Mental Health UK - The Strings Being Pulled Are Joining Up Around You - The Network State

UserWatch Comments

The great Network State carve-up is gathering pace. Third Sectorism is being pushed hard in the UK and married more by hope than reality to the "personalisation agenda" and we have learned that the "light touch" (ordered by Govt) of the "Community Interest Company" regulator appears to have been matched by a Dept Of Health understanding for Primary Care Trusts (health commission and purchase bodies in the UK) to ease CIC's and help them into existence ....

Yes OF COURSE we have seen the result of this locally in Birmingham and those "useful" alliances between Councils and DOH thinking in the appointment of the Local Involvement Networks Host (LINks) : Gateway Family Services - that is in fact is not independent in a sense ordinary people would understand at all .... How can it be with several local health and social care contracts whilst it promises to be an independent support office to "independent" LINks monitors made up of lay people in the same locality .

This month other Network State strands tighten, as in the UK we will see the charitocracy, RETHINK, MIND, and others who have sat on the knees of the Dept of Health bureaucrat planners (some who also morphed into the charities) and select committtees skewing mental health policy towards "work driven outcomes" and they will now be pushing out various TV promotions of how the public should accept mental health matters more .

This whole exercise might be laudable were it not so manipulative towards a Govt driven agenda of pushing mental health Users off benefits and blaming UK employers for their lack of social inclusion. Its an old Labour hang-over hanging on for liberal-leftists to believe in ... Rethink has cottoned on to this contradiction more latterly and has been doing some snake dancing semantics in its reports after it lobbied hard to get people off benefits at select committee level and pushed the anti-stigma bad employers angle ....

Survey's run by MIND and Rethink two of the UK MH charities over the past couple of years we believe are skewed by them constantly preaching the same anti-stigma "bad employers" message to their own supporters and families , staff and sympathisers , and then later surveying them as though its an "open population" ...Self fulfilling projections are very easily achieved in surveys ...

Mental health is massively over-controlled still in the UK by a combination of top charity-views - and NHS interests. The charities are always looking for the next round of grants and how they can manipulate their way into using them. Stuff locality power to the people and their pockets for services.

MH too is overmanned at a serious cost by the bodies the DOH creates staffed to the hilt with often failed uni-types who believed their entry into NIMHE was valuable . It was : to Govt aims of stacking the social poker card angles and manipulating the outcomes on mental health into a cheap model that created "workers" ..

The Govt hang up on work is actually quite crazy firstly because in a roundabout way it avoids patient autonomy and even curiously perpetuates patient misery by divering Trust monies into fitter MH Users getting jobs are Trusts. This "new" jobs market is not endless but many ex-Service Users who are involved in this might not realise that the situation will not last because it costs others peoples health chances .. Sooner or later someone will smell the dead rat stinking - in the very very strong coffee ..

All this change that avoids patients getting real help, and choices of that in recovery, needs to be seriously monitored examining the cost and lost treatment opportunity ratio of patient's helped into the bureaucracy as workers in "mental health promotion" and "User-Voice" mechanisms and comparing it to those without services who are often hidden in their pain and voicelessness .....

Their's is the real plight and we wonder which way some of these NHS in house User-Voice mechanisms are going to jump when one day it becomes glaringly obvious they are existent on others misery and they even make it worse .. Lost opportunity of treatment via cost diversion to fitter MH Users is real - we have seen and witnessed it .

So perhaps Third Sectorism is the economic answer for displacement of all this New Labour "worker-dom" ? - We wonder ... It will ultimately be an area where wages will be driven down as it saturates itself with lottery money and diverted Govt cash from the Dept of Health as well as payments for getting people into "work". What will sustain it ? Volunteerism ?

We see another vision : that people on benefits should increasingly be allowed to develop as they can and not be penalised by a prejudicial stigmatising State whipping up anti benefit sentiments - however that can only happen when people are seen as individuals and given rights for treatments and supports which help their lives. Some of them can then become economically REAL in jobs rather than being subsidised in the NHS by others pain and misery - i.e. lost treatment opportunities

What we are also picking up in Birmingham as a related aside is old Toryism is rife in the Birmingham Council and savings are being made from Adult Day Services which are unlikely to benefit MH Users. The Tories have one main agenda - cut services and create low Council tax .

The Catch 22 for MH Users dependent of Council Services is the "eligibility criteria" for grants like Direct Payments . If you are poor and really screwed up in the head then you qualify for help unless ofcourse its so difficult for you to administer that its best to allow the council to take your life over - in which case you'll get jack-shit with half a zero on ..Some long term psychotic Users of Council services have found they are pushed into little fits and dabs of "education and training" - as the new "work focused" ethos takes hold in the UK and the strain is increasing in the Service Users system that goes from "containment" with drugs, to "look after yourself" - with drugs , with never much of well worked out empathic care regime .. Empathy is a word to the mechanical services - not an experience .


Finally ....Yes there's one of those - we are surprised to learn that the DOH-created Care Services Improvement Partnership CSIP - now the overlord of NIMHE - has been given £3.9 million from the Big Lottery ...So a Govt dept, and that is what they are , now qualifies for lottery money ..HUH ...

That's the UK now ... Just no boundaries and Top Down planning and place-people everywhere .. Its the Network State ..Sod locality too - for that will never be trusted by a Govt that favours social engineering yes-tribes and top down network bureaucracy. Still its plenty of jobs for certain types of people for a while . Until the Tories ascend ?

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