A year ago today I went to protest outside the offices of the private healthcare company Atos – you’ll find more about that protest here. We were drawing attention to the inhumane Work Capability Assessment (WCA) that Atos administers on behalf of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).…

An Open Letter to Nick Gorse, Dean of Camberwell.

Dear Nick,

A few weeks ago, on the spur of the moment, four friends and I chose to go to the private view of the BA degree show at Camberwell College of Art.…

Over the last year the Government has introduced a huge number of damaging policies that target disabled people. These’ve seen spending on support for disabled people slashed, schemes and services abolished, hard won equalities thrown away, and disabled people vilified and subjected to poorly thought out and inhumane assessments.…

Last night I searched for the word ‘Lychees’ on Twitter. I don’t know if it’s a word that’s normally tweeted a lot, but yesterday it was repeated thousands of times across the Twittersphere when my tic, “Square cheese is the cousin of lychees” became part of #SurrenderYourSay.…

It’s Surrender Your Say day today, which means that if you don’t have Tourettes but you do have Twitter, it’s your chance to experience one aspect of the most frequently misunderstood syndrome on the planet. When you sign and surrender here, a neat little app sends real tics at random times throughout the day from your account.…

Regular visitors to this site might’ve noticed a change to our usual homepage banner in the last few days. The regular one’s been replaced by an invitation to ‘Surrender Your Say’ and experience Tourettes Syndrome for a day. That day is tomorrow!…

There are an estimated 6.5 million unpaid carers in the UK. They’re people who support a family member, a friend or partner who’s ill, frail or disabled.

Today’s the start of Carers’ Week, an annual week of campaigning which aims to:

• Draw attention to the role of carers and celebrate the contribution they make
• Help people recognise that they are carers and help them access support
• Highlight the need for sustainable funding for services, both for carers and the people they care for

This year’s campaign focuses on the fact that every day 6,000 people take on new caring responsibilities.…

I’ve just watched a new video made by Scope and Stephen Fry which challenges us to consider the power that just two words can have. The examples they use in the video include:

‘I’m pregnant’, ‘Marry me’, ‘You’re ugly’ or ‘That’s beautiful’.…

This post is about SWANs – not a long-necked member of the wildfowl family – although that might’ve been the natural assumption, given my penguin tirade the other day.

The SWAN I’ve been thinking about stands for Syndrome Without A Name, and for many disabled children and their families this is the only name they have for their disability.…

I’ve written before about my tics’ strange ability to see into the future. They were able to predict the Jimmy Savile scandal long before the story broke, and they’ve become so finely tuned that I’ve decided to share their clairvoyance in my World of the Zodiac video horoscope.…