Is it OK not to be OK, as ye olde aphorism once said? While we consider the flurry of U-turns by the current Labour government, perhaps you can spare a thought for those caught by the shortsighted changes to the Mental Health Act.
In the closing days of 2025, the act was amended, to certify that autism and learning disabilities were not mental health conditions. A manifesto commitment, this was ostensibly presented as a “win” for campaigning groups such as Rightful Lives & Stolen Lives, as the legislation previously allowed people to be held in psychiatric hospitals, when neither condition is medically evidenced as a mental illness.
Thousands remained and are still unlawfully locked up for decades in inappropriate settings, given that care in the community is not available. The NHS estimated late last year that around 40% of such individuals did not need to be held in detention. Stories of abuse, overmedication, restraint, and other degrading violations were everywhere. The stories were just heartbreaking.
And yet the watered-down changes to the Mental Health Act are nothing to be celebrated. It was just the latest political act in a long line of broken promises and token gestures. The problem is that there is not enough (or in some cases, any) support in the community for autistic and learning-disabled people, due to a lack of funding. That’s why hospitals become the de facto solution.
Where else can you go, otherwise? Concerns have since been raised, with these changes, that the overwhelmed prison system will be the next place.
And how dare the government claim this as any kind of political victory? The UN even wrote to the government, concerned that this legislation would breach the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. That is beyond shameful.
I spent the last year travelling around the UK interviewing people and documenting cases of failures in care, often under the Mental Health Act, for my next book. Almost 100 people told me their story in the hope that no one else would have to experience what they had been through.
I think of the story of “the Eye Gouger”, which broke last year, about a woman who had been in an institution for 50 years because no care placement could be found for her. No one even bothered to check if she had a name. The “Eye Gouger” label resulted from an incident of distress that had been inflated beyond any evidential means.
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The ultimate means to dehumanise a person is to deny them a name.
What happens to the people left behind by token political gestures? Politicians need to care, now, more than ever before. We have been banging at the doors of power for decades, asking to be able to live and love just like anyone else. The Labour Party would have thrown to the wolves the same groups of people it now claims to care about, had the Welfare Reform bill passed last year.
Contrary to Kemi Badenoch’s soundbites, these are not behavioural issues, nor can they be corrected by punishment. We now have a review into the “over-diagnosis” of SEND disabilities, as if that is going to help in any way. And yet, when MPs collected basic ideas as to how to change the lives of the least-employed disability group, the parliamentary call for evidence was all but ignored.
Europe leads the way, because there is always a better way. In an investigation for Tortoise Media, Ian Birrell pointed out that Italy had closed its psychiatric hospitals. In 2015 it shut all its forensic hospitals and chose an alternative approach for those deemed dangerous. People can live in the community! And it is far less costly! And far less subject to the rip-off sums charged to the taxpayer for abusive, sub-standard care. Who wouldn’t want that?
For too long, autistic and learning-disabled individuals have had to advocate for themselves, alone, in an attempt to change our society. The time to care, and the time to act, is now.
Lydia Wilkins is a freelance journalist and editor who specialises in disability and social inequality issues
