Aim: This Quality Improvement Project sought to improve communication between patients with intellectual disabilities and their psychiatrists by sharing medical information using an easy read letter format following psychiatric review. Background: Writing directly to patients is in keeping with good medical practice. Previous studies have shown…

Background: Overprescribing of off-licence psychotropic medications, particularly antipsychotics, for challenging behaviours in people with intellectual disabilities without a psychiatric disorder is a significant public health concern. In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service England launched an initiative in 2016, 'STopping…

Aim: This project sought to ascertain views and experiences of people with intellectual disabilities, their carers', and specialist intellectual disability psychiatrists as to use of telepsychiatry consultations. Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic specialist psychiatrists in intellectual disability services in the United Kingdom (UK) have…

The current agenda for mental health in schools is considered in relation to the concept of mental health and how it has been iterated in schools in the UK. Key contributions from education pioneers are outlined, providing a time line for the first half of the twentieth century particularly informed by psychoanalysis. Mid twentieth century the…

This paper uses the notion of the data-doppelganger as a theoretical lens through which to view the datafication of education. The data-doppelganger is the version of the self which exists in the significant quantities of data collected about both children and teachers. A psychoanalytic analysis of the literary genre of the doppelganger identifies…

According to the theory of predictive processing, understanding in the present involves non-consciously representing the immediate future, based on probabilistic inference shaped by learning from the past. This paper suggests links between this neuroscientific theory and the psychoanalytic concept of reverie -- an empathic, containing attentional…

Autistic adults who have a history of committing crimes present a major problem for providers of services in terms of legal disposal options and possible interventions, and greater understanding of this group and their associated needs is required. For this reason, we aimed to investigate the face validity of a proposed sub-typology of autistic…

Understandings of disability are situated within social, political and economic circumstances. Internationally, medical conceptualisations of disability prevail, influencing policy and practice, creating a discourse which encourages categorisation, diagnosis and prescribed ways of understanding behaviour. This body of knowledge has a profound…

Background: An increasing number of genetic causes of intellectual disabilities (ID) are identifiable by clinical genetic testing, offering the prospect of bespoke patient management. However, little is known about the practices of psychiatrists and their views on genetic testing. Method: We undertook an online survey of 215 psychiatrists, who…

The historiography of child guidance has focused primarily on the United States, where it first developed before travelling across the English-speaking world. The rapid expansion of child guidance in the interwar years was enabled by private philanthropy, which provided fellowships to foreign professionals to study in the United States. This…

This article contributes to contemporary debates about the significance of emotions within Higher Education. Using a psychoanalytic lens we analyse the ways in which experiences of anxiety and tension are essential for learning. The anxiety associated with learning can stimulate meaningful and reflexive outcomes but "learning inaction"…

A growing body of research, largely from the global North, and particularly from North America, highlights the increasing psychiatrisation, medicalisation and psychologisation of children and childhood, and suggests that schools and educators play a key role in these processes. This increasing diffusion of psy-expertise within educational spaces…

Therapeutic community treatment models have not previously been applied to forensic patients with mild intellectual disabilities (IDs) with a comorbid diagnosis of personality disorder. Thirteen patients with mild IDs were allocated to a unit within a high secure psychiatric service operating a model of treatment based on the principles and…

In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milner's, "The Human Problem in Schools," published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milner's published book as well as from the historical…

Childhood psychiatric disorders are associated with a wide range of adverse outcomes including poor academic attainment. For some children these difficulties are recognised through school Special Educational Need procedures (SEN) but many others may remain unidentified and/or unsupported. In Britain, government data suggests disproportionate…