It’s a good week for people being taken to task in this week’s TWIM. Aethelred slams the Daily Express for their reporting of benefits issues, Mad Sad Girl calls out the media for their handling of the MMR-autism scare, and this week’s wildcard reveals a UKIP politician praising a terrorist attack.
Aethelred the Unread takes the Daily Express to task for its portrayal of people on incapacity benefit.
The Daily Express yesterday informed its readers that there are 2,000,000 people claiming Incapacity Benefit who ought not be receiving it. The methodology by which they arrive at this outlandish figure seems to be more than a little dubious.
They begin by looking at people who were assessed for the new benefit which is replacing Incapacity Benefit, Employment Support Allowance, between October 2008 and December 2009. Of these people, 68% were rated fit for work, while another 22% were assessed as having health problems but still being capable of some work, making a total of 90% who ought, as the Express believes, be in employment. The paper then extrapolates from these figures, assuming that the same percentage of people who are in receipt of Incapacity Benefit would fail the assessment for ESA, and that consequently the overwhelming majority of people on IB are receiving their money under false pretences.
This ignores the fact that – contrary to what rabidly right-wing scandal sheets might have you believe – people under the old system weren’t just showered with cash from the Magical Money Tree the moment they uttered the words “I’m feeling a bit peaky”. In fact, to successfully claim IB you had to be repeatedly assessed as incapable of work by a doctor or nurse. As a result of this, a proportion of people applying for IB were turned down. I know this for a fact, since I was once amongst their number, until an appeal tribunal overturned the decision. This means that the percentage of IB recipients judged capable of work will necessarily be lower than people applying from scratch, because the bulk of the chancers will already have been screened out by the medical assessments for IB. All of this is common sense, and would be obvious to anyone who had thought about the issue.
Fighting Monsters discusses racial bias in psychiatric research.
Today, the Guardian prints an open letter from a number of mental health campaigners and academics challenging the Aesop study, its conclusions and the way it has been reported.
Quite rightly, the letter states that this conclusions tell us nothing new. We have known for a long time that there are higher rates of incidence of schizophrenia among minor ethnic populations however, there are reasons for this that might be related to the way and the stages at which diagnosis is made.
The letter states that
The way in which this ‘finding’ about diagnostic patterns has been reported stigmatises and pathologises African Caribbean communities as being inherently flawed in some way that generates ‘mental illness’ – a throwback to the discredited Moynihan report in the US, which stated in 1965 that the African American family was a ‘tangle of pathology’. There is plenty of evidence on the nature and extent of institutional discrimination and racism in the British mental health system. Failing to recognise this and, even more seriously, singling out groups and blaming their lifestyle or culture is the thin end of a socially divisive wedge. If ’social engineering’ is being called for, it may be more effective to apply it to mental health services and service providers, not to communities.
Which (unsurprisingly if you look at the signatories!) makes the point far better than I could.
Lake Cocytus asks, who cares for people with dementia?
Dr Kirsten posed a sensible question, here, asking how could a patient with delirium be managed better.
I’ll post on that, later.
It did get me wondering though, why the question wasn’t reversed. Why wasn’t an old age psychiatrist asking Dr Kirsten for the advice. No, really, think about it. Our psychiatric hospital has less than a dozen patients with dementia on the wards. Our neighbouring acute hospital Trust has, across it’s medical and surgical wards, a lot more. Statistically, I’d expect them to have 334 patients who are older adults with dementia in their beds, today.
334.
That’s a lot.
That’s common place, that’s who they have to look after, each and every day, on their wards. We have less than a dozen on ours.
In-patient care of older adults with dementia; who should the experts be?
Marine Snow is reminiscing back to 1999.
“So what are you going to do Lo-Lo?” His nickname for me has never had as much use as of late. Since he applied for University something has changed in him. Softened and matured. Like the cheese that Jake will not eat.
“What about you?”“About what?” I mumble, ignoring the direction that this conversation is headed.
(Female. Female. Female)“The Future,”
(Of course, silly me)“Dunno,” I am a surly teenager, curled lip and hunched shoulders, “Dunno if I, just, well, you know, I might not,” I say
then very softly to the Female
“have one”
Writing in the Margins of My Mind is stuck in the paperwork.
I went into my session with my CPN yesterday armed with a detailed timeline of events, from my perspective, linked to my (still non-existent) psychotherapy referral. From May last year, when original contact was made by my CAMHS team with the service, to September when I was promised the psychiatrist would make the referral, to November when it hadn’t been done, to last week, when I was told she had done it but didn’t know what was happening with it (and neither do I, as I haven’t even received a copy of the letter, never mind anything from the therapy service). I wanted to show her how the situation looked from my point of view, and why I’m so frustrated.
After discussion, CPN is going to double check that the referral has been written, typed and sent, and get me a copy if she can. Apparently it may be the typed and sent part that is missing, because there is a huge administrative backlog from my psychiatrist. She told me in November that the reason she hadn’t done my referral, 2 months after saying she would, was that she has a caseload of 90 and she just hadn’t had the time. CPN tells me that there are people who saw her in October still waiting on reports, letters, etc. Can I just say that this is fucking unacceptable.
DeeDee Ramona continues her reminiscences from Big Dublin Hospital, describing the Young Adult Programme.
Assertiveness training was role play to learn to stand up for yourself without being aggressive. We did this with the ED program folks. I found it very effective. The key was the role play – you learned to feel good about saying “no”. Self-esteem group involved doing exercises from the Feeling Good Handbook, dealing with anxiety was about self-administered exposure therapy, social skills was about being better with people, teamwork group tended to vary, but included the Monopoly-themed game I wrote about a while back, and so on.
It’s hard to overstate how much these groups helped me later on. While I was doing them, I didn’t have much success, because, to be honest, I was far too ill to be on the program in the first place, and it was like bungee running, without the right medication.
But later on, after I left hospital and started to get better, I was able to apply all I had learned. These days I have excellent social skills, back then I had absolutely none. I hated myself with a passion, that is definitely no longer true. I was crippled by all-pervasive anxiety and paranoia, these are almost entirely gone. So, I’m glad I got put on the program even if it wasn’t the best thing for me at the time.
The supportive group setting and the role play nature of a lot of the exercises is what made them so effective, I think.
I also made a lot of very good friends. However, I wasn’t able to persuade any of them to stop smoking so damn much.
Genius Gone Wrong meets with her psychiatrist.
We talked a lot, too much for me to put everything here but in a concise overview we discussed what happened on Monday in college, we discussed the university interviews and we discussed how depressed I currently am and the effect it was beginning to have on my day to day living. We also had a through long talk about L1 and my thoughts and feelings about Huddersfield. In fact most of today’s appointment seemed to focus on L1 and Huddersfield University. In fact a lot of what we talked about was about the life changing decisions happening right now, how I was wondering if I was really cut out for mental health nursing when I was not ‘well’ myself. She reassures me university is still my next destination and I shouldn’t give up the dream I have. Being ‘unwell’ now makes no difference to anything.
The thing with Dr G is that I do feel able to talk to her about anything. She appreciates the fact that I brought up how depressed I was and had been for a few weeks. I’d started to recognise the symptoms some weeks back but when you get to the point where you realise you’re bordering on severe depression again you know it’s time to be more honest with your shrink and take the appropriate steps. She’s happy I did this, I’m happy I made this step. It might be a dark time now, but I confided in her and the next step is to stick to the plan I have made until this period of depression starts to lift and things look a little brighter.
Frontier Psychiatrist has a fascinating interview with the author of the Prozacville cartoons, which I’m a big fan of.
Where do you get your inspiration for your cartoons?
It’s very much a mish-mash: things I’m reading about, things happening to me or those close to me, newspaper articles, tweets, bleats, Negative Automatic Thoughts, advertising hoardings, the general whirr and whirl of the world flooding into into eyes and ears and sparking off something that feels like a Prozacville idea.A lot of your cartoons have mental health as a theme – have you had much to do with mental health services either as a patient or a professional?
Both. I’m nearing the end of my three year training as a counsellor/psychotherapist (integrative), and so quite keenly registering the experience of being (and having been) on both sides of the couch, which is hopefully something I’ll be able to hold onto in my own clinical work. I think we sometimes forget that all health professionals were at some point patients/clients -some more than others- and it feels right that it should be this way. I’m not a huge fan of Jung, but the notion of ‘The Wounded Healer’ is a powerful one.
Here is this week’s cartoon from Prozacville.
My Medicated Cartoon Life has started posting again. This isn’t mental health-related, but the hype around the iPad irritates the hell out of me, so….
Neuroskeptic reviews Crazy Like Us, a book about the Americanisation of psychiatry, and makes some interesting points about culture and mental illness.
If our way of thinking about mental illness is as culturally bound as any other, then our own “psychiatric disorders” are no more eternal and objectively real than those Malaysian syndromes like amok, episodes of anger followed by amnesia, or koro, the fear the that ones genitals are shrinking away.
In other words, maybe patients with “anorexia”, “PTSD” and perhaps “schizophrenia” don’t “really” have those things at all – at least not if these are thought of as objectively-existing diseases. In which case, what do they have? Do they have anything? And what are we doing to them by diagnosing and treating them as if they did?
Watters’ does not discuss such questions; I think this was the right choice, because a full exploration of these issues would fill at least one book in itself. But here are a few thoughts:
First, the most damaging thing about the globalization of Western psychiatric concepts is not so much the concepts themselves, but their tendency to displace and dissolve other ways of thinking about suffering – whether they be religious, philosophical, or just plain everyday talk about desires and feelings. The corollary of this, in terms of the individual Western consumer of the DSM, i.e. you and me, is the tendency to see everything through the lens of the DSM, without realizing that it’s a lens, like a pair of glasses that you’ve forgotten you’re even wearing. So long as you keep in mind that it’s just one system amongst others, a product of a particular time and place, the DSM is still useful.
Second, if it’s true that how we conceptualize illness and suffering affects how we actually feel and behave, then diagnosing or narrativizing mental illness is an act of great importance, and potentially, great harm. We currently spend billions of dollars researching major depressive disorder and schizophrenia, but very little on investigating “major depressive disorder” and “schizophrenia” as diagnoses. Maybe this is an oversight.
Confessions of a Serial Insomniac is experiencing akathisia (restlessness caused by antipsychotic medication)
I can’t stay still – I am experiencing severe anatomical discomfort, from the very core of my physical being. I keep trying to move to combat it, but it never quite seems to work; the discomfort simply moves, or wasn’t where I thought it was. Breathing is difficult, as if perpetually on the verge of a full-blown panic attack. I am incredibly anxious and am almost completely consumed by a sense of terrified foreboding and/or danger. Even that feels physical, which I know doesn’t make any sense, but I don’t know how else to put it. Concentrating on this post (and anything else) is profoundly difficult. My mind is racing – the pressure inside it again feels physical. It literally feels like it is going to explode and on top of that, I keep feeling ‘zaps’ in my head (and elsewhere at times), a bit like if I had missed a dose of Venlafaxine, only much worse in severity. I want to scream and shout and run around and bang my head off the wall and stab myself and cry. Earlier I considered going to the petrol station, with a view to purchasing flammable liquid to set myself on fire. Extreme perhaps (well…there’s no ‘perhaps’ about it, I suppose), but in a way I cannot explain, even the indescribable agony of burning (normally one of my room-101 style fears) seems preferable to the indescribable somethingness of this.
In a sense this could be described as a mixed episode with anxiety or something. It is a bit like that, I suppose, except that it’s more. So much horribly more. It effects every conceivable part of me; mentally, physically, everything. It burns through me, every vein, every nerve – it feels like much more than a mixed episode (as if they were not unpleasant enough), but in a way that has a very elusive and unobtainable description.
Some poetry from So Sick of Drowning.
I was once an angel
Who could soar
Through the sky
But no one sees that now
Instead they see a girl
In a hospital bed
With slit wrists
And junked out eyes
Forcibly caricaturedI am now a sorrowful angel
An angel of blood and dust
I have lost control
And there is a revolution
Raging in my head
The real me is gone
Trapped in a memory cloudDeep inside my mind
Those voices that populate
My inner cities
The Youths on the streets
Once intrepid and wise,
Now unemployed, homeless,
Chanting down world leadersThey have consigned
Loving Gestures
To forgotten halls
Where my heart
Used to beatThey pump more magic potions
Into me. And the magic bullet
Roars to the centre of my soul
Where my dreams are cultivated.
Mad Sad Girl has an excellent post on the MMR-autism scare.
Throughout the time period that I was looking at it was interesting to note that the length of the article seemed to be related to the perceived interest that the article would attract in each of the papers. Those in the Sun and News of the World tended to be of few words and there was certainly no evidence of analysis of the data. In the Mail and the Mail on Sunday there were likely to be not only the actual report of whatever had occurred but also a long piece that in effect said that Andrew Wakefield was a saint and should be thanked by one and all for alerting us to the risk of one’s offspring developing autism as a result of receiving the MMR vaccine, particularly if said piece was written by Melanie Phillips. The Times and Sunday Times tended to have measured pieces, which not only reported the facts but also regularly reported that no-one had been able to replicate the results that Dr Wakefield claimed to have produced. The one area where all of the papers seemed to produce very similar stories was the question of whether Leo Blair had or had not received the MMR vaccine.
Brian Deer was the reporter who eventually managed to investigate so deeply into the whole affair that he uncovered the evidence of unethical practices concerning how children were selected for the study, how Wakefield had received huge sums of money from the Legal Aid Board, and a multitude of other wrongdoings. If Deer had been writing in the US press he would have undoubtedly won a Pulitzer prize for his investigative reports.
There is no doubt that many of those mothers who decided that they would not allow their children to receive the MMR vaccine did so because they believed every word that reporters such as Melanie Phillips wrote. It is almost criminal that newspapers are allowed to print the kind of unsubstantiated drivel that she wrote on the MMR-autism link. She would regularly write about scientific evidence that did not actually exist, and never wrote about the evidence that did. It would not matter to reporters such as her how many studies were carried out showing that the link did not exist, in her mind Andrew Wakefield had shown that the link existed and that was it as far as she was concerned.
Obsessively compulsively Yours discusses medication for OCD.
Medication has been proven to be very helpful in the treatment of OCD, but it is a very individual thing. What may be a miracle drug for one person will be almost completely useless to another. However… medicine is not a permanent cure for OCD – you often only feel better whilst you’re still popping those crazy pills.
So, is medication a crutch? Yeah, I guess that it is in some ways. Okay, so there’s the argument that it is there to correct a chemical imbalance (which I totally subscribe to – I’m much more comfortable with this model than the psychoanalytical one) but people can and do recover from OCD without. But what’s wrong with a crutch? I’ve just come out of plaster and although I could have walked around on my broken foot, it would have taken much longer to heal and been more painful – and the same is true with taking the medication for OCD.
It is certainly not week to accept help of the pharmacological kind – psychotropics are not “stress -reducers;” they correct genuine disorders. Far from being a sign of weakness, it takes a certain degree of strength to admit that you have an illness that may need medication. Is there any sense in struggling through CBT, putting yourself through hellish levels of anxiety when there is something available that will make it all just that little bit easier?
In the end it is a personal decision – some will decide that they can make it alone (and I’m very impressed by those who do, but please don’t try to push me to mimic your bravery) and others, like me, will decide that we need that crutch for a while. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Honest.
Bippidee is having problems with suicidal thoughts and the binge-purge cycle.
I saw L today. I am so grateful to have such a supportive and caring CPN. If there were more people like her working in the NHS then Mental Health services would be so much better. I have never had another care coordinator who I have felt able to trust to such an extent, and who I have believed genuinely cares about what happens to me and is actually committed to helping me. I am obviously very attached to her, but I think she knows that and knows how to deal with it (and me!).
I am struggling a lot. Very strong suicidal thoughts, which to be honest I do feel like I will act on at some point soon. It sounds stupid but my weight and eating issues are contributing to this, although obviously that isn’t the only thing by any means. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had lost a couple of pounds, basically from feeling too crap to move. Unfortunately that has now swung into comfort eating, which is the other thing that can happen to my eating when my depression is bad. Consequently not only have I gained the 2 pounds that I lost, but I have gained more on top of that. I have just weighed myself (yes I know it is 3AM and that is a stupid time to be awake, let alone weigh myself) and nearly burst into tears as my weight is just going up and up and I feel so bloody out of control of that too now, on top of all the feelings and thoughts that I can’t control. Plus I have some documentary on TV that just showed a clip of You’re The One That I Want from Grease, and Olivia Newton John looked so skinny that I found it really triggering, and I am not usually triggered easily like that. It was just weighing myself and seeing my weight so high, followed by seeing that. It just really set me off.
This week’s wildcard is a shocking post on Liberal Conspiracy about a UKIP MEP who praised the French attack on the Rainbow Warrior.
Godfrey Bloom is a UK Independence Party MEP from Yorkshire & North Lincolnshire. He is a fervent climate change denier and has made speeches at the EU Parliament stating global warming isn’t happening and dismissing the idea of Co2 as a pollutant. Bloom also records videos for his own YouTube account.
Recently he made a video (below) standing in front of a Greenpeace boat. He starts off by calling it a “fascist boat”, funded by “ridiculous middle-class, middle-aged people spouting junk science”.
He goes on to say:
This is a huge stunt for middle class people to have a little bit of a float around the world. The whole thing is a sham, the whole thing is ridiculous.
He then concludes the short video with:
And I don’t often say anything good about the French but one thing I can say – well done the French for sinking one of these things. Vive Le France!
There’s only one incident he could be referring to: the French intelligence services sinking of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior in 1985 which killed a photographer and injured others.
Thanks very much for the mention, Z. Some really interesting posts this week – thank you especially for highlighting those that have a political bent.
I’m disgusted by the Express’s typically lax journalism, but frankly not surprised. It seems to me that so many people assume that mental health issues in particular are somehow unworthy of benefits – I can only imagine that this ignorance is predicated on the idea that there is no definitive test for most such disorders in the way there generally is for physical illness. But I guarantee that if some of these people were unfortunate enough to develop mental health disorders, they’d quickly change their minds.
Speaking personally, I absolutely despise the fact that I presently can’t work. The last place I ever saw myself was claiming ESA and DLA; I’ve worked since I was 16 and done two degrees. Why bother if my intention was to malinger? No, this is not what I wanted for myself, and I hate being in this position. It was not a choice.
And as for the wildcard entry – well, words fail me. All I can say is that the article underlines the dangers of parties like UKIP (or at the very least their individual members); they may claim that they are not ‘extreme’ hardliners, but as far as I can see, the evidence speaks very strongly to the contrary.
Anyway, great TWIM this week. Thanks!
I can’t work because I don’t belong on this planet.
Thank you for the inclusion. Wasn’t expecting it due to the ammount of whiny crap I have been churning out!
Just been reading your blog. You’re being really brave – hang on in there!
Oh thank you Michael. That made me cry (don’t take it personally – everything does at the moment. I cried watching Glee of all things the other day…)!
Glee is awesome!
It really is!
I have a whiney blog too.
Your blog is interesting, well designed and really well written – perhaps that’s because you are interesting and well designed too! The incident with your father throwing the Christmas presents at your mother, and his apparent change of character, I’m sure you’re right, he was ill. Have you read Jo Brand’s autobiography, ‘Look Back in Hunger’? The same thing happens with her father, and Jo was the focus of his anger. You are not alone.
Thank you Bristol Michael. It’s all the the eye of the beholder, I expect. And thank you for being so understanding about the situation with my father. I’ll look at Jo Brand’s autobiography. I’ve had my eye on it for ages. She was a psychiatric nurse too, wasn’t she?
Sorry for taking so long to respond to this. I am slothful.
‘rie
Thank You. What a great round up.
Lola x
Godfrey Bloom’s opinions would be most unpopular here in NZ, where the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior continues to be viewed as a terrorist attack in NZ territory sanctioned by the French government.
I can’t imagine they’ll make him Mr Popular over here either, to be honest.
Thanks for the mention!
I’m sooooo glad Mr Bloom favours the cold-blooded murder of people he doesn’t agree with.
The photographer who died, Fernando Pereira, was caught belowdecks and wasn’t able to get out on time like the others, and so he drowned. Which, I’m told, is not a nice way to go. He left behind a 8-year old daughter.
Of course the spotlight of the weak liberal minded on MN won`t bother to focus on how many innocent lives have been taken in foreign forays undertaken by the Labour Party, perhaps with the support of the British Intelligence Services.
I`m afraid I`ve reached the point where any old bollocks from a politician, if they`re actually saying what they believe rather than simply staying on message, is appealing. The unfortunate demise of Mr Pereira, nor the fact I`m a bit of an eco – mentalist, won`t make me hesitate for a second before ticking the UKIP box.
Dear old Queen Victoria, eh what sergeant major? Battle skills honed on the playing fields of Eton, doing battle with the Hun over the skies of North Africa, charming young filly, met her on shore leave in Tanganyika, of course at the time I was very, very drunk.
“Demn thing worz, when I sobered up, turned out she was exactly that, a young filly. Sticky spot to be in, what! Could’ve bin court martialled fer bestiality if my Uncle Egbert hadn’t been at Marlborough with the Divisional Major General. Even so, hed to do extra picquet duty with all the blasted, sheep-shaggin’ Welsh grooms laughin’ up their sleeves at me. Bloody country’s goin’ to the dogs!”
I was right up UKIP then. There’s an interesting, Freudian parapraxis I’ve decided not to correct: I had intended to type “…right about UKIP…” Ah, the playing fields of Eton! I was in the 6th Form at a school not far off, to which Eton extended some hospitality, e.g. use of their cross-country course, their cricket 2nd XI playing our 1st XI, their Combined Cadet Force having mock battles with ours. In the last of these, I was once captured, taken into a foxhole and asked: “Ay say! Hev you gort any weeds?” When I hadn’t, they lost interest, giving me the opportunity to escape through the woods, pursued by cries of: “Ay say! Come back hyar! Yora PRISNAH!” In such manner are this country’s battles won and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, lost.
I don`t get this. Who are you people ? I live on a council estate in a Labour heartland. If I`m in my local paper shop when it opens, and I regularly am, I can buy the FT and other broadsheets but not the Guardian. EVERYbody I speak to, to some degree or other, is tempted by a right wing message. With some trepidation I`m going UKIP. I want some core issues sorting. I don`t know what their health policies are and, frankly, I don`t care. My vote is a done deal. A lot of people are still to be swayed though. The electoral process depends on hard campaigning and a lot of doorstepping but fate can play a huge role. A 7/7 atrocity, nasty crimes committed by immigrants or even a smart, charismatic figure to unite the right wing parties ( and if you add them up they already attract a significant percentage of the vote ), disenchanted Tories, the Christian right and the white working class. All of a sudden there is quite some potential for a nasty mess. Yet you fuckwit liberals cling to your stupidities and titter at the threat oblivious to the squalid mess the left have made of this country. Cover your arses they`re about to be bitten.
Allow me to assure you, Sar’nt, you really wouldn’t want to bite my arse. Try a decent steak from the butcher, if you can find one who isn’t halal of course. And I’ll have you know, young man, that I read the Times not the Guardian – I dislike knee jerkers of any shape, form or variety. Still, only you are Right, in both senses, and anyone who disagrees is a “fuckwit liberal”. I do realise you care, so I’ll stop taking the piss at this point. But I do think you need a holiday.
Have you ever read Christopher Hitchens’ ‘The Broken Compass’?
Do I understand your post correctly?
So you’re voting for some right-wing nutbags, when you don’t know what their important policies are (if health isn’t a core issue, what is?), because you think people turning to right-wing nutbags is going to make a nasty mess and it’s all the fault of the lefties.
Aren’t you a little old to be throwing your toys out of the pram with no concern for who they hit? Or is it more like those people who read 10 pages of Nietzsche and then act like they’ve got a valid philosophical reason for being just as selfish and thoughtless as they were going to be anyway?
Ah – looking at their website, they don’t seem to have a health policy. That is, it’s not one of the topics in their ‘Campaign Policies’ page, and their manifestos are all from 2009. Don’t go voting for a party that’s more interested in the niqab than the NHS. Not because it’ll upset me and be shocking, more because it’s… well… stupid and tacky.
Down the mine 25 hours a day, never saw daylight, still believed in God, Queen and Country though. Dad used to slice us in half with a breadknife after prayers, never did us any harm. Old Mr Pratchett taught us ethics on the rugby field, and young Rosie Dingleleaf taught us biology behind the school boilers. Still had Mr Pratchett’s words ringing in our ears when we were fighting on the beaches of Normandy, play up, play the game! Four ferrets down the trousers, five on Sunday if we were lucky.
Hi, thank you so much for including me.
Trying to get more people to respond to my blog. Any advice. Or is it just rubbish.
Is my prose writing really crap?
disregard the above please it was rude and plain crazy talk.
to the discredited Moynihan report in the US, which stated in 1965 that the African American family was a ‘tangle of pathology’
And no one thought to link this to the fact that they were living in a racist society and were treated as second class citizens in their own country. Un-be-freaking-liev- able.
Thanks for the mention in this weeks TWIM! Good selection and another new blog to read!
You`re a bit of a latecomer to the party Bristol Michael. I don`t follow MN as intently as I used to. I`ve no idea who you are or your standpoint. The fuckwit liberal stupidity of which I complain has been prevalent for a long time in this country. It has pretty much run riot since 1997. Any response to it can hardly be classified as kneejerk reaction. I`ve no clue whatsoever as to the political climate in Bristol but in this part of the world there are a LOT of people prepared to vote right wing. I don`t live in an area where the right wing already has elected representatives.
Going off at a tangent a touch, my wife was doing unpaid youth work earlier this week. ( I was at work ) A youth of around 15 came onto the premises and spat at two girls. My wife, dressed in the organisations uniform, remonstrated with him. He waited `til her back was turned, spat all over her and made good his escape. ( I was in a youth group and my behaviour in my teens left a lot to be desired but this type of thing just didn`t happen in my day ) Clearly, in modern Britain, informing the police would be entirely pointless. I`d be very curious to know what the Mentalists would consider to be an appropriate response.
Sorry for being a sprog who doesn’t know his place, I hope you’re not going to hide my kit. The knee jerk remark was aimed at the Guardian, not you, as the context of the sentence in which it occurs should have told you. BTW in contrasting the lack of Guardian buyers in your locality with the rise of the working class Right, and in much else of your thinking, you do not appear to be aware of the mathematical rule that a statistical relationship does not necessarily indicate a causal relationship.
The charismatic leader of whom you speak, well, Oswald Mosely came from the Labour Party so it can be none other than Peter Mandelson, obviously. I can understand why you wouldn’t want that, neither would I. The buzz from the street from fellow patients in the Bristol Royal Infirmary last May was not to vote at all, as all politicians regardless of party were “a bunch of rogues only out for themselves”. I think that will die down and people will vote as they usually do, with the result of the General Election depending as always on the middle ground. I’m not spelling my political opinions out to you, I believe in the secret ballot and I’m not breaching that here and now because the biggest boy in the playground tells me to. Besides, my brother can beat your brother.
I’m sorry about what happened to your wife but it did sometimes happen here and in Ireland in the 50s. I, too, was a Cheeky Chappy, especially at school. Our local community beat manager and his PC and PCSO assistants would be pretty effective in catching and dealing with the offender in my opinion. Additionally, I’ve been known to use peer pressure in such circumstances, to the extent that the miscreant has approached me, apologised and asked for protection.
Hey, Beakie! Less than 24 hours, then. And he doesn’t appear to have had a CVA so far. ‘Fuckwit:’ a word frequently used in conversation by those whose wits are fucked to enable others to escape without contamination.
A British yob spat on your wife so you want to vote UKIP?
BM, I was pointing out that as I`ve no idea of your opinions, I haven`t aimed any comments directly at you. As you may have been monitoring MN for some time you may have a greater feel for my opinion. Matters not. Feel free to consider yourself tarred with my liberal fuckwit brush though.
I certainly wasn`t thinking of Mandelson. I actually have no idea whether a right wing party harbours a young, savvy, charismatic thruster with the potential to impress the electorate. It can`t be beyond the realms of possibility.
You could well be right, the majority of voters might well revert to type come election day. Polling booths are highly likely to be exceptionally quiet. What I am saying is that surprising numbers of people are prepared to reveal that they are considering throwing in their lot with a right wing party. Fate could provide a lot of these people with the nudge they need to take the plunge. I doubt whether the smug, leftie tittering, underpinned by an implacable belief in intellectual superiority, so prevalent on MN is the sort of thing that will deter them. Or should that be us.
My wife`s youth organisation covers a large geographical area, one we don`t live in ourselves. The dity little spitter was entirely unknown to his victims. Peer pressure isn`t an option in dealing with him. I have little doubt the police could identify him if they chose to make the effort. As for “dealing” with him, it was an unpleasant incident unworthy of jokes.
Which brings me neatly on to you, Neuroskeptic. If my, longstanding actually, dis-satisafaction with the robustness of the criminal justice system is to be addressed which mainstream party do you suggest I vote for ?