Formerly consultant in the psychiatry of learning disability, Sheffield Health Authority

Mary Myers was a leading pioneer in the field of the psychiatry of mental handicap (renamed learning disability) at a time of rapid change when mental hospitals were gradually being emptied of their patients. As a result of work carried out by Jack Tizard and others in the 1960s, it was shown that people with learning disabilities had potential for independent living that was far in advance of anything they were achieving in hospital. In the 1970s, UK government policy, driven partly by the findings of such studies and partly by scandals of poor and inhumane care of people with learning disabilities in large institutions, was to seek an end to large-scale institutional care and to promote the development of services providing care and support in the community.

In 1974, Mary took up the post of consultant psychiatrist in mental handicap in Rotherham with the specific task of establishing a community-based service. Her single-author paper in the BMJ (1982) summarised the ‘First seven years of a new NHS mental handicap service’. In it one can see the clear foundations of the subsequent reshaping of social and health provision over the remainder of the 20th century. In characteristic style she concluded that ‘Without a supportive matrix of co-ordinated statutory agencies (…) both modern professional skills and voluntary resources will not be exploited to the full for this very vulnerable group. Future developments must be based on clearly defined and declared principles’.

Following a failed piloting of the government’s new strategy, Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped, in 1982 she was appointed lead consultant in the Sheffield Health Authority; her job was to ‘turn the service around’. Her approach was one of encouragement of health and social care professionals of all backgrounds and positions to learn from the experience of others, to bring people together in conversations and exchanges of ideas, innovations and knowledge. Her enthusiasm, charisma and relentless networking brought leading and inspirational international figures from a wide spectrum of expertise to Sheffield and the UK to work alongside professionals, families, carers and people with learning disabilities themselves. She earned their lifelong admiration and respect for her genuine warmth and support, and her encouragement of professionals’ practice to be firmly rooted within the principles of person-centred service development and delivery.

Mary’s influence was not merely local. As a member of the National Development Team during the 1970s, way ahead of her time, she sought to improve services around the country and was a member of the group which produced the Kings Fund’s seminal publication, An Ordinary Life. This led to fundamental changes in the way in which people with learning disabilities were to be perceived and thus supported. The underlying principles were to move away from seeing people as patients in a perpetual state of dependency and passive recipients of resources to their promotion as citizens with rights like any other and living in ‘ordinary houses in ordinary streets’.

Colleagues have described Mary as one of the greatest of the early advocates for, and champions of, people with learning disabilities who really did help to shift attitudes and aspirations. In the words of the late Herb Lovett, psychologist, she recognised the ‘mutuality of our human condition’ in emphasising values of inclusion, empowerment and respect, and thereby making a fundamental and tangible difference to the well-being of her patients, their families and those who worked with her and loved her.

I know from my own experience that, although she was an unconventional teacher, she had a remarkable ability to inspire and motivate and shape the understanding of others through her uncomplicated, humanistic and person-centred approach combined with an uncanny ability to bring people together to learn from each other. As a psychiatry trainee in Sheffield in the late 1980s, I can recall sitting at Mary Myers’ kitchen table while she pottered about alternately making coffee, thrusting a selection of interesting cuttings, papers and books under my nose and talking with joyful compassion and empathy about various patients, funny situations, the most recent snippet of information or ideas that had caught her eye or her ear. This was my regular supervision in ‘mental handicap’ and it was quite unlike any experience of learning in medicine or psychiatry that I had come across before. This was what Mary called ‘learning at Nelly’s elbow’ and here the elbow belonged to a psychiatrist who was deeply committed to, and moved by, the lived experiences of people with intellectual disabilities, their families, their histories of institutionalisation, of stigma and abuse, but also of triumphs and insights and their enrichment of the lives of others. Mary’s main interest was not so much in syndromes and pathology but in the reality of being a person with a disability and how one might overcome the barriers that the world constantly puts in your way.

Alice Mary Martin was born in Hornsey on 9 December 1930 and studied at the Welsh National School of Medicine in Cardiff, qualifying in 1960. In 1955 she married Ken Myers, who was training in psychiatry and went on to work at Fulbourn Hospital in Cambridge. Mary, who was bringing up their three children, David, Sarah and Peter, undertook postgraduate training in developmental psychiatry at the Ida Darwin Hospital, Cambridge. The experiences of raising a family, and in particular of understanding the development and needs of a family member with Asperger syndrome, were a bedrock and constant reference point for Mary’s professional training and practice. This no-nonsense practicality combined with an astute clinical and systemic knowledge and intuition endeared her to her patients and their families who found themselves in the company of a doctor they could trust and who spoke their language.

Although she retired in 1991, the reality is that Mary never really gave up working. Her career as a psychiatrist had not merely been an employment but was an expression of her core beliefs, values and respectful curiosity about people and how they can work together in genuine partnerships for the common good. Mary continued to teach, advise, support and learn from others and at the time of her death was still learning and relishing being in the company of a younger generation while studying for a masters degree in autism.

She died on 20 May 2013 and is survived by her husband Ken and their children.