Rehabilitation, Education, and the Integration of Individuals with Severe Brain Injury into Civil Society: Towards an Expanded Rights Agenda in Response to New Insights from Translational Neuroethics and Neuroscience

Abstract

Many minimally conscious patients are segregated in nursing homes, and are without access to rehabilitative technologies that could help them reintegrate into their communities. In this Article, we argue that persons in a minimally conscious state or who have the potential to progress to such a state must be provided rehabilitative services instead of being isolated in custodial care. The right to rehabilitative technologies for the injured brain stems by analogy to the expectation of free public education for children and adolescents, and also by statute under the Americans with Disabilities Act and under Supreme Court jurisprudence, namely the leading deinstitutionalization case, Olmstead v. L.C. ex rel. Zimring.