In his book, Goodey Goodey makes the point that the term ‘learning disability’ is not a fixed, stable concept, but one which has changed and evolved over time. He states his aim as being to not only deconstruct the concept of a learning disability but also to ‘reconstruct the concept as something else entirely’ (p. 2). He argues that learning disabilities are as a consequence of an inclusion phobia which he defines as, a condition which has existed since time immemorial resulting in the identifying and scapegoating of outgroups. He states therefore that social inclusion should be our target in both social and political action.
He argues that although we think about ‘learning disabilities’ as being fixed and permanent, a learning disability is in fact a label which shifts over time. For example, he discusses how a previous label applied to this group, ‘feeble-minded’ would have included many groups of people (such as unmarried mothers) who would not be included within our current concept of a learning disability. Goodey cites many examples of inclusion phobia in action, including ‘mild’ phobias such the person in the bank who talks to the member of a person’s support staff rather than the person being supported by the member of staff, tracing this concept through history.
In a recent commentary on Goodey’s paper on why we should study the history of learning disability, Bradshaw and McGill point out that staff can also be instigators of social exclusion.Footnote 1 In this research, the regard for residents was one dimension which emerged from their evaluation of staff culture. This dimension focused on the extent to which people with learning disabilities were seen as being fundamentally different, or as the authors describe in the paper ‘not like us’. This seems to be a very clear illustration of Goodey’s inclusion phobia.
He argues that this concept of inclusion phobia pre-exists the label of learning disability. He suggests that classifying a human group by their intellectual abilities is the current method by which this inclusion phobia is manifested. He argues that this representation of status by reference to an internal characteristic of ‘intelligence’ is recent.
Goodey suggests that the discrimination, bullying and segregation of people who we label as having learning disabilities are the result of this inclusion phobia. Recent work around hate crime (Richardson et al., 2015) found that just under half of the people with learning disabilities and/or autism who took part in their survey reported experiences of disability hate crime and so Goodey is quite right to point out that this is one of the ways in this group is targeted as ‘different’. Difference is the focus of his fourth chapter.Footnote 2 Of course it is also the case that staff working with this group of people are often excluded (Bradshaw and McGill, 2015), for example because of their association with people with learning disabilities. Beadle-Brown et al. (2014) found that people who were living or working with this socially excluded group also reported victimisation.
Goodey’s book explores the concept of causes, tracing these through history, culminating in parental blame and guilt and finally to the location of learning disability entirely within DNA, therefore locating ‘the problem’ within the child himself or herself. In his chapter on assessment, Goodey argues that we assess what we feel is measurable, hence intelligence becomes something which we assess and therefore refer to as ‘real.’ Finally, he explores his notion of inclusion phobia through the development of the classification and diagnosis of autism spectrum conditions.
Goodey ends by suggesting that a solution would be for all ‘vulnerable’ people to be supported by their local communities (as would have been the case historically) and suggests that services are actively contributing to the prevention of people being able to lead ordinary lives. He ends with stating that ‘Inclusion is not a good idea that needs to be promoted, it is the state of nature’ (p. 166). It is the in ingroup, those who do the excluding, where policy change must be targeted.
