Page 12 - Community Living Magazine 30-3

IDentItY
How JoSH wAS
DISAPPeArIng In PlAIn SIgHt?

BrougHt Home
tHe StrAnge DeAtH oF

leArnIng DISABIlItY IDentItY
Josh’s parents ran a very public campaign demanding,
“Bring Josh home’. It took three years and much heartache

ADultS Simon Jarrett writes: In the summer 2016 issue of

InFAntIlISeD Community Living (29:4) Seán Kelly wrote about the

BY tHe IDeA oF increasing diffculties he is facing as a photographer
working at events involving people with learning
ProteCtIon disabilities (Should staff discourage people from having

their photos taken?). Staff were fnding numerous pretexts,
laura Harris reports from the mostly under the general cover of ‘confdentiality’ or
Hidden Now Heard project in ‘consent’, to prevent people having their photographs
Wales on how a whole host of taken. Is this a genuine concern for privacy and personal
excuses are deployed to deny
people with learning disabilities rights, or part of a more concerning trend which denies
a voice in their own history… people with learning disabilities the right to a public
identity? Does the label of ‘service-user ‘mean that you
encap Cymru’s
M Hidden Now Heard become a person without a story: someone who lives in
project has been working for society, but is not really seen as belonging to it?
over two years researching
and capturing the stories of As humans, we all have an identity and a life story,
Wales’s long-stay hospitals
(or asylums as they used to so what does it mean for our humanity when these are
be called), the last of which denied to us? It seems the problem identifed by Seán
closed in 2006. These hidden is not an isolated one. Here laura Harris and
histories of former patients
with a learning disability, David o’Driscoll talk about the many external obstacles
the staff who worked there they have faced in supporting people with learning
and their relatives have
informed fve museum disabilities simply to tell the story of their own lives.
exhibitions across the
country with three more
scheduled before the end
of the project in 2017. We are often told that a person our society and ensures their
lacks capacity, will get too stories will never be heard.
However there is a stark and upset or doesn’t understand
unavoidable gap in our research what they are saying. In essence the Laura Harris is the project manager
and in the voices cycle of denying of the ‘Hidden Now Heard’ oral
that shape our someone a voice, history project.
understanding of to be heard and
such places; to have his You can follow them on Facebook:
the voices of or her experience https://www.facebook.com/
former patients who called these validated, continues with adults hiddennowheard/
institutions home. infantilised by this idea
of protection.
Fear
It is not for want of trying but time Not everybody will want to misconstrued protection
and time again we are met by similar share their memories of course – results in the continued
responses from relatives and support and many support staff and families silencing of this diverse
staff. There is a strange sense of fear we meet are very supportive – community ensuring
and an absolute desire to ensure the but such misconstrued protection their stories will never
people they support are nothing results in the continued silencing be heard.
but happy. of this diverse community within

10 Vol 30 No 3 | Spring 2017 Community Living www.cl-initiatives.co.uk