Okay—I was just checking.
Most disabled people, whatever their disability or impairments, get treated less well than the general population. In most areas of life, people with learning disabilities are even more disadvantaged than our friends and colleagues in the wider disability movement. In healthcare, for instance, we can expect to die 20 years sooner than other people. Educational opportunities are denied to us through a lack of adequate support and through inflexible systems. A greater number of crimes are committed against us, including sexual abuse. Our right to have relationships and start a family is blocked and prevented in all sorts of ways. Most important for today’s consideration of the bill, our right to equal treatment under the law is quite simply denied to us.
The Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 describes us as “mentally disordered”. We described our experience of that in our open letter to all MSPs earlier this year.
The 2003 act defines us as “mentally disordered” because of our
“learning disability, however caused or manifested”,
and it allows us to be detained and treated for our mental disorder, even though we know that there is no treatment or cure for a learning disability. Ours is the only permanent impairment that is defined and dealt with in that way. Because of that, we are routinely denied access to justice, and anyone with a learning disability who commits an offence can simply be diverted away from the criminal justice system and into the health system and forensic services. While that sounds like a good thing, what it means in practice is that we can be detained for many years and restricted in nearly everything that we do, sometimes for the rest of our lives. That is happening to many people with learning disabilities in Scotland at the moment.
The safeguards in the system are mostly controlled by psychiatrists. We accept that some psychiatrists are kind and well-meaning people, but we do not accept that psychiatrists have a monopoly on understanding and managing people with learning disabilities. If a psychiatrist says that someone needs to be detained and restricted and watched and escorted, and that advocacy is not in their best interests, that is pretty much the end of the story. It should not be.
We are asking to be taken out of the 2003 act. We say that most of its provisions do not apply to us and have little or no relevance to us. Our view is that we would benefit from help and support to learn and additional time to learn and remember, rather than treatment for a disability that we will have for all of our lives. In fact, for us, things that are called “treatment” are most often about restrictions on our lives anyway.
The other major assault on our human rights is the way that the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 is being used and applied to us. When the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Bill was drafted and passed, we were pleased about it and supported it. The principles of the 2000 act are sound. It makes it clear that all other, less-restrictive options must be considered and applied before guardianship orders are granted, and that capacity is not an all-or-nothing idea.
However, over the past few years, sheriffs in Scotland have begun citing each other and claiming that, where a person has been found by a psychiatrist to “lack capacity” on the basis of their “mental disorder”, a guardianship becomes the “least-restrictive option” in order to protect the person from claims of “deprivation of liberty”.
We think that it is very scary that Scottish sheriffs claim to be protecting us from deprivation of liberty by removing all our rights to self-determination. We think that it is shocking that firms of solicitors are urging parents to apply for guardianship orders before we reach the age of 16, meaning that we might never experience adult citizen rights in our own country in the 21st century.
We honestly believe that the time has come for a new piece of legislation that is just about people with learning disabilities. We think that it is only right and fair that learning disability is properly defined as an intellectual impairment rather than a mental disorder. With that definition, we would want recognition that additional time to learn and support to understand things, together with easy-read documents and support to make some decisions, are what we need. We need those things to help us take part in our communities, rather than restrictions, detentions and efforts to keep us apart from the world that we want to live in.
Those have not been easy things to say, and some people may feel uncomfortable with what I have said, but those are the facts.