As the parents of a young man with autism and severe learning disabilities, my wife and I watched the recent Panorama exposure of abuse at the private Winterbourne View hospital run by the Castlebeck group near Bristol with distress, horror, and rage.1
Much subsequent commentary has focused on the bullying and brutality experienced by vulnerable people supposedly receiving expert ‘assessment and treatment’ in a facility offering ‘specialist health care and rehabilitation’.2
Much less attention has been given to another revelation of the BBC documentary: that adults with learning difficulties, autism, and other complex needs are being simply ‘warehoused’ in institutions in which they are condemned to lives of idleness, boredom and neglect.
After watching …