Retraumatization - Tumblr Posts

"There's a certain dark irony to it," she says after several long minutes of quiet. Her toes dabble at the water's edge as she gathers herself to continue,

"Like... the nurse said to me 'I am furious on your behalf, for how you were treated' after I told her about that, and she could not connect that precisely the same thing was happening right there then by her very hand. Her voice was shaking! And I had to sit there, using all of the absolutely critical survival skills I learned back then to be as still as I could and generally agreeable because anything less and, well..."

The investigation, opened in October 2020, revealed thousands of incidents of seclusion and restraint in just two and a half school years. Although students with disabilities make up only 10.8% of students enrolled in the district, every single student the district secluded was a student with disabilities, as were 99%—all but one—of the students the district restrained. The district routinely resorted to seclusion and restraint in non-emergency situations instead of using appropriate individualized behavior interventions tailored to individual students’ needs. The investigation found that these practices often intensified students’ distress, with some students engaging in self-harm and showing other signs of trauma while in seclusion.