This history of a large Pennsylvania institution is comprehensive, detailed, and as much a history of Pennsylvania as it is a history of the Harrisburg State Hospital. Like many of these histories, it focuses on the "public face" aspects - the farm life, the construction of the buildings, the architects, the administrators, and its founding as a moral treatment asylum rather than the "other" side of the institutional coin - overcrowding, abuse, exploitation, and the conditions on the back wards.

Almost Home is a highly acclaimed, intimate PBS documentary that takes you inside a year-in-the-life of a nursing home trying to implement culture change. Viewers will follow honest stories of couples, both bonded and divided by disability and dementia; children torn between caring for their parents and caring for their children; nursing assistants doing juggling difficult work at home and at the job; healthy elders fearful of moving to the dreaded nursing home; and a visionary nursing home director committed to transforming his century-old hospital-like institution into a true home. Almost Home DVD provides education and training on the topic of Culture Change in any setting. It's a candid and moving case study.

Krisjana kristianson recommended as having lots of relevence to SRV

his is the extraordinary story of Waddie Welcome, a man born with cerebral palsy on the 4th of July, 1914. For more than 70 years he lived in Savannah, Georgia surrounded by the love and care of his family and friends. No respite care. No institutions. No day-care programs. After his primary caretaker died, he was placed in a nursing home against his wishes. He spent over ten years advocating to get out. This is a story of how a community came together to enable Waddie to move back to the community. Award-winning filmmaker Narcel G. Reedus captures the heartbreak, pain and triumph of a man who refused to be denied.

Norman's famous A Credo for Support, the powerful 5-minute video which offers a series of suggestions for people who care about and support someone with a disability. It prompts viewers to question the common perceptions of disability, professionalism, and support. Designed for use in presentations, in service, staff training, and orientation programs, this poster is a provocative reminder of the immanence of these issues.

Virginia Cunningham finds herself in a state insane asylum...and can't remember how she got there. In flashback, her husband Robert relates their courtship, marriage, and her developing symptoms. The asylum staff are not demonized, but fear, ignorance and regimentation keep Virginia in a state of misery, as pipesmoking Dr. Mark Kik struggles through wheels within wheels to find the root of her problem. Then a relapse plunges Virginia back into the harrowing 'Snake Pit'.

The Kids Are Alright is a documentary about a renegade "Jerry's Kid" who took on the telethon. Mike Ervin was a poster child for Muscular Dystrophy Association in the 1960's. Today he is a disability rights activist who challenges the use of pity to raise money in the MDA's annual Jerry Lewis Labor day telethon.

Tracy Thresher and Larry Bissonnette are two men with autism who have limited speech but a whole lot to say. As young people, both faced lives of isolation, unable to convey their inner intelligence. It was not until adulthood when each learned to communicate by typing—giving them a way to express their thoughts, needs and feelings—that their lives changed dramatically. After more than ten years of advocating for people with autism, they felt it was time to take their message global—to help people with autism in other countries around the world break through the isolation they both knew so well.

Tracy, Larry and their support team, Harvey Lavoy and Pascal Cheng, joined forces with Academy Award®-winning filmmaker, Gerardine Wurzburg, and Producer, Douglas Biklen. “Our goal was to shine a light on autism internationally. Larry and Tracy’s journey allowed us to portray the global face of autism through the personal stories of six men and women throughout the world,” explains Producer and Director Wurzburg. The result is the feature documentary, Wretches and Jabberers: And Stories from the Road, a provocative mixture of advocacy, personal portrait and travel adventure film—seasoned with liberal doses of humor.

Through rare historical and contemporary footage and interviews with more than 160 doctors, attorneys, educators, survivors and experts on the mental health industry and its abuses, this riveting documentary blazes the bright light of truth on the brutal pseudoscience and multi-billion dollar fraud that is psychiatry.

We think you have the right to know the cold, hard facts about psychiatry, its practitioners and the threat they pose to our children. Get the truth—watch this film.

Governments, insurance companies and private individuals pay billions of dollars each year to psychiatrists in pursuit of cures that psychiatrists admit do not exist. Psychiatry's “therapies” have caused millions of deaths.

There's nothing unusual about a college prep boarding school school....unless it's situated in a poor, urban community plagued by bad schools and violent streets. 60 Minutes reports on The Seed School, an inspiring, innovative, high- achieving charter boarding school that's giving kids in Southeast Wahington D.C., a strong education and a path to college.

Sal Khan is a math, science, and history teacher to millions of students, yet none have ever seen his face. Khan is the voice and brains behind Khan Academy, a free online tutoring site that may have gotten your kid out of an algebra bind with its educational how-to videos. Now Khan Academy is going global. Backed by Google, Gates, and other internet powerhouses, Sal Khan wants to change education worldwide. His approach is already being tested in some American schools. Sanjay Gupta reports.

Before his son Samuel was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, photojournalist Dan Habib rarely thought about the inclusion of people with disabilities. Now he thinks about inclusion every day. Shot and produced over four years, Habib’s award-winning documentary film, Including Samuel, chronicles the Habib family’s efforts to include Samuel in every facet of their lives. The film honestly portrays his family’s hopes and struggles as well as the experiences of four other individuals with disabilities and their families. Including Samuel is a highly personal, passionately photographed film that captures the cultural and systemic barriers to inclusion.

In this follow up to the groundbreaking film The New Asylums, FRONTLINE examines what happens to the mentally ill when they leave prison and why they return at such alarming rates. The intimate stories of the released-along with interviews with parole officers, social workers, and psychiatrists-provide a rare look at the lives of the mentally ill as they struggle to stay out of prison and reintegrate into society.

During a time when people who were branded and stigmatized as "feebleminded" and a danger to society were banished to a life of isolation and total segregation, thousands of children and adults were institutionalized in large state operated institutions throughout the country. In the case of New Hampshire, that place was the Laconia State School. This documentary traces the history of the institution from its initial beginnings as the New Hampshire School for the Feebleminded in the early 1900's until its closure in 1991. Using archival footage and current interviews with former residents of the institution, families of former residents, and people who worked at the institution, along with an extensive collection of photos, newspaper articles, and state documents, this documentary examines the social values and cultural ideals of the twentieth century, relative to individuals and families who were labeled "feebleminded," deficient, or disabled in New Hampshire.

Psychotropic drugs. It's the story of big money- drugs that fuels $330 billion psychiatric industry, without a single cure. The cost in human terms is even greater- these drugs now kill an estimated 42,000 people every year. And the death count keeps rising.
Containing more than 175 interviews with lawyers, mental health experts, the families of victims and the survivors themselves, this riveting documentary rips the mask off psychotropic drugging and exposes a brutal but well-entrenched money-making machine.
**NOTE - This film is produced by a group explicitly associated with Scientology**

Air Date: 02/11/07 It's hard to imagine that at this time in America, a mental patient could be chained to a concrete slab by prison guards and left there until he died of thirst. But that's how Timothy Souders, age 21, died in a Michigan prison, and he's not the only one. With 300,000 mentally ill inmates, U.S. prisons have become the new asylums -- a job for which they are ill-prepared. Scott Pelley's investigation opens a grim window on the plight of America's mentally ill inmates.

Volunteers of America is proud to tell the story of our staff members in New Orleans who support people with significant disabilities. In the weeks and months following Katrina, many of our direct support staff provided 24-hour assistance to the consumers they served, often living with them under difficult circumstances, helping them rebuild their lives in the city of New Orleans. Partnering with the University of Wisconsin, focus groups were conducted with these direct support professionals which led to the development of a report and a soon-to-be released video.

Titled "Higher Ground," this magazine-like report and the film highlight the dedication and commitment of this often undervalued workforce. ANCOR, the national trade organization for mental developmental disabilities (MRDD) service providers contributed to the development of the video is working with us to distribute these materials as widely as possible, using them to advocate for better wages, benefits and recognition for this valuable workforce. - See more at: http://www.voa.org/Media-Center/Video-Gallery/Higher-Ground.html#sthash.CHvFg05F...

Better known as Wheelchair Rugby, Murderball is a game created by quadriplegic athletes that is every bit as aggressive as the name would lead one to expect; played with bone-breaking intensity, a typical game of Wheelchair Rugby involves plenty of trash-talking, a few head-on collisions, and the occasional player being thrown from his modified wheelchair. The game has become an official event at the Paralympics, a worldwide competition for handicapped athletes, and the United States and Canada have become fierce rivals in the event. When Joe Soares was dropped from the top-seated American team, he angrily retaliated by signing on as coach for the Canadian team, which he led to an upset victory for Team Canada in the games. In 2004, filmmaker Henry Alex Rubin and journalist Dana Adam Shapiro followed both teams as they traveled to Athens, Greece, for the 2004 Paralympics, documenting the fierce competition between the two teams (especially the Americans, bitterly stung by what they saw as Soares' betrayal). Murderball offers an up-close look at the 2004 Wheelchair Rugby tournament, as well as the personal stories of the athletes who are passionate, driven, and determined to win -- as one of them says, "I'm not here for a hug, I'm here for a medal." Murderball earned an enthusiastic reception in its premier screenings at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Hurry Tomorrow is a compelling look at life inside the locked ward at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California. Granted unprecedented access to the ward, filmmaker Richard Cohen provides a glimpse at mental hospitals in 1974, just before the civil rights movement began to deinstitutionalize these bastions of social control. Cohen skillfully weaves a narrative out of the footage which suggests that the psychiatrist, his staff, and the orderlies are more in need of therapy than their hapless patients, most of whom seem to have broken social rules but pose little danger to themselves or others. The psychiatrist, Dr. Ellerbroek, has both the air of an over-the-hill hippie and a Machiavellian charlatan. His patients languish as they remain in the institution; they are given daily doses of Thorazine or a mix of psychopharmacueticals to keep them quiet; they are tied to their beds to keep them obedient. Dr. Ellerbroek, with obvious relish, plays god with the lives of his inmates, most of whom have a criminal background, keeping them in the hospital long after their initial “voluntary” commitments. He gives them the ultimate catch-22. If his patients want to leave the hospital, in his opinion they are clearly ill; if they want to remain in the hospital, then they can be released. Ellerbroek seems to take a malicious pleasure in his patient’s anguish upon hearing that they cannot go home.