Erste Schritte in die Physik für Gehörlose - sonderpaedagoge.de!

Madness and Disabilities: Interview with Geoffrey Reaume
which needs to be acknowledged. Historically, psychiatric patients
throughout the western world built, maintained and cleaned asy-
lums for no pay under the guise of moral therapy. The idea was
that light work and leisure activities could help to regulate and con-
ciliate a troubled mind. The reality was that this work was frequent-
ly very heavy and anything but light - building brick walls was not
an easy task, after all. The history behind these walls reflect the
immense toil that patients in the Toronto Asylum did, both men and
women, for which they were never paid and have generally not
been acknowledged, reflecting the hidden labour history of people
with disabilities. This history has had immense impact on public
policies down to today with very high unemployment rates among
people with disabilities and people with a psychiatric history in par-
ticular which has sought to justify devaluing their work by claiming
it was not reliable or valuable work. Yet, my research on labour at
this former asylum in 19th century Ontario shows just the opposite
- after all, how much more reliable can you get than building brick
walls in what is now a very busy part of Toronto that has lasted in
one case for 148 years and in another case for 120 years. These
walls reflect immense prejudice towards the people who built them
where their labour was never properly compensated, and it also re-
flects much pride in their abilities which many of us in the psychi-
atric survivor community have sought to have recognized in recent
years through wall tours, campaigns for plaques and various public
education efforts. To see more about efforts to preserve this histo-
ry, please see my article in the Disability History Association
newsletter, fall 2006 at the following link:
http://dha.osu.edu/news/fall06/newsfall06.html
Heilpädagogik online: If you look at the category "madness" as a
historian, what can you say about psychiatric disabilities today?
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Heilpädagogik online 04/ 08