iatrogenic harm
Iatrogenic harm is harm caused by the system or intervention meant to help. In schools, it can describe behaviour plans, restraint, isolation, unsupported re-entry, or compliance-based programming that worsens distress while being framed as support. It can also be applied to the health impacts caregivers and advocates suffer during their fight for disabled children.
-
A summer reading list for education leaders
The Canary Collective went upstream this week, and the gloves came off. In “Delay, Distract, and Deny”, Wren takes the old public-health parable about pulling bodies from a river and turns it into an indictment: while families stand waist-deep in the current keeping disabled children afloat, almost no one walks up the bank to ask who…
-
Iatrogenic harm and the parent advocate: how school systems produce disability in the families they fail
The body keeps the account even when the institution refuses to. What the school system produced in the parent who spent years trying to hold it accountable is not caregiver burden — a word that belongs to the person carrying it — but iatrogenic harm: specific, dated, attributable, and fully known to the institutions that…