Content note: This article includes a discussion of murder/filicide and ableism.
February 2021
Jessica Leza, MA, MT-BC
Commercial use, reproduction/copying of content, scraping content, or using this essay for machine learning or AI training is strictly prohibited.
____________________
We mark time by naming days, weeks, and months; then, we mark those days with our cultures by bestowing special titles on one day or another. Sometimes, different cultures claim the same day, bringing to light a nearly indescribable tension that otherwise might have lurked uncomfortably under the surface. March first is one of those days.
March 1: The Disability Day of Mourning
March first is the Disability Day of Mourning. The Disability Day of Mourning began in 2012 as a vigil for George Hodgins, a 22-year-old Autistic man who was shot and killed by his own mother, who then shot herself. As often happens in these cases, the press and public response often sympathized with the murderer, while George was described in derogatory ways – as if his disability made him a burden and a monster. In this climate, other parents were featured in the media advocating for the right to kill their disabled children. The Autism Society released a statement about the “tragic story of Elizabeth Hodgins,” blaming her choice to commit murder on a lack of services, even though it is reported that Elizabeth Hodgins had refused services meant to help her family. Not two weeks later, Patricia Corby murdered her four-year-old autistic son Daniel.
In response, Zoe Gross wrote “Killing Words,” published by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), in which she described these murders as copycat crimes, enabled by the media and a culture that portrays disabled people as justifiable homicides waiting to happen. Gross helped organize a vigil for George, bringing the focus back on the true victim of the violent act. Recognizing that this was not an isolated event but something that occurs dozens and dozens of times each year, the vigil evolved into an annual act of mourning for those lost to filicide. All over the world, the disability community gathers each year to hold candlelight vigils where the victims’ names are read out loud to honor their memory and grieve their loss.
2021 is young, still, but the Disability Day of Mourning website already lists seven names: Joan Wheeler, Michael Montgomery, Chadaporn Khamkeaw, Sonam, Manu Savaliya, Guadalupe Martinez, Ekanthachari, and Teru Inaba. 2020 lists too many names to count: like Thomas Valva, the autistic 8-year-old who was starved and froze to death in an unheated garage in Long Island, or autistic 10-year-old Dylan Freeman, who loved swimming and going to art museums and was drugged and suffocated by his own mother. Or the Harless children, all four siblings age four and under, gassed by their own parents only to have the San Antonio press speculate that their disability caused their parents to commit filicide.
On March 1, 2021, we will once again come together to remember these names, and others. This is a day for reflection on the truth that ableism kills, and it does so nearly every week. It’s a day for deep, wracking sobs, a day to feel the sickness and regret and anger and trauma of grief, a day for discomfort, a day to make space for the pain of those who not only did not survive the violence of this world, but whose spirits were extinguished by the very people they should have been able to trust the most: their own parents and caregivers. I shudder to use the word caregiver in this context. There is nothing caring about murdering your child.
March 1: World Music Therapy Day
And then in 2016 – seemingly springing from another planet entirely – comes the March 1 of World Music Therapy Day. The March 1 of music therapists around the globe coming together to promote and celebrate… ourselves.
The British Association of Music Therapy (BAMT) says that World Music Therapy Day is a day to “celebrate and mark the fantastic work carried out by our members and our colleagues throughout the world.” The day when music therapists focus their energy on telling the whole world how awesome we are. Music therapists take to social media and blogs to post selfies, smiling and holding a guitar, and sharing memes about how music therapists help. We are helping! See how we help?
On March 1, the World Federation for Music Therapy will host a music therapy photo contest. Music therapy student clubs will hold mini conferences. The American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) will “remind you that an estimated 1 million [plus] people received music therapy services in 2018 … way to go music therapists; celebrate your impact!”
The disconnect between these two cultural events occurring in the same temporal space is jarring, to say the least. After the psychologically exhausting experience of mourning disabled people lost to acts of violence at the hands of their own caregivers, indulging in the self-congratulatory self-aggrandizement of professionals feels offensively out-of-touch.
It’s incomprehensible that a profession which claims a special relationship to autism and disability, which elevates itself in large part on the basis of service to autistic and disabled people, would nonetheless take this day, the Disability Day of Mourning, and not only fail to support the disability community in a time of grief but to instead claim that very same day as a day to praise the therapists!
The reality is that a lot of the social capital that accompanies being a therapist comes from ableism. We are praised for taking a career that others might not. We are praised for subjecting ourselves to the presence of disabled people. This is not often said explicitly, but the implicit meaning is clear. And music therapists eat it up. We don’t just eat it up; we write out recipes for it, bake it into a cake, and post it on social media so everyone can see how good we are, how helpful we are. And we smile, and strike a pose with a ukulele, and murmur “oh no, the pleasure is all mine!” And the audience all coos approvingly.
It’s only after the audience has left, after the concurrent session or CMTE has ended, when the smiling faces can be dropped, and a music therapist confides in me that they have experienced their disabled clients being murdered by a parent. Clients. Plural.
Because this problem is not distant. It is not small. It is not insignificant. It cannot be written off as an anomaly, or as something music therapists don’t need to think about. This is not my negative attitude. It’s something that happens in the town I live in. Her name was Leslie Hartman. It’s something that happens in the town you live in. We must say their names.
And I cannot disconnect from that truth. I cannot dissociate and smile and take a selfie with a guitar and post it online and ask everyone to tell me how great a person I am because I provide services for Autistic and disabled people. I cannot stand to make this day about me. I cannot stand to make this day about my profession, a profession so disconnected from disability culture that most music therapists probably didn’t even know a Disability Day of Mourning exists!
March 1 should not be a day to shine a light on music therapists. March 1 should not be a day to shout about being such a good helper, yelling so loud about ourselves as a profession that we don’t even hear the list of names being read. The names of people who did not survive ableism.
Names like George Hodgins.
Daniel Corby.
Joan Wheeler.
Michael Montgomery.
Chadaporn Khamkeaw.
Sonam.
Manu Savaliya.
Guadalupe Martinez.
Ekanthachari.
Teru Inaba.
Names like Thomas Valva,
And Dylan Freeman.
__________________________
Disability Day of Mourning: WWIII Edition
Today is the disability day of mourning, a day to mourn the loss of disabled people who were killed by their caregivers, and the way that society responds to these deaths.
Every year when this date comes around it strikes me in new ways how the way that disability and caregiver murder and the devaluing of disabled lives intersect with the other issues. And this is the crux: the murder of disabled people at the hands of caregivers always reflects our broader society.
When COVID first came around, for example, we could see laid bare the ways that parents declined to protect their children and the elderly, and it showed us how one reason disabled people are killed by caregivers is that, as a society, we do not care for those who need care.
Merely the act of needing, needing support, needing care, needing accommodations- all these needs are what our capitalist society uses to devalue some and valorize others. Need itself is interpreted as weakness. In capitalism, needs detract from the profit margin, and thus they are reviled.
If the mere act of having needs is devalued and reviled by the interests of capital, it is no wonder that if a caregiver kills the disabled person who needs them, society will then villainize the disabled victim and valorize the sympathetically unburdened killer.
Society carries sympathy for a parent who kills a disabled child because that parent has taken action to eliminate the needs that reduce the system’s profitability. Capitalist cultures thrive when the burden of needs is eliminated. And this brings us to the core of the MAHA movement.
The MAHA movement is not about improving the quality of life but about improving the surplus capital available to the elites through eugenic policies that change the US population through social murder (premature deaths caused by social, economic, or political oppression, rather than direct violence).
And here we are today, in the early morning of World War III, where the same institutions that brought us both pandemic denialism and the MAHA movement have now distinguished themselves through acts of terror, using AI to bomb a school full of little children in Iran.
Make no mistake that it is the same underlying values: the eugenics desire to categorize needs as burdens, the eugenics compulsion to minimize and deny the ongoing pandemic, the devaluing of children in a genocide and impulse to justify dropping bombs on their schools as necessary for capital,…
No neatly drawn borders separate these moral atrocities. Capitalism and white supremacy and islamophobia and the human trafficking rings run by pedophile killers, letting our elders die of COVID for the economy so we can “go back to normal”… These fascist impulses intersect in messy ways.
And so today, on the disability day of mourning, we can understand that fighting filicide (the murder of disabled children by their caregivers) is such hard work because the real work we are doing is a fight against capitalist, imperialist white supremacy and the commodification of human lives.
And so on today, more than any day before us, we must set ourselves to the grindstone and remember what Fannie Lou Hamer said:
“Nobody’s free till everyone’s free.”
We must remember what Frederick Douglass said:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
Knowing all that, what do you demand?
__________________________
Postscript, Five Years Later
October 14, 2026
I originally wrote this essay because I was hired by a music-therapist-owned non-profit that branded itself as uplifting Autistic voices – Autistic musicians in particular. When I was hired by this non-profit, I was explicitly told that they aimed to “shake up” the music therapy profession through anti-ableist work.
And so I wrote.
Unfortunately, I did my job so well that I lost my job. Challenging the pride of music therapists through a brief essay that expressed both grief and a reflection on the hypocrisy of our “helping profession” was simply too much for the donors. Much has been written about the way that non-profits exist to profit off a problem, rather than to solve it, and my experience confirmed this critical analysis of the non-profit industrial complex.
Almost immediately, the full brunt of the abled music therapy world came down on me. I was told that some of the major donors to the non-profit were affiliated with the WFMT, and my essay put their funding at risk. I was told I should have notified WFMT about my essay (a blog post, really) before publishing it, to give them time to prepare a formal defense of their lack of connection to disability culture. Comfortable white women from the imperial core weaponized a superficial claim of racial justice to claim that the filicide of disabled people is only a problem in the United States and that the Disability Day of Mourning is exclusive to the US, and thus I was enforcing a white American hegemony by asking a global organization that represents a profession that purportedly serves a majority disabled client base to give a shit about the ways that ableism can be devastatingly lethal. One of these white women posted on Instagram that the music therapy marketing day had a more coordinated use of hashtags than the international vigil for the murdered disabled people.
No cabe duda, of course, the profession that is dominated by privileged white women has a more coordinated hashtag than the people who belong to one of the most marginalized populations across the planet! The lack of attention and care for the issue of caregiver murders of disabled people is exactly the reason I wrote this essay, and it is exactly the reason we have this vigil. If the world already cared about disabled people’s lives enough for this to be a prevalent and popular conversation online, maybe it wouldn’t be a problem!
The lack of global attention to this problem is exactly why it is so important for music therapists to step forward and bring the conversation into mainstream discourse!
This went on for what felt like years. Frankly, as I write this postscript in October of 2026, I feel like I originally wrote this essay a decade ago. Maybe the pandemic has permanently destroyed my sense of time. Maybe the stress of making myself a flashpoint for the ire of an international organization and its membership and fans made time stretch out so that a day feels like a week, a week a month, and the months pile up like the bodies of my disabled brethren who were killed by their own caregivers and the vigil for their lives dismissed by a profession who seems more offended by being referred to as “music ladies” and “musical therapists” than they are by knowing the clients they claim to serve are vulnerable to a form of bigotry so extreme that it can lead to their untimely death at the hands of people they should be most able to trust.
Honestly, something about this broke me.
There is something nearly traumatic about genuinely giving yourself over to the true horror of how the world treats disabled people, refusing to run away from how unspeakably painful it is to acknowledge the murder of children, grandparents, innocent aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, parents, our neighbors – all innocent, killed for the crime of being disabled, then described as a burden while the murderer is valorized as having acted out of love.
I was not assimilated into this broader culture of music therapy and the world that hears of this and then turns away, offended that something is taking the spotlight away from raising awareness for my profession and career identity. Something about seeing the loud, performative defense of the profession against the inconvenient and unwelcome intrusion of an (apparently radical) care for the lives of disabled people broke me.
A music therapy organization, staffed and membered by people who certainly have read some cold-pressed corporate literature about representation and tokenism, reached out to one Autistic advocate who had no connection to music therapy and no knowledge of the context. The organization sought the advocate’s approval to keep a music therapy marketing day on the same day as the Disability Day of Mourning, tokenizing the advocate in their self-defense. One can ask the question: if the music therapy organization was making a reasoned choice that aligns with the image they want to promote, why would the opinion of one Autistic person be so demonstrative and final?
The discourse continued, largely without my participation. I started the fire, and the profession stoked it without ever looking back. The blog was taken down from the website it was originally published on within a week anyway (after first adding disclaimers that the essay didn’t reflect the opinions of the non-profit). Instead, I posted here, on my personal site. I did not apologize to the donors or the global non-profit that took a call for disability justice in action as a personal attack against their professional integrity.
How long did the organization ultimately hold out?
I can’t tell you. I can tell you it feels like it took about two years for the organization to shift their marketing event. I already explained that time hasn’t passed in an even, predictable way over the last five years. Pulling up screenshots, social media posts, and passive-aggressive emails from that time is stressful. I don’t have the stomach for it. Maybe someday I will come back and edit this postscript with a precise timeline. Maybe someone else can help put this together.
The organization hosted a survey prior to the change. Over time, the drama, discourse, and heel-kicking spread the issue much farther than any standard milquetoast “raising awareness” plea typically travels. I was hired for $75/week to write weekly blog posts meant to “shake up” the music therapy profession so that, when the dust settled, we would have moved closer to an anti-ableist future. Looking back, I suppose I was supposed to write as an earnest activist, not an effective one. The unwritten expectation of my position at their nonprofit was that I would produce niche disability content meant to reach a small group already mostly committed to the cause, thus provoking minimal change and preserving the nonprofit’s status as a business with a specific tax structure that exists to shepherd Autistic voices into a defanged silo that allows them to elevate themselves as do-gooders.
(The purpose of a system is what it does).
My use of emotionally charged and directly challenging language broke containment into the larger world of the ableists; it was too much. Lord, think of my reputation. I was warned I would be blacklisted, that I was giving myself a certain “reputation.” I was told all kinds of things over these months, and even more was said about me (without me).
But for all of the negative things said about me, the changes still came. After some time, the music therapy marketing day was moved. Now, on Disability Day of Mourning, you see music therapists posting about the most vulnerable, about how dangerous ableism is, and how it can lead to the death of a child or a grandmother. An increasing number of music therapists take part in a Disability Day of Mourning vigil online or in person, and some music therapy businesses, organizations, student groups, or individuals have participated in the vigil in one way or another.
It is deeply uncomfortable now in 2026, just as uncomfortable as it was in 2021. The difference is that there are now more music therapists who are thinking about how they can use their positions, scraps of power and influence, to talk about ableism and how it can lead to the murder of disabled people by their own caregivers.
Music therapists hold a unique position in the culture. We are healthcare workers; we are degreed professionals with licenses and ethics codes, and our photo on the security badge gives us access to the employee-only spaces in hospitals, schools, and other spaces that hold enormous power over the lives of the general population. At the same time, we are expressive performing artists and musicians, and society gives us more leeway to communicate freely about the world we live in. We have one foot in the wild, untamed world of the arts and rock n roll and punk and the noise of dissent, and the other foot gives us the economic and hegemonic sanctity of the credentialed academic who emerges, a scholar from the ivory tower, to move amongst the peasants to treat them with the goodness and wisdom of our therapeutic music and good nature. This gives us a unique power, and though it can feel like the power of a music therapist is small, Paul and Mark Engler remind us in their book This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the 21st Century that history shows us that people with little to no access to traditional power can and do change the world.
The music therapy profession is not unchanged since I originally wrote this essay in 2021, but more changes are needed to get us to where we need to be.