good thing as the person might not have the capacity to be able to do things for themselves but they are able to watch and learn and this is passive support.    Active support is when a person does things with a support worker and the client is very ready to learn and engage with the support worker, and it is such a subtle but vital difference to know the difference and to know what a support worker can and can't do ...

Disclaimer – That these are my own lived experiences and understanding from the research that  I do around the NDIS and health-related topics please be aware that it is informational only and not to be used as a substitute for professional advice or working with a Planner, Disability Advocacy service or talking to your Medical and Allied Health team.    This is a real interesting topic,  and we see that it's one that we need to be aware of as their is very specific widow of  what is tolerated in breaching someone’s privacy so you need to know firstly How to do it?  Why you would need to do it and How to tell the client that you needed to tell someone that their privacy has been breached.    It is a very specific thing to do as every person has the right to privacy but direct support workers need to be very situationally aware and this is something that I found gets forgotten about is a client’s right to privacy.  However, there is somet...

Disclaimer – That these are my own lived experiences and understanding from the research that  I do around the NDIS and health-related topics please be aware that it is informational only and not to be used as a substitute for professional advice or working with a Planner, Disability Advocacy service or talking to your Medical and Allied Health team.    This is a post that I have been putting off writing due to the fact that I have my own care team,  and the political climate around the NDIS at the moment it seems that everyone has an opinion on it but isn't listening to the ones who have to deal with the amount of paperwork that getting a package and working with providers can entail and I am not saying that every provider is difficult like this but it can happen, this way due to the amount of paperwork that is involved in running a business that serves people with an NDIS package and this is where a duty of care is such a tricky thing due to a  number of fa...