Anyone been following the Jordan Burling death case *warning, distressing*

[SealSong]

Has anyone been following this baffling and tragic case?
Mother and Grandmother have been convicted of manslaughter today.
Jordan aged 18 died at home, emaciated and with bed sores, having had no medical treatment.

Details of the court case in here - warning contains very distressing details.

I am struggling to understand how this could have happened. How the mother and grandmother could have failed to get medical attention, and also how Jordan just gave up and wasted away, when there were no apparent special needs, mental illness or specific health problems (as far as is known). Although surely he must have had some kind of undiagnosed mental illness or something.

I'm surprised that there hasn't been a thread on Mumsnet about this case, it has been in national news, but not very high priority I suppose.

One of the strangest and saddest cases I have ever heard of.

I agree that being able to function enough to hold down a job doesn’t mean someone is a fully functioning adult but equally they had some idea of the expectations of day to day life.

It reads to me that this was a highly dysfunctional household with people only just clinging on to the edges of society.

I imagine his body wasted away in part because he was eating no fresh food.

At the end of the day, no-one should have been left in the "care" of a group of people who were totally clueless about caring. Except they raised a perfectly healthly looking duaghter...

And the daughter, Jordan’s sister, has a baby herself.

She looks perfectly healthy physically but she is also 1) a woman whose own child has been taken away and adopted due to neglect and 2) a woman who saw her brother starving and who apparently did nothing.

Parenting is more than just feeding people.

I'm amazed that you learnt about ASD only 2 years ago and that you understand it to be 1) in every case, an LD and 2) caused by abuse and trauma. Who the hell was teaching you? (Serious question.)

The "Autism is caused by abuse/neglect/bad parenting" line of thought was predominant in the 1960s which is 5 decades ago; it has been almost totally debunked (except in France where it is commonly still viewed in this way by professionals.) The view that autism was caused by poor parenting was developed by Bruno Bettelheim, a psychiatrist who was found later to have no qualifications whatsoever. He arrived in America as a refugee from Nazi Germany and attributed his lack of paperwork to the chaos of the war; in fact, he had never HAD any such paperwork. He was a quack and a fraud and did untold harm. In his hospital for "disturbed" children he frequently assaulted his patients and got away with it (he was the God-like doctor.)

Please go on a properly accredited course to learn about ASD. I have two sons on the spectrum, one with LD, one without, and the thought that either of them would come in contact with a professional who is so woefully ignorant about ASD is horrifying. It's completely unacceptable.

I have two sons on the spectrum, one with LD, one without, and the thought that either of them would come in contact with a professional who is so woefully ignorant about ASD is horrifying. It's completely unacceptable.

It is. The so called professionals who saw my two dcs were equally as ignorant. One of them being a clinical psychologist who peddled the attachment theory cause of autism rubbish. This was only six years ago.

There is so much misunderstanding and ignorance surrounding autism that it’s a wonder anybody understands anything about it at all.

Our own experiences over the years have been very mixed. A paediatrician who didn't seem to have a clue about ASD (but who insisted she did). Another paediatrician who said "Girls hardly ever have ASD and when they do it s very mild" (this didn't affect us personally but I knew it was rubbish,. . .I'd already met quite a few autistic girls at my son's special school, some of them non-verbal.)

It still shocks me to the core that a social worker (as here) "learnt" as recently as 2 years ago that ASD is caused by abuse and neglect. If a course accredited by the University of Bath in 2016 was teaching this to social workers, chances are there are other courses right now teaching the same thing. No wonder families like ours often get such a poor level of support.

Whenever I hear of a woman or young girl giving birth in these circumstances, this is what baffles me too! Weird enough that the woman herself doesn't know but psychologists, etc think that in some cases it is tied up with deep denial. It can happen, not surprisingly, in women and young girls who have become pregnant through rape: they are traumatized.

That I can understand. What I really can't understand at all is how a husband/partner sharing the same bed doesn't know. He might have a low IQ, so might the woman, but that in itself doesn't adequately explain it: lots of people with a below-average IQ get pregnant/father a child, know they are pregnant/that their partner is, and go on to be perfectly okay parents.

ASD is a genetic condition, it is not triggered by neglect, abuse or trauma or vaccines, it is simply put a difference in the brain's structure and people are born with it and its no different then people being born as albino yes they are different (and have problems) but they are not a illness that is caused by outside forces so please tell me the year the university and the course name so it can be investigated as teaching incorrect stuff.

Like a geography teacher teaching the world is flat... level of wrong.

I only studied 2 years ago I’m amazed that anything so structural has changed since then and have to say that lots of people must be diagnosed with ASD who don’t have it if this is the new ‘rule’

It hasn't changed. Whatever you were taught was, unfortunately, seriously inaccurate.

Not all people with ASD are have low IQ. Some are extremely intelligent and high-achieving.

I still don’t understand how it can be rebranded as something only inherent after all this time of diagnosing people in which ASD has been shown to occur alongside neglect and trauma

2 things: correlation is not the same as causation; and

In recent years our ability to map the brain has improved vastly. It is now possible to find the areas of the brain that are involved in particular conditions and to identify how they differ from the same areas in the neurotypical brain. The result has been that it is now possible to say for some conditions (e.g. ADD) that they are real and the brains of people who have them are physically different.

What remains to be seen in most cases is whether the physical differences are (i)congenital; or (ii) caused, wholly or partially, by circumstance, like abuse and trauma; or (iii) dormant or relatively unimportant unless triggered by circumstances.