AN ALTERNATIVE GUIDE TO MENTAL HEALTH CARE IN ENGLAND… The King’s Fund 08/10/15Every year, one in four of us will experience a mental health problem. The experience will be different for each of us, as will the type of support we need. But what mental health services are there? And how do they fit in with other health and public services? The King’s Fund has produced an animated film to help people to understand more about mental health issues and the possible care pathways. Released to coincide with World Mental Health Day on Saturday 10 October 2015, the animation was produced with input from three experts by experience and advice from a mental health nurse and a senior colleague from a mental health charity. The three stories feature Asif who suffers from diabetes which leads to deep depression; Alicia, a young girl who hears voices and goes into crisis; Mary, an elderly lady with dementia who eventually goes into a care home.The King’s Fund recognises that the experience of the three characters in the film will not reflect those of all mental health services users. Everyone’s needs and experiences are different, and the availability and quality of services vary across the country. The aim was to create something that would demonstrate the range of services available but also highlight some of the issues that need to be addressed.To view the animation go to the Home Page of the King’s Fund website:http://www.kingsfund.org.uk and click on ‘Watch the Animation’
Short Stories about……….Project
Please contact Steven Short, stevenshort23@hotmail.com for more information.
Short Stories About… project
Short Stories About… is a new series of collected writing and visual arts on a unifying theme.
Our debut collection, Short Stories About Mothers, featured a mother on the birth of her (extremely) premature twins, a woman who had decided motherhood wasn’t for her, a mum ‘lost’ to dementia and a nun talking about acting as midwife for a community (and her Mother Superior).
One of the aims of Short Stories About… is to present different takes on a subject, to challenge readers, to make people think (and to champion printed periodicals, Mothers has 48 pages). Short Stories About… also encourages work from new voices – unpublished authors – and showcase them alongside published ‘names’ (we had Matthew Fort, Jessica Fellowes and Lollie Barr in Mothers).
We are now inviting contributions for our second collection – Short Stories About Madness. The brief is open – what does Madness mean to you, what stories does it bring to mind, what thoughts, memories, experiences. What is Madness? We hope our collection, like Mothers, will make people look at the (huge) topic in a different way, challenge perceptions, inspire and entertain.
We welcome all kinds of contributions. Academic, fiction, memoir, essay. Word count 500 approx.
Deadline for expressing interest: 1 August. Deadline for first drafts: 31 August.
There is no fee – we are self funded, money from the sales of Mother are (hopefully) going to fund Madness. We have also donated copies to libraries in Brighton and Hove and Westminster and Hackney in order to reach a wider audience (who may not usually have access to this kind of material – we’re hoping to find new voices this way, too)
Charley Baker
Lecturer in Mental Health, School of Health Sciences , University of Nottingham
Associate Editor, Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing
ADDRESS: Royal Derby Hospital, Uttoxeter Road, Derby, DE22 3DT, UK
EMAIL: charlotte.l.baker@nottingham.ac.uk
PHONE: +44 (0)7882468272 / +44 (0)1332724922
WEBSITES: www.madnessandliterature.org / http://www.healthhumanities.org
BOOKS:
Health Humanities (Crawford, Brown, Baker et al) http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/health-humanities-paul-crawford/?K=9781137282590
The Roots of Violence are NOT Unknown – Alice Miller
by Alice Miller
The Roots of Violence are NOT Unknown
The misled brain and the banned emotions
The Facts:
1. The development of the human brain is use-dependent. The brain develops its structure in the first four years of life, depending on the experiences the environment offers the child. The brain of a child who has mostly loving experiences will develop differently from the brain of a child who has been treated cruelly.
2. Almost all children on our planet are beaten in the first years of their lives. They learn from the start violence, and this lesson is wired into their developing brains. No child is ever born violent. Violence is NOT genetic, it exists because beaten children use, in their adult lives, the lesson that their brains have learned.
3. As beaten children are not allowed to defend themselves, they must suppress their anger and rage against their parents who have humiliated them, killed their inborn empathy, and insulted their dignity. They will take out this rage later, as adults, on scapegoats, mostly on their own children. Deprived of empathy, some of them will direct their anger against themselves (in eating disorders, drug addiction, depression etc.), or against other adults (in wars, terrorism, delinquency etc.)
Questions and Answers:
Q: Parents beat their children without a second thought, to make them obedient. Nobody, except a very small minority, protests against this dangerous habit. Why is the logical sequence (from being a misled victim to becoming a misleading perpetrator) totally ignored world-wide? Why have even the Popes, responsible for the moral behaviour of many millions of believers, until now never informed them that beating children is a crime?
A: Because almost ALL of us were beaten, and we had to learn very early that these cruel acts were normal, harmless, and even good for us. Nobody ever told us that they were crimes against humanity. The wrong, immoral, and absurd lesson was wired into our developing brains, and this explains the emotional blindness governing our world.
Q: Can we free ourselves from the emotional blindness we developed in childhood?
A: We can – at least to some degree – liberate ourselves from this blindness by daring to feel our repressed emotions, including our fear and forbidden rage against our parents who had often scared us to death for periods of many years, which should have been the most beautiful years of our lives. We can’t retrieve those years. But thanks to facing our truth we can transform ourselves from the children who still live in us full of fear and denial into responsible, well informed adults who regained their empathy, so early stolen from them. By becoming feeling persons we can no longer deny that beating children is a criminal act that should be forbidden on the whole planet.
Conclusion:
Caring for the emotional needs of our children means more than giving them a happy childhood. It means to enable the brains of the future adults to function in a healthy, rational way, free from perversion and madness. Being forced to learn in childhood that hitting children is a blessing for them is a most absurd, confusing lesson, one with the most dangerous consequences: This lesson as such, together with being cut off from the true emotions, creates the roots of violence.
http://www.alice-miller.com
© 2015 Alice Miller
TopRe-imagining Mental Health Nursing into the 21st Century: Exploring our role supporting people with psychosis
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Re-imagining Mental Health Nursing into the 21st Century: Exploring our role supporting people with psychosis
Thursday, September 24th 2015 @ Amnesty International, 17-25 New Inn Yard, London, EC2A 3EA
A conference for students of mental health nursing, practitioners, educators, managers, commissioners, carers, service users and other members of the multidisciplinary team.
Contributors: Steve Trenchard, Catherine Gamble, Lou Hamilton & Mark Earl Keynotes:
There are increasing calls for a paradigm shift in the way we deliver care for those who experience psychosis – moving from medical model understandings and treatment to a formulation based approach that draws on the individual’s lived experience. Such a shift is a challenge, requiring a willingness to respect, attend to, explore and respond empathetically to the narrative of the carer and service user. This conference will provide an opportunity to explore these challenges and identify the implications for mental health nursing practice in collaboration with our multi-disciplinary teams, service users and carers. Combining keynote presentations with opportunities for group discussion, we hope to highlight the ‘lived experience’ of mental health nursing, with an emphasis on capturing the current reality for nurses in practice and exploring our evolving role and opportunities for future directions. To book, click here: Booking lines |
Far be it from me - 