“Your name is what?” Institutional abuse: same old story

We were  once told by a senior care manager in a moment of exasperation that the company did not exist in the ‘real’ world. This week once again we have images of institutional abuse on our TV screens, this time from Winterbourne View the ‘hospital’ for people who have learning disabilities just outside Bristol. Don’t you just love the names of these places? Well who exactly lives in this ‘real’ space? So many parts of our social care system have become so separated from ordinary civil society. A huge amount of our practice at Entelechy has been spent working with the survivors of institutional abuse, survivors from that daisy chain of asylums that once hung around our city where the M25 now sits. When we will start paying attention to their voices?