Winterbourne’s Silent Majority

In 1981, I went on placement as a clinical trainee to a large mental handicap hospital in Surrey. I had never encountered people with learning disabilities before, and I was shocked to the core. But I was a qualified general nurse, and I was used to clearing up the messes bodies make when they’re ill [...]

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Joint Congress of the European Association for Mental Health in Intellectual Disability & IASSID Challenging Behaviour & Mental Health SIRG

This is a first-of-its-kind conference; a joint enterprise between the Division of Clinical Psychology (British Psychological Society) and two European specialist learning disability associations. It is hosted by the DCP’s Faculty of Learning disability, which comprises psychologists working with people with learning disabilities, primarily in the NHS but also through local authority and third sector provisions. Sussex Partnership is well [...]

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Imperial College London | Treet TV

Imperial College London | Treet TV. Imagine making a live TV show with a bunch of potentially maverick scientists and a studio audience. Nervous? Good. Now imagine that you’re going to do this in a virtual world with all your presenters and guests represented as avatars and communicating using text, in-world voice, and VOIP. Not [...]

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Specialist, palliative, and rehabilitative care for people with learning disabilities

This is a new publication in the same vein as Mencap’s ‘Death by Indifference’ shocker of a couple of years ago which exposed the scandalous way in which people with learning disabilities are often treated by the NHS. Not generally through malignance or harmful intent but through ignorance and blindness to their difficulties. Something called [...]

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‘Heavy Load’ and the ‘Stay Up Late’ campaign

After posting last week about our staff awards night and reading this week our chief executive’s blog on same, my mind suddenly fell over an uncomfortable memory. It concerned the contrast between the unspoken freedoms that attending this event represented and the infuriating and humiliating constraints that are the more common experience of most people [...]

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Sussex Partnership research conference

This was the Trust’s third R&D conference, a reflection of the key role research now plays in NHS activity and how recent this incorporation has been. Clinicians have always undertaken research and development, whether in response to highly focused problem solving for a specific issue or as a more speculative process out of which something [...]

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Get Involved with Research

This is an experiment. If we post research questions and ideas, would you folks out there, the public, think about them, comment and help us shape our work? Well, let’s give it a go shall we? The first question is about this very thing and it’s on its own page, where it will stay because [...]

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Goodbye friends and family!

∑ Until mid June at any rate! For some reason, all the calls for new research funding bids are open now and have to be submitted in the next few weeks, come Hull, Hell or Halifax! Along with that is the mandatory report on our virtual world study, delayed by Christmas, snow, and participants who [...]

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Michael Gilbert, murdered by the people he lived with

This is the man whose name I could not find. It was on a news item that preceded a programme I had recorded and I am relieved that I did not imagine it but horrified that the details were far worse than I had thought. here are some quotes from the newspaper: ‘Michael Gilbert, 26, [...]

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Vulnerable Victims: a new page to record our shameful society

People with learning disabilities used to be unseen members of our communities, hidden away in institutions with no voice and little contact with their more advantaged neighbours. The changes in philosophy that came with Wolfensberger’s ‘Normalisation’ thrust in the early 1980s led to closure of institutions and the end of inappropriate incarceration for people whose [...]

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