Silenced and Dismissed I mean, where do I start? What part of our story is the most shocking, the most distressing? When you thought it could not get much worse, or you held out hope that things would improve, when you were promised things would change but they never did. I am so traumatised. Over the last five years my life, our lives, have disappeared in an endless battle with professionals, a never ending need to fight for my daughter’s life, to be listened to, to be beli

I am here. I am in the room. And people talk as if I am not. I have a learning disability. I do not speak with words. But I understand far more than people think. I know when something is wrong in my body. I know when I am scared. I know when people are talking about me instead of to me. For many years, I was well. I slept. I laughed. I went to concerts. I went on holidays. I had my favourite films. I loved life. I trusted the world around me. Then, in 2020, something changed

There is a quiet cruelty embedded in parts of modern healthcare. It does not announce itself with malice or intent. It arrives through indifference, and professional certainty. It is the moment a medical professional looks at a person with a learning disability in visible distress and decides without investigation, that what they are seeing is “mental health”, “the environment”, “genetic deterioration”. That decision can trap a person in pain for years. In my opinion, I do

Every new shift, every new doctor, arrives carrying it. A fresh opinion. A new theory. A different plan. Nearly every single day. And with it, the unspoken assumption that this time, someone has finally understood. For patients and carers who live with long term illness or disability, hospital admissions are rarely a single event. They are episodes in a much longer story – one that stretches back years and forward indefinitely. Yet, hospitals often treat them as stand-alone p