When Occupational Therapy Forgets What it Knows: Professional Memory, Epistemic Authority, and Repeated Rediscovery
OTs are historically nomadic Occupational therapists are historically nomadic. I don’t mean that we are naturally restless, or that moving from one setting to another is a professional virtue or even a standard. I mean that OT work has repeatedly been built inside systems that change – systems that contract, close, or lose the funding and institutional commitment that made the work possible. The occupational therapist may move on. The service may disappear. The knowledge developed there often has no durable home. I saw this in a community rehabilitation system where I once worked. When I arrived in 1989, the agency had no occupational therapists and had recently been cited by the state for failing to provide skilled services in its day program for adults who had developmental disabilities. I hired a COTA (later became my wife!), added staff, and built OT across adult day habilitation, an outpatient clinic, children’s educational programming, residential services, and consultation t...