The Prison Reform Trust work in 2008 suggested that people with learning disabilities in the UK faced ‘personal, systemic and routine’ discrimination from the point of arrest through to release from prison. This Australian study looked at the experience of people in the state of Victoria. The researchers were interested in the experiences and perceptions [read the full story…]
Clozapine is an atypical antipsychotic medication used to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia, most usually used as a treatment of last resort where people have not responded to other anti-psychotic treatments. It has a number of severe side effects including and can also cause the excessive production of saliva and weight gain.. The researchers in [read the full story…]
Men who physically abuse their partners are often treated with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Men sometimes sign up to these treatment programmes voluntarily, but are also sometimes obliged to participate by a court order. CBT can help change behaviour and also break established thinking patterns and beliefs, but is there any reliable evidence that this [read the full story…]
The Ministerial Working Group on Homelessness has published a new report on preventing and tackling homelessness, which builds on the plan that was announced back in July 2011. The new report aims to make sure that every contact local agencies make with vulnerable people and families really counts. It brings together government commitments to: Tackle troubled [read the full story…]
The notion of the therapeutic community emerged in the 1940s and was developed in the UK throughout the subsequent decades. Therapeutic communities developed participative approaches to working with people with long term mental illness. Usually residential, they offered a complete therapeutic milieu with therapists and patients living in the same environment and within the same [read the full story…]
Normally, we at the Learning Disabilities Elf like to look at learning disability specific research, but we thought this review of the utility of risk assessment tools was interesting and relevant to people with learning disabilities who come into contact with psychiatric and criminal justice services. Risk assessment research stresses the dynamic nature of predictors [read the full story…]
Risk assessment tools are widely used in psychiatric hospitals and criminal justice systems to help predict violent behaviour and inform sentencing and release decisions. Yet their predictive accuracy remains uncertain and expert opinion is divided, according to a new systematic review published in the BMJ. An international team of researchers led by Seena Fazel from [read the full story…]
A US review in 2009 suggested that the evidence on the rates of sex offending by people with learning disabilities was equivocal at best with some studies reporting an increased likelihood of people with learning disabilities committing sexual offences, with others suggesting the opposite to be the case. There are difficulties in answering the question [read the full story…]
Studies show that over 1.6 million people are killed as a result of violence each year and it is thought that this estimate is considerably less than the actual number who die from assaults. Violence in inpatient hospital settings and emergency departments is the subject of a NICE guideline that is currently being updated. A [read the full story…]
The evidence on the relationship between sexual abuse in childhood of adult sex offenders is mixed, with some studies showing higher rates of childhood sexual abuse in sex offenders and others showing no such relationship exists. The researchers in this study looked at the sexual and physical abuse histories of a number of adults with [read the full story…]
