Still the unoffered chair? IAPT services and people with learning disabilities
Over 20 years ago, Mike Bender in a short article called "The unoffered chair: the history of therapeutic disdain towards people with a learning difficulty" documented the almost complete lack of attention paid by professionals towards developing and offering psychological therapies (broadly defined) that would be useful for people with learning disabilities. Then, the idea that people with learning disabilities could experience the same kinds of distress as everyone else, and that alternatives to heavy-duty drugs and restraint were both possible and necessary, seemed radical (and now???). Since then, there has been more work around psychological therapies with people with learning disabilities experiencing various forms of distress, although as recent NICE guidelines reported there is a real inequality in the evidence available concerning how good a range of psychological therapies are for people with learning disabilities. There has also been a move towards trying to ...