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When Autistic People Have Epilepsy

Photo © Ivo Dimitrov | Flickr / Creative Commons [image: Illustration of a human brain, in profile, made of colorful cogs in various sizes and shapes.] Maxfield Sparrow unstrangemind.com [Content note: This post discusses suicidality, mental health, and death.] In the early 1990s, I was engaged to a man with epilepsy. He had tonic-clonic seizures and he was a big guy, so I was always alert to the possibility of an episode. I knew there were stores we couldn’t shop in, and roads I couldn’t drive down. I caught his body and lowered him safely to the ground more times than I can remember. I guarded him from the pressing crowd of curious onlookers when he came around after a public seizure. And I worried, feeling helpless, when his medication levels were off, and he had seizure after seizure. I can’t know what it is like to have epilepsy or…

Turning Lives Around Through Supported Living

Diane Lightfoot www.unitedresponse.org.uk/what-we-do/how-we-work/supported-living United Response was set up in 1973 to provide a service based on supported living principles to a handful of adults with learning disabilities in a house in West Sussex. At the time, most such adults usually found themselves placed in institutions, isolated from the rest of society, with few rights and fewer opportunities to live a full and active life. Forty years after that first house was set up, United Response now supports over 2,000 individuals in almost 300 locations across [The United Kingdom], but supported living is still at the core of our work. The majority of our support is officially “supported living” where we support people living in their own homes, with their own rights as tenants or owners, but where we support people in homes that are registered as residential care, we run these along the same principles; enabling people to have control…