Background: The emphasis of mental health services has changed to become more recovery focussed and is increasingly looking towards new roles such as peer support as a part of service provision (NHSE, 2019). However, services for people with learning disabilities and mental health difficulties have lagged behind with people with lived experience…

Background: People with learning disabilities are often left behind and ostracised in life, education, employment and in research. This article describes the importance and value that people with learning disabilities can bring when participating in co-production and lived experience research. The article reports on the inequalities and barriers…

Background: Hearing voices groups (HVGs) are effective avenues of support for people who hear voices in the general population yet their application and adaptation for people with learning disabilities who hear voices are scarce. Methods: This paper is an evaluation of a pilot HVG for people with learning disabilities. Five people attended the…

Background: A key aim of public policy has been to move people with a learning disability from segregated settings into ordinary housing, with the expectation that they would become integrated in and accepted by the rest of society. Despite this policy, people with a learning disability have high rates of unemployment, social isolation, mental…

In the UK, the Mental Health Tribunal is a long-established safeguard for patients detained under the Mental Health Act. This gives such patients an effective appeal mechanism to ensure legal protection of their liberty. This act contains sections that allow for civil detention in the case of mental disorder. The right to apply to the tribunal…

A new risk assessment tool, "Assessment of Interpersonal Risk" (AIR), was piloted and evaluated to measure risk factors and compatibility between individuals living in an assessment and treatment unit in one NHS area. The adults with learning disabilities in this unit had severe and enduring mental health problems and/or behaviour that is severely…

Prevalence rates vary considerably regarding the mental health of people with learning disabilities. This variation is a consequence of the assessment methods used to identify such clinical conditions and also different populations studied. The aim of this study was to screen for mental health problems in adults with mild-to-moderate learning…

We aimed to determine the characteristics of people with learning disability who cross-dress or who have gender dysphoria. Using a retrospective review of anonymised data from clinical records about people referred to a specialist service. All 13 participants cross-dressed and 12 were biological males. Only one person was in a core transsexual…

Of the 4000 women and girls in custody in England and Wales, an unknown proportion will have a learning disability. Most research on the plight of offenders or accused persons with a learning disability has focussed on men because women form a small proportion of the prison population, and women with learning disabilities are an even smaller…

Despite the rhetoric of involvement of people with learning disabilities in health care there is a dearth of research which examines the extent to which service users are included in evaluating their own care. This paper describes a study of methods for enabling people with learning disabilities and complex health needs to comment on the…