"Philosophical rhetoric when not grounded in reality is nowt but sophistry of the most facile variety." - DeeDee Ramona
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Here is something we can all get into a self righteous lather over. I am not sure if Iris Robinson is a British MP or a member of the Northern Ireland assembly her husband, Peter Robinson, is the leader of the DUP and First Minister, but Iris is reported by Hansard as saying;
“There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children.”
[They] also found that 86% thought being an MP was stressful…
…One in three of them said colleagues’ attitudes and the possibility of a hostile media reaction prevented openness about mental health issues.
Much the same was the case with gay MPs in previous years and while I don’t imagine it’s a huge amount better than it was, there have been some who have been prepared to be open about their sexual orientation. This has been an enormous help in informing the public debate on equality for gay people.
What’s needed is an MP who is prepared to go on the record about his mental health problems, in the same way as former Norwegian PM Kjell Magne Bondevik did when depression forced him to take a very public sick leave ten years ago. An MP who was prepared to do so would be a brave individual indeed, and one can imagine the reaction of the media to such an admission. But think of the good it could do for people with mental health problems.
An epitaph for the eighties? “There is no such thing as society”
“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it.’I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”
Prime minister Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987
Now, nothing irritates me more than being told to smile. I don’t like being told to smile by friends, and I certainly don’t like being dictated to by tunnels! However, for those of you working as nurses in the NHS, it may serve you well to remember that tunnel. In fact, perhaps you should have the word “smile” tattooed on your inner eyelids, just so you don’t forget. Why? Well, because the Dear Leader, Chairman Johnson has decided nurses should be rated on how smiley and nice they are.
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“The fact of the matter is that the binge-drinking problem is largely an underclass problem. Teen pregnancies are largely an underclass problem. Teenage crime is largely an underclass problem. Child neglect – we live in a country where a little girl allegedly starved to death in her own home last week – is largely an underclass problem. Our collective problems are largely underclass problems.”
Has caught the attention of Melanie Phillips who writes in her blog
“Absolutely untrue. All these problems, experienced disproportionately by those at the bottom of the heap, were foisted upon them by the over class of which India Knight is a member”
She then goes onto accuse the champagne socialist intelligentsia of destroying the traditional family, demonising men, incentivising mass fatherless ness and declaring never married motherhood an inalienable human right. In short it is left wing intellectuals, the permissive society and the swinging sixties in particular which are responsible for the destruction of society as we knew it.
“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?
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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Features of the reform are familiar from other policy areas. First, a demonisation of a needy or vulnerable group, followed by a rebranding: so claimants become not even “clients” but “customers” (as in the just published “Commissioning Strategy” document); incapacity benefit becomes employment and support allowance; sick notes are redrafted for doctors to certify, not what patients can’t but what they can do. Next come “partnerships”, on an unchallenged assumption that the public sector has failed. The new system is farmed out to for-profit or non-profit-making agencies paid by results. This entails targets, and where targets are set, sanctions follow, for any who “fail to recover”.
Read the whole thing, it’s very enlightening.
Eight out of 10 nurses say they have left work distressed because they have been unable to treat patients with the dignity they deserve, a poll suggests.
Today, a different poll of nurses revealed another concern.
A poll of 1,752 nurses found that a fifth of the time of a standard nurse is spent doing non-essential paperwork.
Hmm, could these two issues be somehow…related? I stroke my imaginary beard.
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Lampooned as Dr Spock’s less humorous older brother in 1995 while Secretary of state for Wales he returned £100,000,000 of Wales’ block grant to the UK treasury unspent following efficiency savings and cost-cutting measures, this is usually forgotton unlike his attempt to sing the Welsh national anthem at a public event despite obviously not knowing the words.
In his current post on Milband’s travails he makes what I think are a number of telling and intelligent points about the differences between the public and private sector.
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The reason is that I was at the Operation Party Hard protests in London against the Church of Scientology.
I think criticism of psychiatry is perfectly valid, except when it comes from the Church of Scientology. They have a museum entitled Psychiatry - An Industry of Death, which among other things accuses psychiatry of being responsible for the Holocaust. The CoS also has questions to answer about the deaths of Lisa McPherson a mentally ill woman who died under the care of the Church of Scientology, and of Elli Perkins who was killed by her schizophrenic son after Scientologists treated him with vitamins instead of antipsychotics.
I have pictures of the protests. Lots and lots of pictures. Since we’ve been having bandwidth problems on this site, I’ve created a separate blog over here. Go take a peek at what I was up to.
I thought the Mental Nurse readership might be interested to know that WISH’s campaign against the smoking restrictions in mental health inpatient units, Stubbing Out Our Rights, has been launched this week.
The arguments for and against the restrictions have already been debated here in a lot of depth so I won’t go into them again, but if you’d like to wander over to the campaign’s website you will see WISH’s take on the issue.
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The Welfare State has sapped the souls of those who it was supposed to help, infantilizing them; the insulation that it provides has led to generations of people who neither understand nor care about the consequences of their actions.
The Welfare State has been enormously expensive and fantastically wasteful, thus sapping the incentive in those who pay for it to work; they have seen their hard-earned cash pissed up the wall on providing perverse incentives for those who are the recipients.
An e-mail sent out from a Daily Mail journalist.
PUBLICATION: Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)
JOURNALIST: Diana Appleyard (staff)
DEADLINE: 14-February-2008 16:00
QUERY: I am urgently looking for anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear, or have lied about their resident status. We can pay you £100 for taking part, and I promise it will be anonymous, just a quick phone call. Could you email me asap? Many thanks, DianaHOW TO REPLY:
Email: mailto:dianaappleyard@aol.com
Phone: not provided for use
Fax: 01296 738083 (preferred)
Vile, racist and utterly indefensible. How do these sleazebags from the Daily Mail sleep at night?
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