Mind My Mental Rehearsal: Swimming 5km to Foreground a Minority Discourse

With three days to go until I swim (!) 5 kilometres for Mind, friends and colleagues asked me: what will motivate me on the day? The short answer is that advocating for the need for better mental health awareness and services has been integral to my personal and professional life for a long time. As my shoulders are aching, I will be hoping that all my emails, Facebook and Twitter posts about this venture will have stimulated an aspiration for readers to augment their awareness of the attendant practical, social and legal considerations that arise when an individual has a mental health problem.

The longer answer, however, begins with my own research. On Monday 30 July I spoke at the Centre for Criminology’s Thames Valley Police Seminar series about the centrality of the intersection between disability and the criminal justice system. Baldry et al highlighted the lacuna in Critical Criminology which, while taking account of race, gender and class, currently relegates disability ‘to the status of an additional dimension of social disadvantage’ (2008: 32). Their work aimed to move thinking beyond traditionally siloed disciplinary approaches and consequently combined insights emerging from Critical Criminology with innovations from the discipline of Critical Disability Studies (CDS) (2008: 31) – most notably the ‘social model of disability’. This model makes a distinction between impairment, a condition of the mind or body, and disablement - a form of disadvantage or restriction of activity, caused by the failure to take account of impairment. Such failure leads to barriers to participation in mainstream social activities being imposed on top of impairment (UPIAS 1976, in Oliver 1976:22).

Criminological theory and criminal justice practice have often sought to categorise offenders with mental health problems (MHP) through the reductive binary of ‘mad’ or ‘bad’, perpetuating a crude and ‘false dichotomy’ (Seddon, 2008). Building on the work of Baldry et al (2008, 2009) I consider the descriptive and normative value of considering these groups as ‘disabled’ under the ‘social model’ of ‘disability’. My doctoral project is about the Governance of adult offenders with autism in England: criminal justice policy and criminal court practice. I ask:

• At what points in the court process does the defendant’s autism become relevant to decision-making and how does this consideration affect case disposal?
• When does the identification of the offender’s autism trigger a consideration of their status as individuals with a disability under the Equality Act 2010?

Research which brings individuals with autism more sharply into focus, within the discipline of Criminology, is especially relevant given new developments in the wider legal and policy context. The Bradley Report five years on (Durcan et al, 2014) was published only two weeks ago and the last year has seen the publication of a number of important reviews and strategies – the Adebowale Report (2013), the recent ‘refreshed’ Autism Strategy Think Autism (DH, 2014) and (2014) and the Mental Health Crisis Care Concordat  (DH, 2014) - to name just a few.

Distinguishing between impairment and disablement, I argue in relation to my own research, the social model is helpful in enabling us to comprehend, on the one hand, the ‘psy’ literature which explores the link between the ‘symptomatology’ (Freckleton and List, 2009) of autism and criminality (the ‘impairment branch’ of the distinction) in combination with the ‘interconnecting variables’ (Browning and Caulfield, 2011) leading offenders with autism into the CJS and inequitable experiences of offenders with autism on the other (the ‘disablement branch’ of the distinction). Such an intellectual venture is timely given the entrenchment of this model in the Equality Act 2010 and the inception of the Autism Act 2009, Autism Statutory Guidance (DH, 2010) and related policy.

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