Black Star Studies Shine On White UK Splits Brilliantly

The strangest thing that has occurred and is still rumbling on through the shadows and hardly detected white matters in some of the white mental health UK community has to be the continuing reactions to the Guardian's Dec 9th article which repeated the powerful claims of researchers who had studied 500 Afro Caribbeans with "onset psychoses" .

Known as the Aesop study backed by NHS psychiatrists it did not support a genetic or biological explanation for either schizophrenia or psychoses instead it showed overwhelmingly that social and family distress and poor parental attachments coupled with the mystifying stresses of living in a white dominated society with its professional middle class medical models was apparently condemning people with hyper distressed lives to "diagnosis" of psychoses..

The point is, the UK CLASS "professional" model of perceiving others is a real factor still, in one set of people describing another set of people as "unmanageable" and worthy of medically labeling "psychotic"

And, Afro Caribbeans are people perceived with effusive personalities and often expressive capacity that can be interpreted too easily as "mad" especially if they are "banged up" in a ward after going into a life crisis filled with layers of previous distresses

"The researchers ruled out genetic issues as the cause, and the previously held suspicions that psychiatrists were more inclined to diagnose schizophrenia when dealing with black males in particular. They concluded instead that the root causes lay in a whole range of social factors that lead to severe social isolation – people living alone, unemployment, and the vexed issue of separation from parents due to family breakdowns in the African Caribbean community amounting to a kind of "sensory deprivation" – all of which have a dramatic effect on people with a tendency towards schizoid personalities."

Source: guardian.co.uk

The Aesop study has to produce more eventual re-percussive effects in the white middle class community and the other white underclass communites - make no mistake about it ..

Not least and perhaps unpredictably, in the charity Rethink which is a mainly white dominated Surrey UK based mental health charity always pre-dominantly looking for the genetic and medical causes of "Schitozphrenia" and which made overtures to the black charity body the Afiya Trust in 2007 that has just featured its head Patrick Vernon in the Guardian on Feb 3rd. speaking about a better deal for black mental health in the UK

"A manifesto for mental health services for people from BME groups is being drafted by the Afiya Trust charity, a move prompted by two concerns: that the government's latest mental health strategy, New Horizons (NH), signals the end of specific efforts to address treatment inequities between some BME groups and wider society; and the appropriation of recent research by the government in the development of its NH strategy, and ­latterly, by the British National party (BNP) to suit their own agendas around race and mental health."

Source: guardian.co.uk

There has been a real attempt by the Mental Health Charities in the UK to form powerful coalitions of influence (Rethink and MIND ) and not always good ones either since they have often skewed the agenda away from truly individualised Patient Choice into Gov't led welfare hothoused "work and recovery" orientated models that missed the real need for individual social support and treatment choices long ago .

From Afiya Trust's own charity paperwork in 2007 we can see partly in the codified language why Rethink was rejected as a partner :

"While contact was made with Rethink, a preliminary consensus was anecdotally elicited from some network members, which informed the decision not to pursue the prospects of working with Rethink. If was felt by a significant number of the initial membership that there were areas of differences in values and principles when it came to the position taken on mental distress (as opposed to mental illness), as well as a difference in approaches to working in some areas of working. Subsequently as the first priority outcome was increasing network membership , the Catch-A-Fiya Network decided to defer partnership working with Rethink in the first year . source : THE AFIYA TRUST REPORT AND FINANCIAL STATEMENTS - 31st March 2007 .. Registered charity No: 1061596 "

So the Aesop study of 500 Afro Carribeans wrongly medically labelled as psychotic is a real star shining brilliantly right into the dark white corners and that means onto the leading UK schitzophrenic charity Rethink too, forever encouraging claims that social stigma on schitzophrenics is rife ..

The biggest dark matter problem too in the UK is Class and its well hidden but the Afro Carribean study has come embarrasingly close to showing it up brilliantly...

Does anyone wonder why the Guardian does not see that ?