May 2008

Since emo has become something of a running topic on this blog, I note that today the emos have struck back at the Daily Mail, staging a protest outside their offices to register their objection to the Daily Heil’s utterly ridiculous “killer cult of emo” hysteria.

I’d like to take this opportunity to applaud the kids who did this. Well done for standing up for yourselves, and being willing to take the Mail to task over their scaremongering.

Now go and listen to some Nine Inch Nails, some Black Sabbath and some Generation Terrorists/Holy Bible-era Manic Street Preachers, you bunch of limp-wristed, middle class pantywaists.

A year ago, I attended the Royal College of Nursing Congress. It seemed like the RCN was starting to shake off it’s former reputation as the most pussywhipped of all the trade unions. For the first time ever, its members voted to consider industrial action. I heard speaker after speaker denounce New Labour and dismiss the pay deal on offer as an insult. The previous year, Patricia Hewitt had been booed offstage when she tried to address the RCN Congress.

It’s a year on from then, and NHS nurses are getting another insulting, kick-in-the-teeth, below-inflation pay offer. 2.75% this year, followed by 2.4% next year and 2.25% the year after. All this in the background of rising food and fuel costs, rising council taxes and more and more difficulty in obtaining credit. Still, the newly-militant RCN will be ready to take the fight to the government and deliver a boot to their collective knackers, right?

Oh. Sadly it looks like the RCN has suddenly reverted back to its previous position in relation to the government, which was roughly the kind of position adopted by a half-starved Thai hooker in relation to a fat, sweaty Western businessman.
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Time for our weekly round-up from the mental health blogosphere.

Some of the more observant among you may notice that the nursing-related Weekly Handover round-up didn’t appear last week. I think I’m finding it a bit too much to do two round-ups a week rather than one. Anyone fancy taking over the Weekly Handover to ease the burden on poor little me?
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I’d just like to draw attention to a comment made by Cockroach Catcher in a previous post, in which he says of his background in child psychiatry:

At least a third of the children we saw were not the real patients.

I’m currently a CPN operating out of an outpatient clinic for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). Cockroach Catcher’s comment intrigued me, so I decided to do a bit of a straw poll of 15 kids seen in our clinic over the past couple of weeks. For these 15 kids, I asked myself, “Who’s the real patient?”
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Dr Crippen is concerned about dumbing down at Cambridge University. I hate to think what he is going to make of this.

English students at Cambridge University have been asked to analyse lyrics by singer Amy Winehouse in a final-year exam.

Of course in my day at too posh to wash school for young student nursey nurses it would not have been Amy’s lyrics we would have been studying but this although that was before Wizzy had had his lobotomy poor dear.

This from Dennis MacShane MP.

“Yes, a mistake was made with the abolition of the 10p tax band, but the worst of the 10p row was how it obscured the fact that Brown had lowered income tax from 22 to 20 per cent in his last budget. Can that tax-cutting Brown please re-emerge?

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When I worked on an elderly care ward for patients with organic mental illnesses such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease it was customary to use anti psychotic medication to “manage” the symptoms of confusion that often accompany these conditions.

The drug of choice in those days was Meleril (Thioridazine) now taken off the market and replaced with newer atypical antipsychotic drugs. The practice was the same in the community as I noticed when visiting care homes as a student. Patient is confused wandering, at risk of falling and or aggressive to others? Answer: Prescribe Meleril 10mg daily. Patient still confused and wandering? Up the Meleril. Still confused? Increase Meleril until patient is comatose, job done.
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Children with asperger syndrome often get horrendously bullied at school. Due to their inability to read social cues they tend to come across as a bit weird, and often say embarrassing remarks or make social blunders. As a result, the school bullies home in on them like lions circling an injured wildebeest.

Which makes this story even more shocking.
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Back in March I attended the Anonymous protests against the Church of Scientology, because I disagree with their Orwellian tactics, not to mention their demonising of psychiatry and their ridiculous belief that you can treat severe mental illness with vitamins.

While there, I notice we were being filmed. Not only by the Scientologists themselves, by also by the City of London Police.

I was a bit annoyed at this, not least because I noticed that later on in the day, when the protests moved to the Church’s “Dianetics and Life Improvement Centre” on Tottenham Court Road, the Metropolitan Police didn’t seem to feel any need to film us. When I got home, I wrote a slightly snotty e-mail to the City of London Police demanding to know why we’d been filmed.

I got back quite a reasonable letter from them - much more reasonable than the one I’d sent - saying that this was standard practice at demonstrations, that the contents of the film were covered by legislation such as the Data Protection Act, and that the officer in charge of policing the demo would be happy to answer any further questions I had. After reading their reply, I felt a bit silly.

However, after reading this news report I’m wondering if I was being too paranoid after all.
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Time, once again, for a round-up of what’s happening on mental health blogs better than ours.
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Following on from my earlier post about emo, I think I’ve give a real-world clinical example, dealing with a self-harming emo kid.

A quick caveat before I do. Teenage self-harming is not an “emo thing”. We see plenty of cutters in CAMHS, and the bulk of them are not emos. Chavs cut themselves too. In fact, some kids cut themselves despite not being part of any fashion clique at all. It’s almost as if self-harm were a mental health issue rather than a fashion trend. Strange, that.

Anyway, let’s bring in our emo. He’s 15 years old, and in honour of My Chemical Romance, we’ll call him Gerard.
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Get fresh at the weekend, as Mel and Kim once said. So here’s the inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines, doing a very energetic routine to “Jump” by the Pointer Sisters

They were previously a huge internet hit with their version of Thriller.

So what do you think? Is this the answer to the mental health crisis in our prisons?

Surfing the net; an interesting article on yet another theory on the aetiology of mental disorder.

This one suggests that the culprit may be nothing more than the common ‘flu’.

Doctors have known for many years that microbes such as syphilis and Streptococcus can, if left untreated, lead to serious psychiatric problems. Now a growing number of scientists are proposing that microbes are to blame for several mental illnesses once thought to have neurological or psychological defects at their roots. The strongest evidence pertains to schizophrenia, but autism, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder have also been linked to bacterial, viral or parasitic infections in utero, in childhood or in maturity. Some of these infections can directly affect the brain, whereas others might trigger immune reactions that interfere with brain development or perhaps even attack our own brain cells in an autoimmune mistake.

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(Guest post by markyjones)

I am a nurse working in a locked ward in Anglia region. (I’d rather not give name of hospital). We have a patient on a section 37/41 order who has been granted unescorted town leave. I think she is an abscond risk (others disagree with me). She can take her passport and credit card in her posession as doc thinks she has ‘capacity’ to manage own affairs. If she absconds abroad can we get her back? I know section 18 covers retaking her while she is still in the UK but what if she gets on a plane? Much debate among colleagues, but I think MHA 1983 ceases to be effective once absconder leaves country. Police cannot issue a European Arrest Warrant unless she commits a crime. Anyone any ideas on this one?

The quickest and most effective way to totally invalidate somebody’s viewpoint - as I’m sure Ted will be happy to tell you - is to state that they’re mentally ill. The psychoanalytic movement in particular used to be notorious for dressing up their feuds in the language of psychopathology. At its most horrific extreme, the Soviet Union used psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate and drug political dissidents on the grounds that “no sane person would declaim against Soviet government and Communism”.

The example I’m going to use isn’t anywhere near on that scale, but it does demonstrate the ways in which psychiatric labels can be abused as a means of attacking a political opponent. It involves none other than my old mate Dr Crippen.
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