Where were you?
Today the Guardian published a long article on the late Lucy Glennon, who wrote for the paper, most memorably about her condition (epidermolysis bullosa or EB), but also about food and about the effects...
Category: Disability
LB on Newsnight while BBC plugs Southern Health unit
So, last night Newsnight did a feature (34min in) on the ongoing ‘effort’ to get people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour out of assessment and treatment units (ATUs), more than two years after...
Thomas Rawnsley (1994-2015): abuse, separation, unexplained injuries … heart attack
Updated 5th February Yesterday I learned that a young man with both autism and Down's syndrome whose family were fighting to get him out of a 'specialist' hospital back to his family in Bradford...
Walking into Trouble: How ‘shared space’ shuts blind people out
Some friends drew my attention to the above video, which is about how the ludicrous "shared space" fad (in which 'street furniture' is ripped out, pavements and roads levelled, and surfaces smoothed out to...
Quality, not quantity
On Thursday the inquest into the death of Nico Reed, who died in a Southern Health supported living unit in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, returned a narrative verdict which stated that his death was the result...
What’s missing from Bubb’s tepid report
This week the long-awaited report by Sir Stephen Bubb into the care of people with learning disabilities and autism following the scandal of Winterbourne View in 2011 was published. Titled "Winterbourne View: Time for...
Are we really much better than the Greeks?
Last Friday there was a story on the BBC website on a state home for both children and adults with learning disabilities in Greece, in which some of the inmates, who have conditions including...
Claire Dyer is free
Today Claire Dyer and her family found out that she had been released from her sectioning under the Mental Health Act, and will not have to return to the medium-secure unit to which she...
Would Braille have thrived in inclusive education?
The other day I had a brief tweet discussion with Liz Ball, campaigns involvement officer with Sense, the British deafblind charity, about whether Braille would have become established as the major means of written...
Ice buckets and cruelty
I'm sure everyone has heard of the "ice-bucket challenge", in which someone is filmed having a bucket of freezing water poured over their head in response to donations to a charity, usually one dedicated...
Claire Dyer and the LB Bill
On Friday 1st August, Claire Dyer's family lost their legal bid to stop her being transferred from an assessment and treatment unit in Swansea, where her family live, to a medium-secure unit near Brighton,...
Claire Dyer: Transfer postponed!
Update 30th July, 14:13: See this BBC news report – this may be on TV later, especially in Wales. Update 14:55: There is to be a court hearing this Friday; Claire will not be...
Online friends, suicide and threats thereof
Recently, two people I know (or knew) on Twitter posted threats to kill themselves. One of them is a woman who has bipolar disorder and has been in hospital on several occasions recently; the...
Claire threatened with secure unit transfer again
Last January I wrote about Claire Dyer, a young autistic woman in Swansea who was at the time being threatened with transfer to a secure hospital in Northampton. Then as now, she was living...
McDougalls' children removed yet again
Mark and Kerry McDougall, the Scottish couple who fled to Ireland in 2009 to avoid the social services in Fife, Scotland, taking her then unborn son into care at birth (on the grounds that...
Ayn van Dyk is coming home at last
On Tuesday Amie van Dyk, mother of Ayn van Dyk who was seized from her home in Canada by social services after briefly wandering from her father’s home in June 2011 (see previous posts),...
Free speech
The last couple of weeks a few things have made me seriously consider the state of free speech in the UK. One was that a man (Michael Abberton, right) who had posted some innocuous...
Thalidomide: David Mason is no hero
Last Thursday there was a BBC documentary about thalidomide, the drug used to suppress sickness in pregnant women which was responsible for serious birth defects in the children of the women who took it....
Dudes
This post is part of Blogging Against Disablism Day 2014. Recently a fashion has emerged of referring to people with learning disabilities, particularly autism, as dudes. This fashion has emerged out of the Justice...
Why is T-Mobile censoring disability blogs?
I regularly read a blog, Blogging Astrid, by an autistic woman in the Netherlands who has been blogging about her life since her teens, but since 2007 it has been about her life in...