This week’s Wildcard strikes a blow for the rights of straight, white men everywhere to watch Top Gear and talk about the Kaiser Chiefs. Meanwhile, the mental health bloggers discuss labelling, waiting lists, antisocial personality disorder and more.
Fighting Monsters discusses people in hospital with dementia.
Today, Community Care reports that the Alzheimer’s Society has called for patients with dementia to be discharged earlier from hospitals as this would save a significant amount of money. They conducted a survey of 1300 carers of people with dementia, about 650 nurses and 500 nurse/ward managers to find that 86% of managers said people with dementia spent longer in hospital that others admitted with the same medical conditions and 49% of carers said hospital stays had been longer than they had expected.
There are other figures there but to me there is an obvious reason for these figures. Firstly, most ward managers always think people are in hospital longer than necessary. I am working with a man who is currently in the local acute hospital’s general medical ward. He fell and broke his hip. He has been ‘ready for discharge’ four times – on each occasion as I have arranged his discharge – I have been told that he has deteriorated further and is unwell. But on each of those ‘almost’ occasions, I have received all the delayed discharge paperwork and have created no small amount of work to try and set things up for him.
Currently there is a wish to rush people out of hospital. Where I work, there are very few dementia residential placements in local homes. We meanwhile have no provision for block purchased intermediate care placements – no wonder then that there are some delayed discharges but I wouldn’t expect ward managers to say anything other than that because often they are at the sharp end and cannot understand the implications of poor commissioning decisions.
Teenage Misanthropy’s latest post is not about mental health, but he’s titled it “This Week in Dentalists”. Have we started a meme?
Abysmal Musings muses on diagnosis and labelling.
So, after nearly two years, how has my diagnosis changed me? Because, for sure, being labelled in such a critical way that takes away so many of your rights and privileges damn well changes you. And I am an old dog of 38.
Well, firstly I’ve retreated from all of the healthy constructs that I used to use to behave like a normal person. I think I am still ‘normal’. But I’ve been told for the last couple of years I’m not. And it has meant I have let slip the reins to a certain degree. The insecure me, the angry me, the raging me, the paranoid me, have all been let loose far more than I ever let them be. (When I was officially well). After all, why bother, when one can’t even be a local School Governor? I’m not allowed. I know the governors. They all get pissed in the pub, then drive to pick their kids up in their godalmighty 4x4s.
And I’m not eligible to be on a jury. Despite the fact I have one of the finestly graduated shades of grey mindy mind I’ve ever had the pleasureful pleasure of meeting.
So fuck that.
Crazy Nurse is stuck on the waiting list.
I went to the GP who said she would write a referral letter. The crisis team said because I was known to the trust (the mental health trust is all one and the same, with wards and services on the site of a number of different acute hospital trusts) that I wouldn’t have too much of a wait before I got an outpatient appointment. A month or so later I went back to the GP as I hadn’t heard a thing, so she said she would check with her minions that it had been sent. She never got back to me, it was obvious at the time that she didn’t have the time for mental people; but whether or not she chased it up, I’ve still heard nothing from the hospital. Maybe she never wrote one??
So as it stands at the moment, I’ve no psychiatrist, and no CBT, and when I moved house which was in February I self removed myself off the CPN waiting list as well. So given that technically that means I am under no ones care, I technically aren’t mental.
I was initially pleased, like, yey me!! As if they had thought I was any kind of risk I wouldn’t have been aloud to float off under the radar. But, it has occurred to me that if anything now happens, I am at increased risk of being admitted because there is no support network. During my past two encounters with the Crisis Team; because of my good backup i.e. DrF and the nurse practitioner at my old GP’s, I have been allowed to stay at home. But now, I don’t have that back up.
The obvious answer is to stay not mentally interesting. I hope I can do that.
Prozacville goes Freudian
Tall Guy Writes looks at Antisocial Personality Disorder.
This week’s non-mental health Wildcard comes from Laurie Penny at Liberal Conspiracy. In news that will warm the cockles of Oldschoolbaby’s heart, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) are debating whether to appoint a Straight White Men’s Officer to the students union.
The needs of straight, white males are different to the needs of other minority groups, and should be treated as such. But being born a privileged son does not mean that one deserves to be denied support in the process of finding and exploring one’s identity, especially as growing up white, straight and male in Britain today is so often a confusing and painful experience.
Today’s white, straight men too often mistake the work that equality activists do to oppose the worst consequences of white, male, heteronormative privilege as active discrimination against themselves as individuals. Attacks on unearned privilege are not the same as discrimination, nor are they something which any ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’ should waste his time opposing. Instead, such an officer would best serve his community by helping students explore positive ways of expressing a straight, white, masculine identity in a society thoroughly sick of being dominated by straight, white males.
She concludes in favour of the proposal.
SOAS was established a century ago to train white, straight young men in the arts of domination and subjection. With a little imagination, it could well end up training the next generation of white, straight young men – struggling to find their place in a world that orders them to dominate and then blames them for doing so – in the arts of listening, sharing and solidarity.
Awesome roundup as usual, and the wildcard is a brilliant choice. *Loves Laurie Penny*
Lola x
“Today’s white, straight men too often mistake the work that equality activists do to oppose the worst consequences of white, male, heteronormative privilege as active discrimination against themselves as individuals”
Clearly written by someone who either lacks insight or doesn’t spend much time around ‘equality activists’, nor visits their blogs where they spout the most incredible misadric bile with impunity.
Does SuperBunnykins Cellar Door engage in blatant misandry to bolster her position of being actually quite scary? No, quite studiousness and commitment to her studies/work is what brings Socrates to heal, whimpering like a puppy.
Does DeeDee nail scrota to the wall before explaining to the boys that screaming Ugg! and hitting the computer with a mallet is not the preferred method of re-booting a server?
Did my Aunt Flo outline an anti-patriarchal context of her actions before stabbing her unfaithful husband with a pair of scissors?
Real women pick up a 45 and blow their men’s brains out. They never stamp on their balls.
Be careful Socrates – I am a feminist and proud to be one. And I think white straight males DO need to be made to examine their unearned privilege. It’s my experience that they don’t like having it pointed out. Tough.
There is diversity in white, straight males too – I’m one, but I hate Top Gear, football etc, and that sort is somewhat alien and sometimes scary to me.
Yes. White straight males are still forced into quite rigid social conventions. Women and minority groups have pushed back the boundaries of their social conventions a bit more. However, white straight males do still benefit from the fact that most of society is set up for them.
“quite studiousness and commitment to her studies/work is what brings Socrates to heal, whimpering like a puppy.”
So I don’t need the stilettos and riding crop…?
Oh well
Nice roundup Z
Thanks for the mention. I do love Prozacville!
Great round up, thanks Z
I am a feminist
You hide it well.
I am a masculinist. A white, working-class, autistic man, born and raised in Southall to a divorced, disabled, Mother and have been homeless for most of the past 15 years. Where the fuck is my privilege?
You’re not middle class, you’re disabled, and you’re poor. There’s your answer. The concept privilege networks is a useful one to understand how disadvantage works, however there are many many overlapping such networks and it is just a conceptual tool.
For example, I benefit from being raised in a middle class household and living in a middle class neighbourhood. My values are those of the ruling classes. I am taken seriously by psychiatrists, especially SHOs, partly, I suspect, because I come from the same academic middle class background that they do. So, I speak and express myself the same way, I have things in common with them, I can relate to them. That’s an example of my middle class privilege and education privilege right there. Wether they would take me just as seriously if I left school at 15 and had a pronounced working class accent is another matter. I could go my entire life without realising how much shit patients from a working class background might end up having to take from the exact same doctors purely on grounds of being considered thick due to class. So I could easily think that problems in doctor-patient interaction don’t really exist. See what I mean?
Not really, very drunk. It is Friday night after all. I will return sober and consider properly.
My Granny drove a truck in the War. And much to the neighbours’ disgust, continued to do so after it was over. Her youngest daughter grew up to be a truck driver too, for Corona. This was in the early seventies. Just before her husband got scissored for shagging her best mate. My mum, her sister was a keen archer and could just about draw a long bow – her legs not working had concentrated the benefit of her very active life into her arms – very muscley arms, that came in quite handy when discipling 3 teenage boys.
ummm lost my point. drunk and disorderly – I did my own TWIM except it’s called TWTWTWIA. So it’s two TW’s better than yours *stickstongueout*.
i will return. hungover,.
No it’s not. It’s Saturday.
Point being, they have never read nor heard of Andrea Dworkin
Thanks again for the mention! A fine collection as usual
The needs of straight, white males are different to the needs of other minority groups
OTHER minority groups? That suggests SWM are a minority group. Has nobody noticed that the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the vast majority of ministers in both the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet, judges, Chief Constables, magistrates, company chairmen, bankers, NHS chief executives, vice-chancellors and archbishops are straight white men?
such an officer would best serve his community etc
GAH! I hate this identity politics shit. What bloody “community”? There’s no such thing as the “straight white male community”, just as there’s no such thing as the “gay community” or the “Muslim community” – treating people as homogenous lumps of humanity called “communities” is what gets us into such trouble.
Laure Penny needs to grow up, and learn how to write.
I think her point was that straight, white men are a minority within SOAS.
Then her writing is even sloppier than I at first thought.
‘s funnily enough, just reading Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”…
All of those white men you mention are old and will die soon. The younger generation of men are rapidly adopting the position demanded of them by wymyn, which is either objects of ridicule/disdain or of utterly subservience.
It is obvious that vegetarianism and the consequent massive intake of phyto-oestrogens is responsible for the latter.
I’m uninterested in the reason for the former, but am fairly sure that rugby, 6 days a week in the middle of winter, right up on the South Downs whilst being shouted at by someone that used to kill foreigners for a job, would work wonders for their self-esteem.
Our Chief Constable is a women, as is the chief exec of our Trust. Camerooney is about to engage in a typically PC bout of blatant discrimination and tell loads of perfectly qualified men, that their dicks make them ineligible for High Office.
At the same time I couldn’t help but notice a news story about US women suffering terribly from having babies of the wrong gender and that girls are the most popular choice for babies in the American clinics.The subculture of “women who are bitterly unhappy about their baby’s gender and who can’t get over it”
I suppose they can fly some of the excess Indian boys over for marriage. [see Orwell's November 11, 1946, Tribune piece]
[lmfao! do I sound like OSB, or what?!]