Love, Attachment and Intellectual Disability: Meeting Emotional Needs and Developmental Trauma - Paperback

by Alan Skelly (Author), Victoria Shimmens (Author)

This book came about from the authors' experience working together in clinical learning disabilities services, and their work to move the focus away from the management of challenging behaviour and towards a trauma-informed, attachment-based approach to caring. It will introduce some of the key theories that have informed our understanding of the emotional development of people with intellectual disabilities and the importance of receiving love from an attachment figure from a young age, followed by case studies that focus on the lives of particular individuals - sometimes presented as individual therapy sessions and sometimes an overview of progress across many sessions. Whilst it describes work done by a psychology team in community health services, it is relevant to all health and social care professionals who help people with intellectual disabilities, as well as useful for advocates, service commissioners, families and healthcare generalists.

Author Biography

ALLAN SKELLY is the 2019-2021 Chair of the Faculty for People with Intellectual Disabilities (FPID) of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and Consultant Clinical Psychologist with Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne & Wear NHS Foundation Trust. Allan was chair of the working group which produced the 2017 BPS clinical practice guidelines for the integration of Attachment Theory into the work of clinical psychologists in the UK. VICTORIA SHIMMENS is an Assistant Psychologist at NHS England. In 2021 she co-wrote a chapter with Allan Skelly and Aimee Corner about the long-term outcome of using PBS interventions in The Bulletin of the Faculty of People with Intellectual Disabilities.