Last week started with a somewhat anti-climactic announcement from the Prime Minister about mental health services. Her speech ended with a statement that “parity means parity”. If this was intended as a triumphant conclusion to a stirring performance, it fell rather flat. The phrase echoed her hollow “Brexit means Brexit” catechism. The Prime Minister seems […]
Archive | Mental Health
What’s going on?
One of the most memorable features of 2016 was a continuous cacophony of intolerance and raw aggression. Our most pressing task for 2017 is to find a distinctive voice of militant tolerance and decency. It is a bit of a challenge, but it must be done. Stridency appears to have infected public debate of all […]
The virtual asylum revisited
Early in my career as a consultant, I took responsibility for the psychiatric care of a group of men who had been resettled in a community facility after decades as residents in a distant mental hospital. One man sticks in my mind. Ernie had diagnoses of learning disability and chronic schizophrenia. He was mute. He […]
No more Knock Down Ginger
By Catherine Robinson on 6th November 2016 in India, Internationalism, Mental Health, Politics, Psychiatry
When I was a kid in South East London, there was no Internet and no video games. There were just two black and white television channels. Commencing the day after President Kennedy was assassinated, we had Dr Who on a Saturday evening, but both channels went off for an hour on Sunday evening. The Sixties […]
The life so short, the craft so long to learn
On Monday, 24th October 2016, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges published a list of forty treatments and investigations that confer no benefit to patients and therefore might be appropriately discontinued. The initiative is part of the Choose Wisely campaign, which started in North America. Although the campaign is driven by the principle “first, do […]
A change is going to come
British society is in a peculiar place in its attitudes to diversity. This apparent confusion does not just involve multiculturalism and migrants. It is evident with respect to all types of difference. There are certainly signs of real progress. The Last Leg, long one of the funniest programmes on TV, is now also one of […]
The Ministry of Fear
As I arrived in Southwold, Suffolk, for the annual family gathering, I was puzzled by a plethora of red, white and blue bunting. It was the day after the Bastille Day massacre in Nice and I briefly wondered if the bunting was a gesture of solidarity. Then I wondered if the town was having an […]
Chaos and lies
There seems to be a lot of news at present. It is not just the quantity that is exhausting. Like the weather, severe news events are becoming unnaturally common. Once-a-century phenomena are occurring several times a week. Personally, I would like some respite. Events are piling in on top of each other so that, for […]
Apart from that, everything is fine
The news media are overflowing with speculation about the cataclysmic implications of Brexit, which is fair enough. It is a huge event. Meantime, out in the world at large, we need to anticipate the likely consequences for our own work, which in my case means mental health services. I was at a party in London […]
More on psychiatrists and the prevention of terrorism
I am not, generally speaking, greatly drawn to Tory MPs. When Kenneth Clarke was on Desert Island Discs twenty odd years ago, I was dismayed to find that we had overlapping musical tastes. It did not shift my opinion about his politics. Yesterday morning, I heard Dr Sarah Wollaston on the BBC’s Today programme, explaining […]