Excerpt from: National Council on Disability (click for full article)
On behalf of the National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent
federal agency, and in response to your recent national call to action, I
write to offer the commitment of our Presidentially-appointed Council
Members and professional staff as a trusted advisor to the
Administration and the newly announced interagency task force in the
wake of the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut.
We agree with you
wholeheartedly that something needs to change. As you identified in your
recent public addresses in the wake of the tragedy, NCD further agrees
that finding solutions to stemming such tragic violence requires
thoughtful examination of multiple policies and systems. While a
disability diagnosis of the perpetrator of the violence in Newtown
remains unconfirmed, media coverage and national dialogue has
increasingly focused on issues related to mental health, often
portraying, intentionally or not, a correlation between certain mental
or developmental disabilities and violence. On the contrary, research
consistently documents that people with disabilities are much more
likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of it.
It is important that the policy proposals considered and advanced by the task force do not, even inadvertently, reinforce stigma and confound existing and future efforts to encourage utilization of mental health services. We encourage you to charge the task force with considering strategies to combat such misinformation in the course of its work and within the Administration’s messaging on the Newtown tragedy more generally.
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