Not Just Users of Services, but Contributors to Society: the Opportunities of the Disability Rights Agenda
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/13619322200100027 |
| Pages | 25-28 |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Author | Liz Sayce |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Focus on…
The Mental Health Review Volume 6 Issue 3 September 2001 ©Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) 2001 25
Not Just Users of Services, but Contributors
to Society: the Opportunities of the
Disability Rights Agenda
Liz Sayce
Director
Communications and Change
Disability Rights Commission
There’s more to life than mental health
services
In 2001 Ms Melanophy – a successful customer services
manager in an educational publishing company – won
an employment tribunal case. Her performance and
conduct had been temporarily affected by her manic
depression. Rather than finding out what the problem
was, the employer sacked her for gross misconduct
while she was absent from work receiving treatment in
a psychiatric hospital. The tribunal found that, under
the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, the employer had
acted ‘hastily and prematurely’ and had treated her less
favourably because of her disability: in other words, she
had been subject to discrimination.
Mental health survivors and professionals have
become so used to the daily reality of discrimination –
NIMBY campaigns that de-rail service developments,
insurance and mortgage refusals, media headlines like
‘Nuts to be caged for life by docs’ (The Sun, 2000) – that
it is easy to overlook new developments that begin to
confer rights. After years of having passively to accept
discrimination with virtually no redress, it may be hard
to believe that change is possible.
Yet Ms Melanophy was significantly aided by recent
disability rights policy. Before 1996 there was no law in
force to prohibit employment discrimination on
grounds of mental health status or other disability.1
Before 2000 there was no Disability Rights Commission
(DRC) to enforce the law and promote equality of
opportunity. Ms Melanophy’s case was backed and
funded by the DRC whose chair, Bert Massie, stated:
‘Thousands of people with manic depression hold down
good jobs successfully and bosses need to be sensitive to the
particular impact of an employee’s disability and respond
appropriately. Employers have every right to expect high
performance but it does not make good business sense to sack
people hastily. This case shows that employers are putting
themselves at risk of litigation if they do so’ (Community
Care, 3 May 2001).
Treating illness – or securing disability rights?
In 1997 the newly elected Labour Government –
highly symbolically – moved disability policy from the
Department of Social Security to the Department for
Education and Employment (DfEE). No longer were
disabled people to be seen as passive recipients of
welfare – but as individuals entitled to opportunities.
For similar reasons, in the US aspects of disability
policy were moved as early as the 1970s from the
Department of Health and Human Services to
Education; and disability now sits across the
Departments of Labor, Education and Justice.
Meanwhile, the focus of the British mental health
world’s attention is mainly on initiatives stemming
from the Department of Health: the National Service
Framework, assertive outreach and so forth. From an
anti-discrimination perspective it is hugely welcome
that the National Service Framework’s Standard One
requires mental health services to ‘combat discrimina-
tion against individuals and groups with mental health
problems, and promote their social inclusion’.
However, as Ms Melanophy’s case suggests, the
achievement of ‘inclusion’ is beyond the powers of the
1The
makes it illegal to discriminate against disabled people in employment and provision of goods and services. Disabled people
include those with ‘clinically well-recognised’ mental illnesses that have lasted or are expected to last for at least 12 months (including episodically), where the
person has an impairment that substantially affects their day to day activities. For more information contact the Disability Rights Commission on 08457 622633,
textphone 08457 622644, website www.drc-gb.org.
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