On Tuesday 21 April 30 academics and clinicians gather in Nottingham to spend three days developing new ways to understand learning disability. Counterpoint is being hosted by Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust in conjunction with the University of Nottingham. People from Australia, USA, the Netherlands and Germany will talk with colleagues from Dundee, Cardiff, Birmingham, Oxford, Leicester, Cambridge, Northumbria, Warwick and, of course, Nottingham.
This roundtable is one of two complementary initiatives aimed at renewing interest in learning disability. The other is a special edition of the Mental Health Review Journal which will be published this summer. This journal reviews policy and practice, and will include contributions from a user group and Nottingham Mencap. These important perspectives will also inform debate at Counterpoint.
Why now? Because contemporary learning disability services are shaped by ideas that are 35 years old. These ideas have been highly effective. They improved housing and support and ensured anti-discrimination legislation was passed - but they have not changed everything. The majority of people with learning disability continue to be fairly isolated, and the burden of care continues to fall largely on parents. There is a common belief that such shortcomings stem from mere failure to implement current policy properly: services must try harder.
Counterpoint assumes that doing more of the same is unlikely to create more change. Instead, this roundtable combines a wide range of disciplines – social work, philosophy, nursing, geography, psychiatry, politics, psychology, education, ethics, and history – in a quest to identify new ideas and examine different possibilities. Anybody curious about the proceedings will be able to access a summary on the Trust’s IMH website. http://www.institutemh.org.uk
