The loser of Sagamihara
Last Monday a former employee of Tsukui Yamayuri-en, a care centre in Sagamihara, Japan broke into the centre during the night and murdered 19 disabled residents. We do not know the names of the...
Category: Disability
Seven Days of Action: a lucky escape
This week the learning disability blogging crowd are putting on Seven Days of Action, with a blog featuring seven stories of young people who have spent time trapped in the ATU (Assessment and Treatment...
Who needs Autism Awareness?
Today is World Autism Awareness Day, an event organised by the United Nations since 2008 to "encourage member states … to take measures to raise awareness about children with autism throughout the world". It's...
Review: Happy Valley, The A Word
Last Tuesday, The A Word started at 9pm on Tuesday, the slot that had been occupied by the second series of Happy Valley, the Yorkshire-based six-part police drama starring Sarah Lancashire as a police...
About the Leicester Mencap picture
Last week, someone posted a picture to the Mencap Facebook page, and the picture has been widely shared on social media and has found its way into the mainstream press. It shows a young...
Another victim of the great British mental health misery-go-round
They first sent me to Windsor, and then to Stoke on Trent In a holding cell in Liverpool three days and nights I spent My solicitor can't find me and my family don't know...
Sympathy for Tania Clarence shows disablist attitudes
In April 2014, Tania Clarence smothered three of her four children, Olivia, Ben and Max, all of whom had spinal muscular atrophy type 2 (SMA2), at the family home in New Malden (see earlier...
About that “only disability in life” meme
You can't be on social media for more than a few weeks at a time, especially in any group with any disability connection whatever, without someone posting that infuriating meme that says "The only...
It’s official: Connor Sparrowhawk died of neglect
Yesterday, the verdict was delivered in the inquest into the death of Connor Sparrowhawk, known as Laughing Boy or LB, in the NHS learning disability unit at Slade House, Oxford, in July 2013. The...
Review: The World’s Worst Place to be Disabled
The World's Worst Place… is a documentary featuring Sophie Morgan, a British model and TV presenter who has been a wheelchair user since being paralysed in a car accident twelve years ago, travelling to...
Fear-free healthcare, revisited
Back in 2012, I published on this site a manifesto of sorts, calling for healthcare in the UK to be free of fear. Back then I was heavily involved in ME activism and three...
Review of Wanted: A Very Personal Assistant
Wanted: A Very Personal Assistant is another part of BBC Three's ongoing season of programmes about disability, Defying the Label. In this two-part series, four young people with mobility impairments of differing severity were...
Review: Don’t Take My Baby
Don’t Take My Baby is an hour-long BBC drama, broadcast on BBC Three (which is likely to be removed from digital TV and only shown online as of next year, something one review says...
Close the units down?
Last Wednesday the BBC's Call You and Yours programme on Radio 4 held a feature on the 'progress' in getting long-term residents out of assessment and treatment units (ATUs), the type of short-term mental...
Review: Kids in Crisis
Kids in Crisis was a programme about children with severe mental health problems in the UK who are being transferred a long way from home, sometimes hundreds of miles, because there is no inpatient...
So, Maisie’s home, but …
Last Sunday I mentioned that there was to be a "tweet storm" in support of the "Get Maisie Home" campaign, which was really about re-opening a children's mental health unit in Hull which was...
On Thomas Rawnsley’s 21st, Maisie’s tweet storm and the Kesgrave abuse inquiry
Today would have been Thomas Rawnsley's 21st birthday. Thomas was a man with Down's syndrome and autism, who was in a succession of care homes and NHS hospital units from 2013 until he died...
Time to bring the air industry down to earth
Yesterday a story started circulating on social media in which an American female Muslim chaplain named Tahera Ahmad, who was travelling on a United Airlines flight (run by a partner, Shuttle America), asked for...
Sometimes it’s the miles. Sometimes it’s the care. Sometimes it’s both.
This post is part of Blogging Against Disablism Day 2015. Phill Wills, the father of Josh Wills, an autistic boy from Cornwall who has been in a hospital unit in Birmingham since 2012 and...
Thomas Rawnsley: funeral today
The funeral of Thomas Rawnsley, the young man with Down’s syndrome and autism who died at the Kingdom House unit in Sheffield earlier this month, where he had been held on a Court of...