Editorial

Volume 11 Issue 3 includes four papers on fairly disparate topics. We trust that readers will find useful information and ideas in all of them. We also have a review by Professor Deb of the Third Edition of Psychiatric and Behavioural Disorders in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (Hemmings and Bouras, 2016), which provides a good overview of the book and will help readers to see its relevance to their practice.

Raghavan and Griffin review recent literature on resilience in children with a specific attention to its relevance to children who have intellectual disabilities. They find that little of the reported research focussed on children who have intellectual disabilities and note that this is a neglected area. These authors discuss several risk factors associated with intellectual disabilities in children, then proceed to a review of protective factors and note the associations between these factors and intellectual disabilities. They conclude that research consistently reports poor outcomes for children who have intellectual disabilities, but there is little knowledge of the role of resilience in protecting these children.

The Transforming Care project that developed from responses to Winterbourne View places great emphasis on the discharge of people who have intellectual disabilities from hospital care. One factor that can be a barrier to discharge from hospitals, particularly from secure hospitals, is the perceived degree of risk to and risk presented by patients when they return to the community. Chester et al. explore an aspect this perception, namely, the experience and understanding of risk assessment by community team members. This piece of qualitative research highlights a number of issues that affect perceptions of risk, not only the characteristics of patients themselves but also the nature of community provision and resources, and the complexities of the legal frameworks that apply.

Ramerman et al. examine prescribers’ adherence to guidelines for prescription of antipsychotics in the Netherlands. They found that adherence was poor. This problem is not limited to the Netherlands; the literature cited by these authors provides a rich diet of other studies that found similar problems in other places. It is to be hoped that this kind of research will be pursued in other places and that the effect will be that adherence improves.

Chaplin and Marshall-Tate’s “personal view” is a cogent argument for greater use of self-help materials by people who have intellectual disabilities and experience mental health difficulties. It reflects a point made by two service users, Cronin and Peters, in their paper included in Issue 1 of this Volume 11, namely, that increased ability to engage in self-help increases a service user’s sense of self-sufficiency and confidence. Chaplin and Marshall-Tate also give a useful review of accessible self-help materials that clinicians can introduce their clients to.