The latest annual LeDeR report covering 2018-2020 gives what Prof Chris Hatton of Manchester Met Uni describes as “comprehensive, and exceedingly grim” statistics on the deaths of people with learning disabilities. In his twitter thread, Chris describes the shockingly high proportions of people who died who were being given anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and combinations of powerful drugs of those kinds. Anyone who has worked with people with learning disabilities in health or social care services, will recognise the routine way in which people who have at some point been described as ‘challenging’, ‘complex’ or having ‘behavioural difficulties’ end up on cocktails of powerful drugs, and then more drugs for the side-effects of those drugs (an average of over 6 drugs per person for those who died according to LeDeR). This often goes on for years or decades, with no obvious sense of what the drugs are currently doing for the person, or what would lead to doses being reduced.
Ethnicity, gender and type of disability label all have a bearing on how likely you are to be prescribed various kinds of psycho-active drugs. These statistics of course hide the individual people and lives they analyse, and the Bristol University team who produce the report make a point of starting each annual report with a few stories, like Angela’s:
Angela was funny and had a good sense of humour. She could say a few words and knew a little Makaton. Angela used to enjoy lots of activities including swimming, climbing, bowling and walking but she was less active as she got older. She liked to visit garden centres and listen to classical music.
As we know, “There was a significant increase in the number of deaths at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic from March – May 2020.” This fact raises many unanswered questions about the extent to which people with learning disabilities were protected and well cared for during the pandemic, and their vital services given all of the safety equipment, support, testing and access to vaccinations which they should have been at an early enough stage. We know that some, perhaps many people with learning disabilities, were wrongly given ‘do not resuscitate’ notices by doctors who believed that they were justified by their disability. The LeDeR report found that 3/4 of those who died had a ‘DNACPR’ notice, with factors such as the person living in a service rather than at home making a big difference to the chances they had one. 6% (up from 4%) of notices for those who died were demonstrably wrong; these will not include incorrect notices put upon people who did not then die.
But it is the correlation between extremely high medication and deaths which Prof Hatton draws out which has been haunting me. As Chris puts it, “Everyone knows this level of medicating people is wrong and dangerous. And it continues.” As NHS England puts it, these drugs, if wrongly administered, can cause not just long term health conditions (such as those associated with weight gain caused by drugs) but other ‘serious’ health problems, yet “every day about 30,000 to 35,000 adults with a learning disability are taking psychotropic medicines, when they do not have the health conditions the medicines are for. Children and young people are also prescribed them.”
The number of things that ‘everyone knows’ are wrong, harmful or downright dangerous, which the NHS, social care systems, and learning disability services and their commissioners carry on doing anyway is a long one. I have argued before that as a public service sector, we have become adept at blaming people who use services for the things we knowingly do wrong: they are problematic, challenging, complex, and we are doing the best we can with limited resources. We are fluent in the language of risk and risk management, but wilfully blind to some of the most important risks (in my book I argue that when we say an organisation is risk averse, we usually mean it’s averse to some risks but stunningly complacent about the risks which matter most to people themselves).
But the implication of the facts set out by LeDeR are that the medicalisation of learning disability and the resulting over-medication of people who if they didn’t have learning disabilities would be treated very differently, could not just be harming, but in some cases, killing people. The NHS and government need to be able to answer that question with certainty, and if it is the case, the response to it cannot just be another ‘improvement’ programme.
Escaping the invisible asylum 