The heartbreak of sending our disabled child to residential school

August 8, 2012   Carers, disability, learning difficulties

Lacking support, we have no choice but to send our daughter away for schooling, but stories of institutional abuse haunt me

 

The Winterbourne View residential care home in Bristol, where staff were caught on camera abusing patients by a BBC TV investigation.

The horror and revulsion of watching the abuse meted out to patients at the private hospital Winterbourne View was a far more visceral experience for me than for Panorama viewers last year who don’t have a family member with a learning disability. The pain was far deeper because I felt like I was watching my daughter’s future being played in front of me.

Emily is 15 now and her inner torment of the hormonal battle of adolescence, which screams out for her to detach, is coupled with her neurology of autism and learning disability that limits that detachment.

So she suffers her torment as best she can and attempts self-restraint because she’s a person of decency and inherent kindness. She’s just a teenager. How much easier for her if she could tell me to fuck off, but she can’t.

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Review of national arrangements for providing information and advice to carers

August 8, 2012   Carers

Review of national arrangements for providing information and advice to carers

8 August, 2012

The department has today published a review of the service arrangements for providing information and advice to carers.

Access to good information and advice is important in supporting carers to get the best from their own lives and assist them in getting the right help to maintain them in their caring role.

Carers Direct provides an on line information point for carers, as part of NHS Choices, and a telephone advice line through which they can gain access to individual advice.

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Mental health spending falls for first time in 10 years

August 7, 2012   Carers, Depression, mental health, ukcuts

Total government expenditure on services down by £150m, the first reduction since 2001, says Department of Health report

 

 

More than 6 million Britons are estimated to sufer from depression each year.

Spending in real terms on mental health has declined for the first time in a decade, a report for the Department of Health has found.

Although one of the coalition’s first big policy announcements was to declare that mental health ought to have “parity with physical health in the NHS”, investment in mental health for working-age adults dropped by 1%, once inflation is taken into account, to £6.63bn. For the elderly the recorded fall in real terms spending was 3.1% to £2.83bn.

In total, spending on mental health services in England dropped by £150m, the first fall since 2001. However this drop comes after a decade of rising investment: in 2001 just £4.1bn was spent on working-age adults mental health.

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