A BBC report has revealed that an autistic woman with a learning disability was wrongly confined to a mental health hospital for 45 years, beginning when she was just seven years old.
The woman, who is believed to be originally from Sierra Leone, and who was given the name Kasibba by the local authority to protect her identity, was also held on her own in long-term segregation for 25 years.
Kasibba is non-verbal and had no family to speak up for her. A clinical psychologist told File on 4 Investigates how she had begun a nine-year battle to release her.
The Department of Health and Social Care told the BBC it was unacceptable that so many disabled people were still being held in mental health hospitals and said it hoped reforms to the Mental Health Act would prevent inappropriate detention.
More than 2,000 autistic people and people with learning disabilities are still detained in mental health hospitals in England – including about 200 children. For years, the government has pledged to move many of them into community care, because they do not have any mental illness.
The government promised to take action after a BBC undercover investigation in 2011 exposed the criminal abuse of people with learning disabilities at Winterbourne View private hospital near Bristol.
But all key targets in England have been missed. In the past few weeks, in its plan for 2025-26, NHS England said it aimed to reduce the reliance on mental health inpatient care for people with a learning disability and autistic people, delivering a minimum 10% reduction.
However, Dan Scorer, head of policy and public affairs at the charity Mencap, is not impressed. “Hundreds of people are still languishing, detained, who should have been freed and should be supported in the community, because we haven’t seen the progress that was promised,” he told us.
Dr Patsie Staite learned of Kasibba’s incarceration in 2013 when she was a rookie clinical psychologist carrying out a routine review of her care. But it would take nine years to free her.
“I hadn’t ever seen anyone living in the situation that she was living in. And I think what was really shocking was it was all legitimised,” Dr Staite told the BBC. She said the apparently legitimate hospital setting masked the reality that Kasibba “was locked up for sometimes more than 23 hours a day”.
Returning to the site of the hospital – which cannot be named to help protect Kasibba’s identity – Dr Staite pointed out a hole in the fence. It had been cut out, she said, so Kasibba could watch people walking by from the outside space of the locked annex where she was held.
It is thought Kasibba, who is now in her 50s, was trafficked from Sierra Leone before the age of five. She lived in a children’s home for a while, but that placement broke down and, by the age of seven, she was moved into the long-stay hospital.
Dr Staite said that staff had described Kasibba as “dangerous” and an “eye-gouger”.
She discovered a single incident in the records which appeared to have led to these accusations of violence. Decades earlier, when Kasibba was 19 and before she was placed in long-term segregation, a fire alarm had gone off and the locked ward was being evacuated.
Kasibba was distressed and, in the confusion, she was approached by another patient. She scratched her, causing a cut to the other patient’s eye.
“That was how the incident was talked about ever since, ‘she’s an eye gouger and she caused so much harm to this other person’,” said Dr Staite. But “it just didn’t ring true”, she said, that a middle-aged woman with a learning disability who had lived in the hospital for decades could be that dangerous.
After months of work, Dr Staite submitted a 50-page report to Camden Council – the local authority in north London which had originally placed Kasibba in the hospital. Dr Staite said it had already been accepted that Kasibba did not have a mental illness and her report concluded she was not dangerous and was safe to live in the community.
A team of health and social care professionals was then set up in 2016, calling themselves “the escape committee”. Their mission was to free Kasibba.
SOURCE: bbc.com