Shut Away

Availability:
Ebook in EPUB format. Available for immediate download after we receive your order

DRM:
Watermark

Publication Year:
2019

ISBN-13: 9781773101002

<p><b>An explosive book that exposes the abuses of institutionalization.</b></p><p>&#34;How many brothers and sisters do you have?&#34; It was one of the first questions kids asked each other when Catherine McKercher was a child. She never knew how to answer it.</p><p>Three of the McKercher children lived at home. The fourth, her youngest brother, Bill, did not. Bill was born with Down syndrome. When he was two and a half, his parents took him to the Ontario Hospital School in Smiths Falls and left him there. Like thousands of other families, they exiled a child with disabilities from home, family, and community.</p><p>The rupture in her family always troubled McKercher. Following Bill&#39;s death in 1995, and after the sprawling institution where he lived had closed, she applied for a copy of Bill&#39;s resident file. What she found shocked her.</p><p>Drawing on primary documents and extensive interviews, McKercher reconstructs Bill&#39;s story and explores the clinical and public debates about institutionalization: the pressure to &#34;shut away&#34; children with disabilities, the institutions that overlooked and sometimes condoned neglect and abuse, and the people who exposed these failures and championed a different approach.</p>