Interestingly enough Colonialist stated yesterday
that he found it incredulous that people, who could turn so violent so quickly,
would be allowed to simply wander the streets.
This, for me anyway, is where the whole world of learning disability gets
very interesting. At the beginning of the
last century people with learning disabilities were placed in one of four
categories, idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons and moral imbeciles. The legal distinction between an idiot and an
imbecile was determined in the Idiots Act of 1886. People like Winston Churchill wanted to
introduce compulsory labour camps for ‘mental defectives’ and serious discussion
about sterilising the feeble minded was all the rage. These days we would call this eugenics.
People were herded into massive Victorian
institutions, usually referred to as lunatic asylums. The treatment of patients was horrific and perhaps
the most accurate description of their treatment would be to refer to the film,
‘One Few Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.’ Not
everyone involved in the care of these people was vicious or uncaring; there
were some, hopefully like me, who felt a certain sense of duty not only to
protect these people but to improve their lives. There were one hundred and twenty ‘lunatic
asylums,’ in the UK where people could be locked up for having sex before marriage
or for being gay. It was in the
seventies when people began to demand that these institutions should close and
the barbaric treatment should cease. Natural
Breaks was one of the companies who sprang up because even though the large
institutions were actually beginning the process of closing down, they were
simply moving their patients into the community where the local authority now
had responsibility and all that happened was that people were now contained in
smaller units.
It was around the seventies when the movement began
to make some progress where it was felt that people had the right to live as
normal a life as possible and that where support was needed it should be
given. Natural Breaks didn’t want to
lose the impact or evidence that these institutions had on the patients. They had a video project where everyone was invited,
as and when they felt like it, to sit in front of a camera and tell a story
about an incident while in hospital. I watched
a few of these videos and was horrified at what people were saying. Tales of staff coming on to a ward in the morning
with half a dozen tooth brushes in a mug and telling the twenty patients to get
up and wash their teeth. Tubs of
clothing being wheeled in and patients actually fighting for some clothing to
wear for that day.
I could see that most of these guys had had a
hard time and deserved a decent life. I
certainly felt that I was in the right place, but as I began to look about me I
could see that not everyone was up to the same standard of understanding and
ability. I realised that once again one
of the subjects we used to discuss in the armed forces had come around again. We always spoke about what we would do if we
could re-join the armed forces for a second time, but this time actually know everything
that we now knew. Would we join the same
trade, would we join at all, what would we do differently? The most interesting answer, I thought, was that
you should become a steward, officially recognised as the trade employing
people with the lowest intelligent quotas in the forces. Stewards were basically waiters. There would be zero competition and promotion
would be at double top speed.
I now found myself in an industry where many
people were academically challenged, to say the least, and I’m talking about
the staff. I was being made to attend various courses, some of which I found embarrassing,
food hygiene, which I remember I completed in the Seaman’s Mission in Bootle where
the female instructor was fawning all over me as she had never had anyone score
one hundred percent before. I’m sure it
was my legs, the other staff attending the course were not impressed as they
now thought they had a smart arse in their midst. One of the courses was how to restrain someone
who is trying to kill you. A useful
course in the field of learning disabilities I can tell you but one which involved
endless discussion about the rights of the person attacking you. I’m sorry, but if it is three o clock in the morning
and someone is coming at you with a claw hammer, intent on taking your head
off, that persons human rights doesn’t come in to it.
We were shown how to restrain someone on a chair,
or on the floor, making sure at all times that we didn’t hurt them. One course actually advocated a type of
martial art which really didn’t go down well at Natural Breaks. Another course I attended was totally freaky.
It was led by a hefty young lady who gave us all a sheet of paper from a flip
chart and asked us to draw our most perfect retreat. I can’t remember what I produced but I do remember
that she drew a small cottage in the middle of some mountains, with a stick
figure on a bicycle in the distance. She
said that she wanted to live in the Scottish Highlands, on her own, and that once
a week a big hairy Scot, in a kilt, would cycle over to her cottage and ‘service’
her. I didn’t find her sentiment strange
just the fact that the course was supposed to be about dealing with violent people.
What she said was that we would all be on edge
and the poor fellow we were with could sense this, so, what we had to do was
think and believe that, ‘I am not here to hurt you. I like you.’
Most of us wondered if this would be possible if someone was swinging a chair
at your head, but this was a much respected course, so we nodded in agreement that
we would follow her directions. I was on
duty straight after that course with the fellow who had been on an eight to one
ratio with the local authority. I would
be on my own with him for eight hours.
There was another member of the team on call should he be needed, but it
was frowned on to use the on call. I
remember walking in to the front room of his house and from the state of the place
could see that he, ‘was on one’. A
technical term describing the frustration the patient might display.
As I stepped in to the room he looked at me and
growled. He was standing in the centre
of the room and as normal had stripped off all his clothes and urinated on
them. I forced myself to think ‘I am not
here to hurt you. I like you.’ I tried to relax but my experience of this fellow
really did have me tense up, I know I’m usually brilliant, but I’m still only
human, just. Truthfully I could not
believe what happened next, the fellow calmed down and came over and gave me a
cuddle. It was fantastic, it was something
we all looked for at the beginning of a shift, not the absolute pleasure of
having a naked man hug you, but it was an indication that he was calm and you
should have an incident free shift. Some
of his behaviour originated from the lunatic asylum where he had been kept for
most of his life. Because of the fight
for clothes every morning he would grab as many garments as he could and put
them on no matter what they looked like.
So we had to control his clothes, if allowed he
would wear every garment that he owned and if he then began to suffer stress he
would rip them all off so that we were constantly on the lookout for clothes for
him. Furniture as well, as quite often
he would smash up the flat where he lived.
But it was his medication that worried me the most. It was pretty strong stuff as you may
imagine, and was very strictly controlled, to a point where we would have to
call a doctor in if we had administered our quota. It was a worry that the pill count would
never add up and everyone was under suspicion. What we discovered really
knocked me for six, One fellow on the
team would give this guy his medication at the beginning of his shift just in
case he may have ‘gone on one.’ Thing is,
he didn’t record it, so we could have killed this poor fellow thinking we were
giving him a prescribed dose of medication when in fact we could have been
giving him an overdose.
So for me the world of learning disabilities opened
up a whole new challenge. A world where
both the patients and the staff needed me, it was a world I really enjoyed
working in and one where I could make a difference and I was in the right place. Natural Breaks, Merseyside, was regarded as
one if not the leading learning disability company in the UK. Like yourselves I often questioned this
claim, how on earth do you gauge one company against another? One day I asked Jan, Jan was the boss of
Natural Breaks and because it was so difficult to get people to work with our
troublesome character, Jan would often take over a shift from you. I think I had completed twenty four hours
solid with our fellow and had had enough.
Jan pulled up in her car and said she was taking him out. I asked how it could be claimed that we were
the best company in the UK and Jan explained that all you had to do was note
how many people from other companies came to see what we did and how we did
it. Another penny fell and as I watched
her put the fellow in her car, I saw what other people must have seen, it was
the attitude. Jan had put the fellow in
the front seat of her car and was telling me that she was having a family barbeque
at her house, which is where she was taking him.
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