Supporting People with Learning Difficulties
The West Midlands Region of Cruse held its second Annual Conference in April at the Conference Centre at St Mary's Hospice in Birmingham, and made it a joint event in celebration of the Golden Jubilee with speaker Valerie Sinason, .
Dr Sinason, a child psychotherapist and adult psychoanalyst, is an inspirational speaker and well known for her pioneering work with learning disabled patients.
Reporting on the event, Joyce Rimmer, chair of the region, writes:
"The subject of the Conference was decided on the train coming home from the National Conference in September 2008. Paul Boyden, an NHS psychologist and I were so enthused by Dr Valerie Sinason's lecture at the 2008 Cruse annual conference that we decided to persuade the Regional Committee to invite her as the keynote speaker. Dr Sinason is much in demand but was able to come on April 4th.
"We planned to devote the whole day to 'Supporting People with Learning Disabilities' with workshops to follow Dr Sinason's lecture led psychologists in the South Birmingham PCT's Psychology Service for People with Learning Disabilities. An application was made to Awards for All to help pay for the Conference but it was not until the end of March that we heard that the grant was so generous that we could invite all Cruse volunteers and any other volunteers free.
"Seventy people attended. Debbie Kerslake spoke first about all that Cruse has been doing since it was founded 50 years ago. It is clear from the evaluations that some delegates were unaware of the scope and range of Cruse and wanted to know more.
Spellbinding and informative
"Dr Sinason held us spellbound for an hour - without notes or Powerpoint! Clear communication is crucial in supporting people with learning disabilities. She emphasised that we must remember:
Name the disability. If it is speech then we talk with them about speaking.
Loss - disability might be seen by the disabled person and their family as loss of the person they might have been, but loss happens at every stage of life and people experience loss again in moments at any time and in any place. We all live with loss.
Dependency - learning disability often means having to depend on others to carry out intimate tasks such as a father having to change his daughter's tampax, which might be seen by some as abuse.
Sexuality - people with learning disabilities are not supposed to be sexual. They have to stay little for ever. They often do not have the words to speak about sexual longing or activity. Survivors of incest have a particularly difficult time because they loved the person who abused them and now are told to "find somebody like yourself, not like your mum and dad".
Fear of being murdered - many people with learning disabilities sense that others think they ought not to have been allowed to live and would be better dead. They fear being killed. Their pain and distress needs to be recognised and understood.
"Delegates wrote that Dr Sinason was: outstanding; uplifting; inspiring; thought-provoking; informative; confidence-boosting; very wonderful; brilliant. Others said that it was a wonderful opportunity to hear her and one, who had been nursing people with learning difficulties for many years, commented that the presentation inspired fresh thinking.
"After lunch the workshops were led by Paul Boyden, Mandeep Kaur and Lisa Barber-Lomax who were "excellent, informative, the tools and techniques were very useful, stimulating, easy to grasp....a brilliant learning opportunity. As delegates left many said they had never known a day go so quickly or learned so much."
