The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) regulates some of the biggest papers in the UK, including the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times, The Telegraph, and Metro. At the moment, IPSO can only deal with complaints where disparaging language has been used against individuals, not groups of people.
The Daily Mail and The Times have both recently run articles about the rise of ADHD diagnoses with the implication that these may be a trend rather than genuine medical conditions. The way things currently stand, there is no mechanism for IPSO to raise these issues meaningfully with publications which are signed up to its standards.
The campaign has been launched by Rachel Charlton-Dailey – Mirror columnist and CEO of the Disabled people’s media outlet, The Unwritten, to encourage IPSO to change its editorial guidance to ensure that national media outlets are held to account, and correct, ableist language.
Rachel said: “Ableism in the media happens every single day. In small ways like the language that suggests disabled people are suffering or that we’re inspirational. Then there are the ingrained ways we’ve seen for decades such as how the press massively contributed to the narrative that everyone on benefits are scroungers and faking to not have to work.
“Then more recently is the really really harmful way that columnists and experts are given inches to proclaim that chronic and neurodivergent conditions aren’t real and are inspired by TikTok trends.
“I see this belief often and as someone who has been misunderstood and derided most of their life over their conditions I can’t explain the untold damage it does.
“These narratives also don’t ask why so many people are suddenly seeing themselves in social media posts after years of thinking they were just “weird” or being gaslit by professionals,
“While the Head of Standards agreed with me that there is always lots of outrage on social media when a paper is ableist, she said it doesn’t translate into complaints.
There are complaint templates and links to complain to IPSO on the Unwritten website.