THEY DON'T KNOW HOW YOU FEEL
They Get This Training, But They Don't Really Know How You Feel is the title of a collection of transcripts of interviews with the parents of handicapped children....
A number of themes emerged from what the parents had to say. One was that the professionals often gave the impression of not wanting to look at the family's difficulties in coping with a handicapped child. Doctors, for example, were seen as wanting to look only at the purely medical problems. One mother commented: "When they're in hospital, desperately ill, and they know—like spina bifida babies, they know they can operate and most likely save their lives, but I think it's wrong. The medical profession is inclined to do all this—wonderful they've saved another life. But then they don't get the back-lash, we're the ones who have to take them over at home. I think they're hypocrites, all of them."
...Often the parents felt fobbed off with pity they could not use—"you can just see them humouring you; it's no good, sympathy without action."
