Rehabilitating Vocational Rehabilitation

by Dora Raymaker · 2009-01-15 16:00:00 UTC
Topics:

front of building with letters spelling of employm nOne of my academic contacts sent me information about a free webcast from the National Center for the Dissemination of Disability Research "Vocational Rehabilitation Service Models for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders." I'm not sure if anyone else out there is as dorky as me and drooling, "oooo I'm so going to watch that gimmie gimmie," but...

There's actually a funny (sad?) story behind why my contact sent me the webcast information. She and I were sitting in her office talking about something and she mentioned casually (but quite seriously) that vocational rehabilitation was great for everything except actually getting anyone a job. To which I started laughing (crying?) because I'm exactly experiencing that right now. I have a world of good to say about VR as I most definitely would not be here had VR not rescued me from a particularly dangerous situation. But the closer I get to completing the "training" phase of my employment plan and needing to work on the "job" part, the less helpful VR becomes.

My "world of good" is also not the norm. I have friends on the spectrum who also use VR services, and few of them have had anything productive come of it. Often what determines the experience someone has with VR is how well their VR councilor "gets" autism. And unfortunately very few (this is a recurring theme in social services) seem to "get it."

Something I would very much like to see is more engagement by VR directly with the autistic population they serve. A survey at the very least might help VR to better understand the barriers that VR itself might be putting up to helping us get jobs--for example meeting with a client in a noisy office where he cannot make sense of conversation, or not clearly explaining to a client what a job developer is and what her choices for selecting one are (true stories both). Another thing I'd like to see is better education of councilors to understand things like that some of us may be excellent at advanced scientific research and completely incapable of doing janitorial work (that would be me), or that just because some of us can make it through a day in a retail environment doesn't we're not paying a high cost for that with our health.

VR is actually a pretty awesome resource, in theory. I would like to see VR improved so that it becomes an awesome resource in practice as well.

Dora Raymaker
PREVIOUS STORY:
School Is Not Supposed to Hurt: Report on the Use of Seclusion & Restraints
NEXT STORY:
Why I'm Asking Aetna to Cover My Surgery

COMMENTS (14)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.