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Doctors and nurses are discriminating against people with learning disabilities, a charity said today.

A survey for Mencap found health professionals had witnessed discrimination by their colleagues, with patients suffering a lack of respect and dignity.

Overall 46% of doctors and 37% of nurses said they believed people with learning disabilities received poorer NHS care than other groups.

Almost half of doctors (45%) and a third of nurses (33%) personally witnessed a patient being neglected or suffering a lack of dignity on the NHS, or receiving poor quality care.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/people-with-learning-disabilities-face-nhs-discrimination-2006395.html

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN05UfmIAh4

What is a learning disability? From those with learning disability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfkVA2BKIyY

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Changing attitudes towards Learning Disabilities. What is being done right now?  

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Changing attitudes towards Learning Disabilities. What is being done right now?  

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Mencap is an organisation who have a vision of the world being a place where people with learning disability are valued equally, listened to and included. Currently, Mencap provide resources designed to encourage employers to consider persons with learning disabilities for work placements and paid employment.

Many large organisations and charities in the learning disability field, provide education and messages designed to promote inclusion and more positive attitudes via their websites, leaflets and social media. However, it is likely that these only infrequently reach an audience not already positively inclined towards people with learning disabilities.

Attempts have been made to educate police officers about the needs of people with learning disabilities and shift their attitudes towards them in a positive direction. In the wake of changes to disability hate crime legislation in the UK, in many places police officers are receiving training related to the reporting of and responding to instances of possible disability hate crimes perpetrated against people with learning disabilities.

Attempts have also been reported to increase trainee teachers’ understanding of learning disability, for example through a half-day training events, and a mix of formal teaching and experiential learning which improved teachers’ attitudes to teaching children with learning disabilities within inclusive environments.

http://demos.be/sites/default/files/attitudes_changing_report.pdf

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The contact hypothesis has been described as one of the best ways to improve relations among groups that are experiencing conflict. Gordon W. Allport (1954) is often credited with the development of the contact hypothesis, also known as Intergroup Contact Theory. Allport's theory states that under appropriate conditions interpersonal contact is one of the most effective ways to reduce prejudice between majority and minority group members.

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http://www.autismspectrumexplained.com/stigma--discrimination.html

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Extended Contact through Story Reading in School: Reducing Children's Prejudice toward the Disabled 

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Extended Contact through Story Reading in School: Reducing Children's Prejudice toward the Disabled 

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The aim of this study was to develop and assess a prejudice-reduction intervention for young children based on a relatively recent psychological concept, extended contact. A number of extended contact interventions were tested based on different models of generalized intergroup contact. Results showed that extended contact led to increased positivity toward the disabled, and this was most pronounced in the intergroup-extended contact condition. These findings suggest that extended contact can provide a prejudice-reduction intervention tool that can be used with young children in contexts in which the opportunity for direct contact is low.

Cameron, L. and Rutland, A. (2006). Extended Contact through Story Reading in School: Reducing Children's Prejudice toward the Disabled. Journal of Social Issues, 62(3), pp.469-488. 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2006.00469.x

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Gilmore, L., Campbell, J., & Cuskelly, M. (2003). Developmental expectation, personality stereotypes, and attitudes towards inclusive education: Community and teacher views of down syndrome. International journal of disability, development and education, 50 (1), 65 – 77.
http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.ntu.ac.uk/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=02759ce3-5053-4e71-b60e-1e2ef142957e%40sessionmgr120

Both in schools and communities, negative attitudes or underlying pessimistic views about what people with disabilities are capable of achieving may undermine successful inclusion.
Such views may be based, at least in part, on inaccurate knowledge and misconceptions about particular disabilities.
In a study of 231 trainee teachers attitudes towards the inclusion of children with down syndrome, Wishart and Manning 1996 found that, although most of their sample believed that regular classrooms provided educational, social, and emotional benefits for the child with down syndrome and for other children in their class, they had reservations about having a child with down syndrome in their own classroom
Their views may have been influenced by inaccurate knowledge about the disorder and pessimistic expectations about the developmental outcomes that are likely for a child with down syndrome
Such misconceptions and negative attitudes clearly have the potential to influence the success of inclusive education for children with down syndrome, particularly if they continue to be evident in the views of more experienced teachers

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“When I am able to get people to understand me, my view of life is positive, but when I am battling against the prejudice I feel very low. This feeling comes from the powerlessness to change my situation in which I find myself…In formal situations this is not a major problem, but in informal ones it is a crushing one.” (a 31-year-old woman with Asperger syndrome).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2004.06.013

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Stereotypes and autism - the medias  in enhancing stereotypes about autism 

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Stereotypes and autism - the medias  in enhancing stereotypes about autism 

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Draaisma, D. (2009). Stereotypes of autism. Phiolosphical transactions of the royal society of London: Series B, Biological sciences. 364 (1522), 1475-1480. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677582/)

The paper is going to consider issues that Asperger (1944) began to grapple with which are still very much with us.
Issues of labelling, description, and stereotyping.
Considers that much of what society at large learns on disorders on the autism spectrum is produced by representations of autism in novels, TV-series, movies, and autobiographies.
The paper begins to scrutinize these as well to check whether the representations presented are in in fact misrepresenting autism.
Media representations of talent and special abilities can be said to have contributed to a harmful divergence between the general image of autism and the clinical reality of the autistic condition.

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Stereotype
• A set of beliefs surrounding members of a social group and the content of these beliefs get evaluated and leads to prejudice
Prejudice
• Brown (2010) defined prejudice as any attitude, emotion or behaviour towards a member or members of a group, which indirectly implies some negativity or antipathy towards this group.
Any attitude can be positive or negative
Discrimination
• Actual behavioural outcome of stereotypes and prejudice