Changing Our Lives has a strong and proud history of working with people who find themselves stripped of the most basic human rights, often those people with a learning disability and/or autistic people in inpatient units.
We know that one way to gain traction in the system is to share people’s stories in order to show real examples of what is possible. We are still coming across professionals who just don’t believe or can’t see how the individual they are working with could live their life in their own home. Our work is always shaped by a recognition that people themselves are in the best position to know what works for them. So, drawing first hand from the experiences of people with a learning disability and autistic people, the Hospital to Home series records the experiences of both individuals who have left the hospital and are settled in their own home, as well as individuals who are still within hospital settings.
Beyond the labels and beneath her beautiful Black skin…
Kasibba was inappropriately detained in a mental health hospital all her adult life.
Mythologised and ensnared within a rhetoric of fear and racist tropes, she was deemed ‘too complex’ to work with and ‘too unpredictable’ to be allowed out of long-term segregation.
But we knew that this was not the case.
Kasibba now lives in her own home with her own staff team and is happily creating her own version of an ordinary life. She has reclaimed control of her life and is finding happiness by choosing what she wants this to look like.
Read her story here.
