Aspies For Freedom

Full Version: Civil rights fears over mental health reforms
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Are there ever any empty beds in NHS mental hospitals?

Wasn't the political fiction called "care in the community"  devised precisely to reduce  mental health in-patient facilities to the barest minimum needed to meet demand for those "sectioned" under the mental health acts, with a bit of slack left over for "acute" cases.

And of course people with ASDs would come under the general umbrella of mental health legislation in the UK.

The Blair regime  has always been keen to push mental health enforcement and we shouldn't forget their serious but failed attempt to pass legislation allowing them to lock up persons deemed to have dangerous personality disorders without any crime ever having been committed.

The term "psychopath" is still used generally to imply "sociopath" - and we, of course, are psychopaths, though the term "autistic psychopathy" is seldom heard nowadays.

:roll:

What is likely to happen?  What can we expect?

Whatever accountants decide is the most "cost effective" way of dealing with us that can be made to look respectable.  No matter what  politicians and legislators may say and do in public,  whatever looks to be the  least controversial of the cheapest proposals for dealing with difficult and troublesome persons will prevail.

As a sophisticated and highly cost-effective electronic "tagging" system has already been set up to service the criminal justice industry,  it can only be a matter of time before its use is extended to other potential "client groups"  - like you and me...

Stella Maru
Ms Vetivert asks:

since when are we psychopaths? there's a whole world of difference between someone with autism and a psychopath.

The term "autistic psychopathy" was coined by Kanner (1943) and is still very much in current use in England. See for example the entry for autistic psychopathy in the online GP Notebook here:

http://www.gpnotebook.co.uk/cache/-154140671.htm

The archaic term "psychopath" is widely used in tabloid newspapers and cinema in England when the term "sociopath" would have been more suitable, usually to describe the criminally insane, serial killers and so on.

Stella
ERRATUM

In my post above I mistakenly said that the term "autistic psychopathy" was first used by Kanner in 1943.

In fact it was first used by Asperger in a paper  Das psychisch abnorme Kind (Asperger, 1938)

I  am very sorry for any inconvenience this error may have caused  :oops:

Stella
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