ATH 101 Final Project Part B-1 PDF

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Final Project Part B: Milestone One

Olivia McKinley Southern New Hampshire University ATH 101: Introduction to Anthropology Professor Christina Heiner November 15, 2020

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The crisis situation I chose is the Right to Fail situation. In this situation, we learn about how people with mental illnesses and have been institutionalized should be allowed to live on their own in supported housing. After closing most of the state institutions, many mental health patients were put into adult home. In adult homes, many patients were abused and neglected, while others died and went unnoticed for days or weeks at a time. These patients were given the right to live independently via a 2014 federal court order, also in this order they were given the right to fail. We learn about the lack of effort to integrate these people into society. The court proceedings lasted over 11 years. Supported housing was introduced as a way to help those who were considered to be “high functioning”, meaning that they were able to provide themselves with the proper care and continue to take care of their mental stability. In the video, we follow members from FRONTLINE and ProPublica as they investigate some of the cases were people had chosen to move into the supported housing. In supported housing, individuals are promised support and the right to choose how and where they wanted to live. For over 24 of these individuals, they weren’t able to adjust and struggling to make it by. Many of these individuals decided to go back to the adult homes, while others turned to living on the streets. These individuals were given extremely short notice on when and where they were moving, one individual saying that they had five minutes notice. For a good portion of the video, we follow along with the investigation of Nestor Bunch, a schizophrenic man who had no real sense of time. We, first, learn about him through Nora Weinerth who was a friend of his mother’s. In his first apartment, Nestor lived by himself for five months before he admitted himself to a hospital for suicidal thoughts. We learn that he wasn’t getting his checks, meaning that he wasn’t able to buy food. He also didn’t have heat or hot water. After being released from the psychiatric ward, the program decided that he should

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have a roommate. This roommate was Bernard Walker. We learn from Bernard’s brother, Michael, that he didn’t feel that Bernard was capable of fully caring for himself, much less another person. They lived together for a total of 16 days before Bernard was found naked and dead at the bottom of the staircase to the apartment. There was minimal to no support from the agencies that were meant to be running these programs. We find out that the New York Department of Mental Health stated that while many of the people in the program thrived some did not, further going on to say that 39 people returned to the adult homes and 33 had died. I chose this crisis because I suffer from mental illness, I have severe depression and have been institutionalized at a psychiatric hospital for suicidal thoughts and actions. It was extremely difficult for me when I was trying to better myself to tell people my story. It makes me upset that these people were treated so poorly and didn’t receive the care that, not only did they need, but they were, also, promised. This crisis speaks on how flawed our healthcare system is and how little the government cared about these individuals. Watching this video was very difficult, it was hard to watch how these individuals were treated and that many of them didn’t receive the care that the agencies knew that they needed and that they had promised to give them.

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References Thomas Jennings (Writer & Director). (2019, February 26). Right to Fail (Season 2019, Episode 3). In R. Aronson-Rath & D. Fanning (Executive Producers), FRONTLINE. https://www.pbs.org/video/right-to-fail-fz7iaq/...