sandr059

[Warning: this is one of those over-enthusiastic “I’ve just read this totes amazeballs book” essay-length posts, so if you don’t want to read credulous speculation look away now] Long-suffering Regular readers of this blog will know there are a number of things I worry away at, without getting anywhere near the heart of the matter, such as: how and why agencies supposedly there to support people with learning disabilities and their families do the opposite of this in ways that are so malign; why there are such inequities in access to decent services and support; how and why bureaucratic processes are so regularly ‘weaponised’ against people with learning disabilities and their families with apparent impunity when breaking any regulation or law you care to name. Sometimes you read something at the right time that helps you see things from a different perspective. I’ve just finished reading “The Utopia of Rules” by David Graeber (an anarchist anthropologist, or is it an anthropologist a...

A weird thing happened to me yesterday (and yes, I’m blaming you #justiceforLB). Public health practitioners in North West England get together for an annual event, and to the organisers’ great credit they’d organised yesterday’s event in unconventional ways to get beyond the usual slow torture by powerpoint and do something different. Part of this was to have soapbox sessions, where you can sign up for 3-5 minutes of talking (no powerpoint!) about your ‘public health passion’ in a room full of people followed by 5-10 minutes of discussion. So a month or two ago I signed up for a slot, and I’d put together my usual pitch of shocking/grim statistics and matchingly grim individual experiences about the health, living situations and health service treatment or otherwise of people with learning disabilities (gotta win that misery auction…). As I was last up, I was listening to persuasive, evidence-based and passionately expressed cases being made by public health practitioners about domest...