I work in the Learning Disability Service in North Ayrshire, and have been working in Learning Disability services in Ayrshire for over 20 years. A constant theme across those years has been the visibility of people with learning disabilities, or rather, their lack of visibility. All too often, services and communities are designed without proper consideration of how to include them. Whether that’s information that is too complex and hard to read; spaces that are difficult to move around if your mobility is impaired in any way; systems and supports that don’t allow enough time for people to make themselves heard and understood; or people that make negative assumptions about the abilities of others.
Working in a Health and Social Care Partnership, there can be an understandable emphasis on the role of data about populations, as a lever for change around issues such as these. That isn’t always helpful if there isn’t data readily available about a population, as is often said to be the case for people with learning disabilities. But even where the data is available, the numbers are abstractions, which don’t tell the whole story: they don’t say much about the hopes, dreams, gifts and reflections of people. They aren’t great tools for conveying joy, or sharing fears. They don’t inspire and create community. All too frequently, what they do achieve, is a focus on people as broken things needing fixed, and not necessarily fixed in a helpful way, just in the way that services are set up to deliver.
Art and creativity can inspire. They can spread joy, share dreams and fears, and bring people together. They’re important. I’m not sure many galleries would stay open if they were displaying pie charts instead of paintings. Creativity has always been there in the work of Ayrshire learning disability services, but in recent years we’ve made more of a deliberate effort to use them as a means of celebrating lives, and starting new connections. The How We See Ourselves and What Comes Next projects were joyful things, which we need to be doing more of.
The Mental Health Arts Festival is another such joyful thing. It’s a broad church, where there’s space for all to find themselves, and each other. It’s a space made for connection, and transcending the artificial divisions which so many aspects of society foster. However services may choose to describe us, we are all human, and what we have in common far outweighs whatever differences we bring. That’s a source of joy that budgets cant constrain.
Blog post author
Dominic Jarrett
North Ayrshire Mental Health Arts Festival 