Oliver Russell: psychiatrist who fought for the rights of people with learning disabilities

In the late 1960s and early 1970s a series of scandals shed much needed light on the plight of people with learning disabilities. Many were living in large institutions, removed from society, and were often treated appallingly by the people meant to care for them.

In 1972 Oliver Russell, a child psychiatrist, was asked to provide two sessions a week at Farleigh Hospital in Bristol. The psychiatric hospital had been brought back under the health authority’s control in 1968 after three nurses were jailed for abusing patients. Hospital managers were resistant to the new regime, however, and it took Russell two years to persuade them to allow him to take charge of a single ward. When he eventually took over he found that 10 out of the 22 male patients were detained under the Mental Health Act 1959. Russell and a colleague interviewed the men and reviewed their notes.

“By the end of the afternoon we were able to cancel the detention of all the men still under section. This enabled me to take forward more radical plans for their discharge into the community,” he wrote in his diary.

These radical plans to get people with learning disabilities out of long stay hospitals culminated in the Wells Road project—a house on a residential Bristol street where they could live in the community with support. One of those who collaborated with Russell was David …