Sunday, April 29, 2007

Birmingham And Solihull Mental Health NHS Trust Censorship By CEO Sue Turner ?

A source known to Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Userwatch UK Blog has been contacted by the CEO Sue Turner of the UK Birmingham NHS Trust with a request for taking off this picture shown HERE from UserWatch on the grounds that is :

"Horrid and Frightening"

And also it is claimed to be :

"poor art"

Userwatch thinks this version on the left is rather glowing and anyone could possibly get a good tanning off it ..

The serious underlying story goes though , the source has requested that the Birmingham And Solihull Mental Health Trust in the UK give fair and equal opportunity (as it does with other local Service User Groups) of promotion to a Mental Health film called the Highcroft Lifebook Film which partly demystifies the State and family influences in one local family's mental health damages over 100 years.

The film partly concludes that the obvious theme of intergenerational deficits of reflexively denied empathy (being in touch with each other emotionally) can create a long line of unhealed and repeated emotional damages .

The film goes on to create a DIY approach to Mental Health Service Users being able to create and make their own "Lifebooks" at home .. Its very pro-independence of a struggle for authentic growth

It seems as if the signals are pretty clear that the Birmingham And Solihull Mental Health Trust will not fairly promote the Highcroft Lifebook Film unless and until this picture goes ..

Overnight the Userwatch team has been contacted by a photo journalist and we will see what other parts of the Blog community have to say about this

One thing is for sure . When you challenge the corporate NHS state and its pressure particulary for conformity of "Group-mind" be aware that freedom of thought and expression is all there is left as a real value to live and even die for.


More Later .

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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The Battle Ground For Minds And New Slaver-Labour

Computerised Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and CBT itself is set to become a kind of future litmus test for a number of forces currently trying to socially engineer Mental Health (MH) Service Users away from dependency on Incapacity Benefit and MH Day Services ..

The MH charities have partly led the cavary charge against the poor weaponless indians without that much reservation too ..

CBT has been pushed by Rethink and Sainsbury's Centre For Mental Health with the golden prize of "modernisation" as an aim, and with flag waving here and there partly through Mental Health Media with poorly demonstrated and questionably effective projects about "stigma"..

This concept is very overplayed but a few people have a vested interest in doing that especially some elite Ex Service Users circles who trot out with expenses paid the same old "stigma stories" at various meetings in the UK .

The MH Charities do not have much else to falsely rally the converted indians to re-totemise and dance around though, and somehow their patient freedom to choose treaments (PATIENT CHOICE) has slipped to the bottom of the totem pole and is going "UGHHH"

These Charity bodies are now full of connections with ex career civil servants DoH or DWP linked , and have a rather grey agenda really, because the real prize of Service Users having control and choices of purchase of treatments that suit continual management or genuine recovery is very very far away . The MH NHS is dominant and towering and is often in league with the MH Charities to cheapen services .

By the time the "litmus" test is done on CCBT and CBT, and found to be wanting in the right colour and depth , New Labour with its anti-benefit anti-MH-patient choice stance may well be run out of steam . It wont stop the next lot from picking up and beating the same drum perhaps ..The Charities are shape shifters too so it won't worry them that much .

The health economics idea behind CCBT and CBT is to use the resources saved by getting people fit and back to work to actualise other improvements in MH Services isnt it ?

I doubt this . Savings will ultimately be used to buffer the false way the welfare state and the new "welfare-charity-state" take control over patient's lives - the status quo will continue with service delivery being owned at a few removes from the patient . The quality-driver of PATIENT CHOICE in MH terms still has not got much of a chance . The Charities want to take over . There are big wages in it too ..

New Labour are not modernising anything with any radicalism in MH - they are reforming and supporting a middle-income, income-tax-protected new administrative class . Its what they are and have become themselves.

The more honest way forward of people really paying for health giving services through re-distributive income tax related ways is not saleable politically. We have conservative middle classes to thank for this curvature of backbone and an ex Thatcherite agenda continued by Tony Blair . He's their man okay ..

The health market could have been democratised by state enabled PATIENT CHOICE and driven into more quality by that mechanism over time - the problem is the NHS is a very large supporter of the middle classes and their economic stabilities. Priority for frontline treaments is giving way also to new User Bureacracy rather than market democracy driven by state enabled PATIENT CHOICE .

The new User-bureaucracies are insidious and pernicious in the way they are supported to partly divert treament opportunities away from other Patients whilst playing with the idea they are somehow more democratic.. Democracy at the point of CHOICE and with closer purchasing power is the better way forwards . The money is already there being played with by the social engineers like the Charities who want more lottery money for "stigma drives" or NIMHE and CSIP who are the DWP-DOH post victorian workhouse orientated expensive services in disguise.

New Labour have condemned many in the MH community to false hope and little real service of any long term therapeutic value . This will collapse into more piles of messy realities one day. But who knows who will be left to witness its subtle holocaust of the spirit . Most of the Charity heads will be retired in Spain ... Roll on Global warming .....Mr S. Atan rules it seems ...


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Saturday, April 14, 2007

Computers Licenced To Dispense Mental Health Soapy Porridge

In the post victorian but very surviving ethical corpse of work-to-forget your mental health pains, Computers in health are now to dispense software mental health solutions . OOOOOO Lovely ....

"Soft soaping" patients is more like it : Userwatch bubbles

But the roll out of Computerised CBT or the lather is ON as from March 2007 .

It will have to be measured for its effectiveness according the DoH, and head cook Louise Appleby who has been supplying the whine will instruct NIMHE (the "Innovators") now shape shifting to CSIP into partly being the Waiters who will measure customer satisfaction .

But it wont be : "Waiter there's a cry in my soup !"

Because flying Cries are banned, by the new, be-in control-of your-emotions-software ..

Dont get afraid of your own inner core of vulnerability - Delete it by thought ..

Yeah Sure ....

The job of CCBT procurements has gone to the Primary Care Trusts across Birmingham (like others places in the UK.) They must provide hardware where Computerised Cognitive Behaviour Therapy will be accessesed . The software licences are to be purchased too by the PCT's and because there is no new money for this half baked one size fits all scheme - it will be diverted from elsewhere out of the local health budget . Userwatch wonders where that might be ? Could it be the already poor supply of talking and feeling therapies ? Probably.

Meanwhile the User sector in the local mental health economy in Bham is set to expand again with a post being advertised for a Voluntary Sector worker to co-ordinate communications with the Voluntary sector . The money once again will come out of the local mental health budget . UserWatch questions this . Its frankly daft . A deeper schism is opening up with new User bureacracies (paid for the the Trust out of frontline treatment money) and poor supply of recovery treatments are the reality for many Bham Users .

Oh sorry we forgot there's always your computer to talk to or failing that going to a library to access your CCBT programme to do "Homework" ... That is how it has been put !

What the cogging hell is going on in Mental Health economics? . The supply side is dominated by the Govt Agenda and the User side is contstantly being bought off by the services themselves and used a vanguard to represent others falsely .

This is not Patient Choice realised but in fact "survival of the fittest" in a skewed and distorted state dominated choiceless context and the tests being run is who in the "User" community will orientate around the Catch 22 paradox of User's up the health service's anus the most ?

Maybe we should rephrase that Darwinism into "Survival of the Shittest" ?

What do you think satirically speaking ?

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

The Highcroft Lifebook Project Of North Birmingham






The "Highcroft Lifebook Project" was borne from a need to express a story of great family pain and make some lasting witness of a theme that inhabits some families and makes some members mentally ill later in their lives.

That theme is early catastrophic seperation and loss (and even abuses) that is somehow carried on like a partly unnoticed but nevertheless repeated lack of empathic early care for children . The Lifebook project points not to conscious fault in the family so much as preserved unconscious defensive repetitions of certain types of unempathic behaviour which carry on to traumatise the generations. And, this is certainly no theory when it happens to some people who can more consciously attest to a trail of family pain that has affected them.

The Intro to the Highcroft Lifebook film preserves the theme of these insights. It is short and to the point and will be built upon . The intro is followed by about another 13 mins of film which shows the actual making process of the "Lifebooks" . The whole theme is to bring the ability back to the Mental Health User at home who wishes to explore making a map of sense of their lives - in their way .

North Birmingham Communty Arts is a User Led Art Group and project which meets at the 610 Centre in Kingstanding. This Group has been given some rights to sell "The Highcroft Lifebook" film in order to sustain its function and growth - NBCA's primary purpose is to create fellowship in Birmingham North where there has been little in the way of creative mental health sustainance with the exception of a handful of people and a few good staff .

NBCA is trying its best therefore to create a better balance of inclusion , creativity , and User autonomy for those with disabling Mental Health problems .