With no regular government reports regarding the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s okay to lower your guard. However, that could be a mistake. This is because, as studies show, the long-term effects of the disease can be devastating. And Britain might be sliding into a chronic illness timebomb.
Coronavirus and cardiovascular disease
Take cardiovascular disease, for example.
In March, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) published an article on how coronavirus can affect the heart. The BHF referred to a study published in Cardiovascular Research. It found that compared to uninfected people those infected were:
around 40% more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and five times more likely to die during the 18 months afterwards. People who had experienced severe infection were at even higher risk.
The study added that those people in the infected group “were also at higher risk of stroke and atrial fibrillation in the short-term, but not the long-term”.
It went on to explain how, for example, the lack of oxygen and nutrients that coronavirus-infected people experience can result in heart damage. It can also cause both inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) and heart lining (pericarditis). Further, it can affect the lungs – leading to pneumonia.
Covid and neurological disorders
Coronavirus can also affect neurological and related disorders.
In August 2022, an article published in the Lancetexamined links between coronavirus and neurological diseases and disorders. It found that:
most outcomes had HRs [hazard ratios] significantly greater than 1 after 6 months (with the exception of encephalitis; Guillain-Barré syndrome; nerve, nerve root, and plexus disorder; and parkinsonism)… By contrast, risks of cognitive deficit (known as brain fog), dementia, psychotic disorders, and epilepsy or seizures were still increased at the end of the 2-year follow-up period.
The study also reported there were risks for children who had coronavirus, such as:
cognitive deficit, insomnia, intracranial haemorrhage, ischaemic stroke, nerve, nerve root, and plexus disorders, psychotic disorders, and epilepsy or seizures.
It added:
A sizeable proportion of older adults who received a neurological or psychiatric diagnosis, in either cohort, subsequently died, especially those diagnosed with dementia or epilepsy or seizures.
The study concluded with a stark warning to health systems:
The fact that neurological and psychiatric outcomes were similar during the delta and omicron waves indicates that the burden on the health-care system might continue even with variants that are less severe in other respects.
Health systems need to prepare
In March 2022, John Hopkins University published a Q&A session with Ziyad Al-Aly. He is the director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center and head of research and education service at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System.
The session highlighted that:
anyone infected with COVID is at higher risk for heart issues – including clots, inflammation, and arrhythmias.
give you fatigue and brain fog and result in new-onset diabetes, kidney problems, and heart problems.
He also warned:
On a government level, I think we definitely need to be prepared for this. We cannot move on from the pandemic and disregard its long-term consequences. Arguably the long-term consequences are going to be even more profound and stick with us and scar a lot of people around us for generations.
However, in the UK any preparations to deal with long Covid could be exacerbated by a haemorrhaging of clinicians:
RETENTION
GMC found 1/3 of Doctors who graduated in the UK moved abroad
1/3 go to one of four countries: Australia, New Zealand, USA & Canada
GPs twice as likely to report burnout as a reason to leave (42.8%)
In the UK coronavirus-related neurological disorders or heart-related illnesses will undoubtedly increase the pressure on a vastly underfunded health system.
Since May 2022 there has been a noticeable absence of government updates on coronavirus and the vaccination programme. Nor does it help that there are no more free test kits available, thus discriminating against poor people.
Where new variants are identified, people will need to be informed. The booster programme also needs to be made more widely available. Currently, it’s only available to people age 75 and older, or those with a weakened immune system. There are further restrictions from July. The government says:
After 30 June 2023, you can no longer book a COVID-19 vaccine online…After this date, you will only be able to get a vaccination if you are at increased risk from COVID-19, and in most cases, you will have to wait until the autumn.
Lack of or delayed treatment of long Covid disorders could see an increase in chronic illnesses, or early death.
Only with a far better-funded NHS can the adverse effects of coronavirus be mitigated in both the short- and longer-term.
Former TVNZ Breakfast host Kamahl Santamaria, who quit following complaints about inappropriate workplace behaviour, has broken his silence and started a podcast he says would “set some records straight”.
The Emmy-nominated broadcaster lasted just 32 days at TVNZ after working at Al Jazeera, where he had also been accused of having sent a lewd email to a female colleague.
Speaking publicly for the first time in more than a year, Santamaria talked about the allegations, the effect they have had and how the reporting of them had led to his new website The Balance.
“It is very much informed and directed by my own experience over the past year, and yes I will be using it to set some records straight,” he told listeners in the first episode of his podcast, RE: Balance.
“Because in the end, I trust myself to tell my story.”
Santamaria said he had been a journalist for nearly 25 years, but for the last year had had to live with the label of being “a disgraced journalist”.
“That’s not a pleasant title to live with but that’s how it’s been ever since my departure from TVNZ in May of last year,” he said.
‘Full story yet to be told’
For legal reasons, Santamaria said he had not spoken about his departure from TVNZ — but he told listeners he would when he is able.
“The full story has definitely not been told, yet,” he said.
The Balance . . . Hosted by former Al Jazeera and TVNZ presenter Kamahl Santamaria who says he now “knows a thing or two about ‘being the story’ and how the quest for clicks and eyeballs can result in a story that doesn’t quite match the headline.” Image: APR screenshot
“The headline doesn’t always match the story, and countering that is a big part of what I’m embarking on with The Balance.
Santamaria said what happened had forced him to stop, look at himself and his behaviour in the past, and acknowledge there were times when he just got it wrong.
“I am deeply sorry for that and for the effect I have now learned that it had on others,” he said.
He said they also prompted him to look at the environments he was working in.
“What I failed to recognise was particularly in a post ‘Me Too’ world, there is just no place for over friendly, over-familiar, flirtatious, tactile behaviour or banter in the workplace no matter how friendly that workplace is or how prevalent that behaviour might be.
Mistakes impacted on health
“I’ve made mistakes but I hope my past doesn’t define who I am in the future.”
Santamaria said the effect on his mental health and that of his family has been “immense, dilapidating and long-lasting” and “it still goes on now”.
He revealed he had been in hiding for a year “growing a beard, always wearing a cap”, afraid to use his own name, and that he is on medication.
Santamaria referred to a report about his visit to the National Business Review, which he said was the “one time” we went out publicly and a journalist turned it into a story.
He said the journalist wrote about how uncomfortable he made people feel by just shaking their hands.
“The whole thing was utterly ridiculous to the point now where I don’t even shake people’s hands anymore.”
Santamaria disclosed that in the early stages, he had been on heavy medication during the day and sedation at night, and the family had him on a round-the-clock suicide watch.
He said he had been in no position, physically or mentally, to speak up for himself at the time.
“The fact that I am still here now is a testament to my family who kept me alive when I didn’t want to go on and they continue to do so,” he said.
First published by The New Zealand Herald and republished here with the author’s permission.
Paediatrician Dr Teuila Percival heads the list of Pacific recipients in the New Zealand King’s Birthday Honours List for 2023.
Dr Percival is one of at least 15 Pasifika people in New Zealand who are on the list. She is to be a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to health and the Pacific community.
For the past three decades she has been a strong advocate for Pacific children’s health in New Zealand and the Pacific.
Dr Teuila Percival . . . “It’s important for Pacific people to be recognised in the work they do.” Image: Pasifika Medical Association/RNZ
Dr Percival said she felt honoured to get the award after getting over the initial surprise.
“I think it’s important for Pacific people to be recognised in the work they do, so it’s really nice in that respect,” she said.
“It’s just a great job, I love working with kids. I think children are the most important thing.”
Dr Percival was a founding member of South Seas Healthcare, a community health service for Pacific people in Auckland since 1999.
She has also been deployed to Pacific nations after natural disasters like to Samoa in 2009 after the tsunami and to Vanuatu in 2015 following cyclone Pam.
Education Sacred Heart school counsellor Nua Silipa is to be an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to Pacific education.
Silipa said her experience struggling in the education system after immigrating from Samoa in 1962 had motivated her to help Pacific people in the classroom.
“When I look back now I think my journey was so hard as a minority in Christchurch,” Silipa said.
“It was a struggle because we weren’t in the classroom, the resources at that time were Janet and John . . . so as a learner I really struggled.”
She said the “whole experience of underachievement” motivated her to help “people who are different in the system”.
“It’s not a one size fits all in education.”
Nua Silipa said she felt humbled to be a recipient on the King’s Birthday Honours List.
She said the award also honoured the people who had been involved in improving education for Pasifika.
“I know there’s so, so many other people who are doing work quietly every day, helping our communities and I’m really in awe of them.
“There are many unsung heroes out in our community doing work for our people.”
Technology Mary Aue is to be a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to education, technology and Pacific and Māori communities.
Coconut Wireless creator Mary Aue . . . “There was no communication back then, so I created an e-newsletter.” Image: RNZ Pacific
Mary Aue is to be a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to education, technology and Pacific and Māori communities Photo: Supplied
In 1999, she launched Coconut Wireless as an e-newsletter for Pasifika reaching 10,000 subscribers. It relaunched in 2014 as a social media platform and now has over 300,000 Facebook followers.
“There was a disconnect between community and government agencies and there was a disconnect between our communities,” she said.
“There was no communication back then, so I created an e-newsletter.”
The name Coconut Wireless was based on the island concept as a fast way of communicating through word of mouth.
Aue has also been an advocate for more Pacific and Māori learners in science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM).
Aue said she was originally going to decline the award as there were a lot of people in the community who do not get recognised behind the scenes.
“I have to thank my family, my friends and the amazing community that we’re all part of.”
Sport Teremoana Maua-Hodges said she “just about choked” on her cup of tea when she found out she had received the Queen’s Service Medal.
Maua-Hodges has been given the award for her contribution to sport and culture.
She said the award was the work of many people — including her parents — who travelled to New Zealand from the Cook Islands when she was a child.
“I’m very humbled by the award, but it’s not just me,” Maua-Hodges said.
“I stand on the shoulders of different heroes and heroines of our people in the community.
“It’s not my award, it’s our award.”
Maua-Hodges said the most important thing she had done was connect Cook Islanders.
“Uniting Cook Islanders who have come over from different islands in the Cook Islands and then to come here and be united here within their diversity makes me very proud.
“They’ve taken on the whole culture of Aotearoa but still as Cook Islanders . . . to show their voice, to show their flag, in the land of milk and honey.”
The Queen’s Service Medal will be renamed the King’s Service Medal once the necessary processes are done, and the updated Royal Warrant is approved by King Charles.
Pasifika recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for 2022:
Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit: Dr Teuila Mary Percival — for services to health and the Pacific community.
Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit: Nua Semuā Silipa — for services to Pacific education.
Honorary Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit: Meleane Pau’uvale — for services to the Tongan community and education.
Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit:
Mary Puatuki Aue — for services to education, technology and Pacific and Māori communities.
Dr Ofanaite Ana Dewes — for services to health and the Pacific community.
Fa’atili Iosua Esera — for services to Pacific education.
Dr Siale Alokihakau Foliaki — for services to mental health and the Pacific community.
Keni Upokotea Moeroa — for services to the Cook Islands community.
Talalelei Senetenari Taufale — for services to Pacific health.
Dr Semisi Pouvalu Taumoepeau — for services to education and tourism.
Honorary Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit: Fa’amoana Ioane Luafutu — for services to arts and the Pacific community.
Queen’s Service Medal:
Joseph Davis — for services to the Fijian community.
Reverend Alofa Ta’ase Lale — for services to the community.
Teremoana Maua-Hodges — for services to sport and culture.
Putiani Upoko — for services to the Pacific community.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
10.8% of all Australians identified as carers in the 2018 Australian Census. That is approximately 2.65 million people! And yet, Erin–who was a Disability Support Worker for five years and is a carer for her brother–says that “we don’t really talk about it.”
Keep quiet and carry on
Erin caring for her brother wasn’t vocalised as an expectation; there was “no conversation” about it at all.
As the youngest daughter, it was her responsibility to “make his food and help him with his hygiene… administer medication.” Her second brother, James, would “entertain him by playing video games with him and talking to him.”
Erin, 19, also emphasises that her mum, for many years, was the “main carer” for her brother. While Erin recognises that expectations placed upon her were gendered “to a degree”, she points out that her mum was a carer and mother of three with a full time job for all her childhood.
This–albeit unequal–distribution of labour has been crucial in making sure her brother receives appropriate support. However, Erin grew up with and then internalised an unspoken expectation that she must “always put others first”.
For Erin, this looked like “fitting your life around him [her brother],” taking on the majority of household tasks as she got older, and working two jobs all while going to school.
I reached out to Emma Madsen, who runs The Carers Club. She says, “most carers are in the workforce in some capacity.” Emma also points out: “Through my work with carers […] it might be a more 50/50 split between men and women carers. Male carers often don’t identify as caregivers, and I suspect internalise a lot of their struggles, resulting in them not accessing services and support, which in turn doesn’t allow us to capture them in the data.”
In Erin and James’ case–although the kinds of care they provided were gendered–they shared care responsibilities while James lived at home.
Erin: “He [her brother] has to be our main priority.”
These silent expectations were “the norm.” They’ve taken a toll on Erin’s mental health and she has learnt to always sacrifice her own wellbeing in favour of her “friends and family.”
What we think we owe to each other
Erin tries to tell herself, “Hey, stop living for other people!” but finds herself doing just that. Once you find yourself in the rhythm of “putting others first”, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop.
“If something is totally not my issue–maybe my friends are going through something–I still feel the need to step in and be their support person. Or if my mum is having a hard time, but I’m also having a hard time, I will still look after her rather than myself. I’ll still look after my brother.”
Erin would feel “guilty” if she acted any other way.
Erin also reflects on how she and her brother James relate to one another: “We were kind of like business partners.”
“When I see James and it’s just the two of us we’re like, ‘Oh, what do we talk about?’”
Their shared responsibilities of care took priority over a “sibling bond,” and they are now relearning how to be brother and sister. Erin sees “glimpses of a bond” with both her brothers, but she doesn’t think it will “ever be normal.”
Searching for support as a young person
According to the 2021 Carers Wellbeing Survey, young carers “are at greater risk of high psychological distress.” This makes it crucial that young carers like Erin have access to robust support systems.
Erin told Jesse she “felt like an adult when I was 12.” Picture: Jesse Blakers
From ages 9 to 16 Erin belonged to a Young Carers program run through the St Vincent de Paul Society. They organised monthly activities like going to the movies, and camps twice a year. “They were probably the best thing ever, they were amazing.”
“You could relate to everyone…because everyone going to these programs were young carers as well. You could always talk to them.”
However, finding support as a young carer has been a mixed bag for Erin. When she attempted to access other support services, she says, “They wouldn’t take me seriously because I was young… they just wouldn’t listen.” She would reach out for help, “and then nothing would happen.”
Erin asks: “So where did that information go?”
When Erin came to school exhausted or overwhelmed, people around her didn’t seem to notice. “No one really offered… to be like ‘Hey, do you wanna talk about anything?’”
Sometimes Erin felt like she wasn’t allowed to be a kid. “I felt so grown up for a long time. People always used to say, ‘Oh, you’re so mature! That’s amazing!’ At the time I thought that was great… but I shouldn’t have had to be.”
Because this was “the norm” for Erin, it wasn’t expected that she should reach out for support. “I felt like an adult when I was 12.”
Particularly in primary school and early high school, “there was never any talk of a less-than-perfect home life” among her peers. Erin was “weird” if she tried to reach out.
These days, Erin is learning how to look after herself: “My brain is going a thousand miles a minute.” It’s the small things that help her right now: “my friends, going on walks, taking it one day at a time.”
Erin hopes for “more awareness” that “some young people look after family members,” and that young carers are able to develop strong “support networks.”
Are you a Young Carer, or do you know a Young Carer looking for support? Little Dreamers provide online and in person programs for young carers aged 4 to 25. The Carer Gateway and Carers ACT are also great places to start
Picture at top: Young carer Erin. She’s chosen not to have her face in the photos. Pic: Jesse Blakers
Three states want to stipulate how, and whether, autistic transgender youth and those with mental health conditions are able to access gender-affirming care — a new tactic aimed at the intersection of two marginalized groups. Georgia, Arkansas and Missouri enacted policies that either: suggest that the provision of such care should be withheld from autistic people; require doctors to determine…
Bly’s 1887 masterpiece Ten Days in a Mad-House reminds us that the ultimate test for public safety programs for the mentally ill is their impact on the most vulnerable.
Trigger warning: this blog discusses sexual violence and may be upsetting for readers. A list of support services is listed at the end of this blog.
Growing up, I’d never imagined where I’d be now. A survivor. Of not just one, but multiple sexual assaults.
I’d always thought that to be raped was one of the worst things that could happen to me.
I empathised with survivors. Yet the crime, the risk and the perpetrators seemed so far away from my life and my existence.
As a teenager, I knew of only one survivor (to my knowledge). As far as I knew, none of my close friends or family had been affected (however, I would now question this).
Sexual assault was not something I imagined I’d be talking about now – other than as an ally and advocate against gender-based violence.
However, little did I know, that I’d be assaulted twice by the time I was in my mid-30s. And that my perception of assault was to change rapidly. As would my perception of society.
Yes, things would never be the same again…
Society and sexual assault: (mis)taught perceptions
As a woman, I grew up being taught to protect myself. I was told to not walk alone at night, to have extra cash in my handbag (back in the day) and to check-in on friends to see if they’d got home safely.
Danger is a reality that we learn to pre-empt and recognise – but hope never accumulates into anything real.
Yet the reality is, it is real. And more so than we think…
Why? Because the perception of assault we’re taught as young girls/women, is VERY different to the reality.
Here in the UK for example, we don’t live in a conflict zone – where rape is used as a weapon of war). Child/forced marriage is criminalised and crippling poverty (whilst prevalent) isn’t a common push factor (whilst of course recognising the factors that push people into sex work).
As a society, we’re generally taught that sexual assault is alien, far away and completely distinguishable from our everyday lives.
Through the media and a lack of education on consent and relationships, sexual assault is painted as:
Usually violent (with physical threats, e.g. with a knife)
Carried out by an unknown criminal (although we are being taught more about child sexual abuse, marital rape and date rape)
Something that you’ll be sure of if it happens to you (both during and after)
You’ll scream. You’ll say “no”. You’ll say “please stop!” And, most crucially: there’ll be absolutely no doubt about what’s happened.
A doubt that won’t be echoed by loved ones, that won’t be questioned by society and most importantly: by you the survivor.
Society tells us that the after the assault, we’ll receive sympathy, understanding and support. That “everything will get better”.
Yet, surviving two assaults has instead taught me the harsh reality. One we all need to face…
From child to adult: coming to terms with assault
For years I carried the “shame” of how I lost my virginity. I was 16 and under the influence of alcohol. Today, I still hold only a few hazy memories of that night.
On holiday overseas, I went to the perpetrator’s apartment with a friend after celebrating my exam results.
I didn’t want to lose my virginity when I agreed to go. I hadn’t planned anything to happen (no condoms in tow). And, I wasn’t remotely interested.
In his flat, I was sat on the sofa with a drink. Yet, the next thing I remember is being directed to his bedroom, fully nude, my hand in his.
Then: lying on my back, searing pain. Blood.
No protection – putting me at risk of unwanted pregnancy and contracting an STD (things I was very clued up about, knowing I’d use protection when I’d eventually have sex).
Leaving his apartment, he refused to walk me home.
Once back at my hotel, I felt like something inside me had died. That life would never be the same again.
I lay on the bed, crying – without really knowing why.
The next day, I went in search of the morning after pill at a local pharmacy. I thankfully got it after being re-directed to the local hospital (as well as a negative STD check once home).
My case was common. Research has found that in 41% of cases of penetrative sexual assault, a condom was not used.
Yet there was not one safeguarding check. No one asked me about consent (that I can remember) or questioned the lack of contraception. Nada.
There were questions about my last period. But, presuming/discovering I was over the age of consent (which I was), no other questions followed.
And I didn’t question it either. I thought it was consensual. I hadn’t screamed. I hadn’t “fought back”.
I don’t really recall wanting/agreeing to it, but I hadn’t said “no”. I knew what was going on. I just couldn’t remember everything.
Intoxication or hazed trauma – who knows. My “friend” later told me that she’d told him: “to f**k me.”
The fact that I was a teenager with a man in his early 20s – a child whose virginity had been stolen – remained ignored, misunderstood and buried.
Life moved on. Except, I carried a sense of guilt and shame that I’d “made a horrible mistake”. A burden that I carried for almost 20 years.
Fast forward into my mid-30s, my then spouse referred to the incident as an assault. Assault I thought? I wasn’t assaulted.
It wasn’t until a friend (a childhood survivor himself) referred to me as exactly that with a mutual friend, that I learnt the reality.
Again, questioning him, I denied it. Yet many conversations later, I came to realise: I was assaulted. I just hadn’t realised.
Had this happened to a friend, I’d never have doubted it. Yet with myself, there was a blind spot.
But I knew what was happening? I didn’t tell him no? I chose to have a drink.
A child, under the influence of alcohol, unable to make “choices” about contraception – it all started to slowly make sense.
Informed consent, power dynamics, coercion – these were all topics we’d never been taught about at school. But should have been.
Now an adult and almost two decades later, I was coming to terms with the reality – albeit with difficulty.
I confined in more and more friends (male and female), expecting them to say that I was making it up/had misunderstood (as I still often believe/doubt).
Yet, over and over, friends would say the same thing: “Mary, that’s rape”.
Yes, all of that shame and self-hatred I’d carried was directed to a victim – a victim of a crime knowingly and happily carried out by a grown adult.
A man that’s probably married with kids by now. I often wonder, does his partner know…?
Silent stigma: denial and misinformation
After learning the reality of my assault, I thought things would get easier. But they didn’t…
I discovered that being a survivor is a secret that you’ll carry with you forever – with mounting pressure.
Society is simply not equipped (or willing) to deal with the issue.
With a culture of victim blaming, a lack of understanding on consent and relationships, shame and stigma around assault and gaslighting of victims, survivors’ struggles continue beyond the trauma of the assault itself.
And what’s more, you learn that: you’re never safe from sexual assault.
I know this because, the sad truth is that, the more I talked about my experiences with friends, the more I realised just how many people had been affected. Both male and female.
Some had kept the secret hidden for years – telling no one. And others, like me, didn’t even realise they’d been assaulted.
Sharing our experiences, more than one female friend came to realise that their “first time” or first sexual experience had been forced by the man in question.
Men who didn’t talk about what happened, men who gaslit them, men who denied it.
And it was this gaslighting that I too was about to discover. As, a few weeks into dating one man, I was assaulted. An act he denies.
Gaslighting me, he claimed “it didn’t happen”. He then accused me of being rude (when confronting him) and “selfish” for not meeting his “sexual needs”.
Gaslit, confused, and worried that I was simply “triggered” by the past: I didn’t know what to think. The memories were hazy but the panic and tears very real.
Telling him I needed space, I lay on his bed (he was in another room) and cried. Alone. Then, realising it was night and being confused, I stayed and proceeded to make dinner.
The next morning, discussing the previous night with friends, the tears began to flow. My breakfast then lay thrown up and flushed down the toilet.
I told him it was over. “We had a great night last night… I can’t change your mind about it” he echoed, opening the door. I walked out and never saw him again.
Distressed, I tried to return to my normal routine. After all: it wasn’t the first time it had happened. I was a “strong woman” I told myself.
Yet the irony is that I missed a call for specialist trauma services that day because I couldn’t face picking up the phone. However, I carried on.
Until the next day, when I simply couldn’t do it any longer. I broke down and my mental health started to plummet.
Lessons as a survivor: blame and barriers
Confused about what happened, I reached out to more friends. I was shocked, dazed and trying to make sense of what happened.
The incident that took place when I was 16 was different – I was as a child – and an intoxicated one at that.
But now, a young adult, I’d encountered a different scenario. One that occurred with a man I was dating.
We’d been intimate before and what started as consensual, had ended up with assault.
Yes, in the aftermath, lay a whole series of problems, ranging from societal attitudes towards assault, to poor conviction rates.
To this day, I haven’t reported either of the assaults to the authorities and I haven’t told my family.
Why? Because the fact is that, I’d be taking a risk.
A risk of being inadvertently blamed (“why did you go to his flat?”), a demand for answers and a feeling of “breaking their heart” as their perceptions of me (as a “victim”) would shatter forever.
It was more emotional turmoil that I simply didn’t – and still don’t – need.
After hearing the varying reaction from a female family member regarding the two murders of Sarah Everard (murdered by a policeman) and Zara Aleena (a woman walking alone at night), I knew I didn’t want to open that can of worms.
During a telephone conversation, the question: “Why was she [Zara] walking alone at that time of night?” stood in stark contrast to a more blatant display of sympathy for Sarah – who had been handcuffed by a policeman and ordered into his car.
Of course, no decent person believes any that anyone should be assaulted or that it’s “their fault”.
But then why the questions? It doesn’t matter if some is walking around stark naked, at 3am in the morning, in the pitch-black dark: no one has the right to assault them.
Yet, continuing to blame survivors, we’re not only subject to a crime itself, but the burden of the secret that society throws back in our faces.
Time after time, we hear: “what was she wearing?”, “why was she out alone?”, “she just regretted it the next morning”.
Of course, we should all think about our safety – but if only people could spend more time and energy calling out the sexism and abuse, than simply projecting onto survivors. Then, perhaps we’d get somewhere.
Instead, society continues to simply perpetuate the problem and stigmatise survivors. For example, if victim blaming wasn’t enough, add to the equation the reactions, responses and fears of (heterosexual) men.
I, of course, learnt quickly to not tell men. I came to realise that my “secret” must only be shared with people who’d demonstrated the trust, love and capacity to “cope with it”.
Some men saw it as a vulnerability – attempting to exploit the situation. Narcissists would feed off it. Like a bird of prey seeking out a target.
Then there were the cowards. Men that made it all about themselves, “fearing” that I’d blame them for something if we ever got physical.
Again, the misogyny that continues to create the environment for assault in the first place, continues to “punish” survivors. Painting us as victims for men to contemplate about how they can best manage or exploit the situation.
As survivors, we don’t want pity. We don’t want fear. We simply want to be respected and to be safe.
We don’t want thinly veiled attempts of empathy because “women are someone’s mother, sister, wife etc.” We deserve respect because we’reindividuals in our own right.
We’re all human. And we don’t deserve to be abused.
Yet, it doesn’t end here. On top of the “who to tell” dilemma lies the risk of going through more emotional upheaval if we report the crime.
Plagued with a sense of guilt for not protecting other women (against a crime I didn’t commit), for not speaking out against injustice, yet a fear of “perverting the course of justice” by reporting a false crime, I haven’t reported anything.
Speaking to friends, advice included: “it’s not worth the excess trauma”, “it’s his word against yours” and “they’d rip you to shreds”.
And they’re right – there’s no one answer.
It’s my (unconfident, confused) word against his. And, if we were to get to a courtroom, prosecution rates are so low, they’d most likely not be found guilty.
Here in the UK for example, in 2021, 67, 125 cases of rape were reported to the police.
And how many subsequent prosecutions? A grand total of: 2,409 (for the period 2020 to 2021).
Yes, only 5% of cases that were taken to trial resulted in prosecution.
Dame Vera Baird, Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, issued a statement on the issue and it’s pretty damming:
“The distressing truth is that if you are raped in Britain today, your chances of seeing justice are slim.”
Coming to terms with my assaults, I started to better understand why survivors weren’t coming forward and why historical abuse is often buried and kept secret for so long.
It’s like being punished all over – by both society and the legal system.
Generation after generation, we do seem to be moving forward. However, not quickly enough.
We’re hearing, for example, more and more slogans such as “no means no” which attempt to raise awareness of consent.
However, these fail to recognise that consent isn’t always about vocalising “no” – as opposed to a simple “yes”.
Consent must be informed, clear and NOT REMOVED. Understanding the context is critical.
For example, is there alcohol involved? Is there coercion? Are all parties able to understand the concept of consent and reality of sexual intimacy?
What we need to be teaching about is INFORMED consent. Because, just as the reality of an assault is hazy to the survivor, so is the education and understanding of sexual assault we’re being given as a society.
There must be no doubt. And yes: you can change your mind or the circumstances may change.
Take for example the issue of stealthing–where a condom is removed without the other person’s consent. This is now rightfully now classed as rape here in the UK.
Yet the reality is that songs such as “Blurred Lines” and “rape jokes” perpetuate a continual rape culture. And this has serious consequences, building:
“…an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynist language…thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety.”
Jokes about “her regretting it in the morning” and confusion over sex whilst intoxicated need to be addressed for what they are – skirting the issue in question.
A lack of education, prevailing misconceptions and continuous victim shaming continue to promote an ongoing rape culture. A culture where informed consent is, at best misunderstood, and at worst: ignored.
The abusive practice of gaslighting for example, is also now only just coming to public knowledge.
However, it continues to be used as a tool of denial and shaming by perpetrators and non-perpetrators alike in the context of sexual assault.
So, how do we move forward? Well, we need to tackle the issue head on – starting with the historic culture behind rape.
We need to dispel the myths and victim blaming narratives about clothing, alcohol and “times and places”.
And we need to encourage everyone to speak out and to educate children and adults alike on consent, assault and sexual trauma.
Creating change: education, advocacy and accessibility
To ultimately prevent assault, we need a deep socio-cultural shift in attitudes.
We need to call out the narratives that shame victims and de-toxify spaces that promote rape culture.
We need critical education on informed consent which can critically help to both prevent assault and help survivors to better understand their experiences.
For example, a friend of mine recently ran a workshop on consent and sexual assault to a group of women. Whilst the workshop went well, what he didn’t expect was for four women to approach him afterwards saying they’d been affected.
They’d carried the abuse without realising for (what can only be assumed as) years.
Yet, understanding the abuse is just the first step. Because, when survivors accept that the abuse has happened and look for support, it’s often inaccessible and/or inadequate.
When I was looking for specialised support for example, countless charities offering specialist counselling were so overwhelmed that many couldn’t even put me on a waiting list.
And this was before the second assault even took place…
Survivors must be able to access crucial emotional and legal support in safe, accessible spaces which offer trauma-centred care and result in higher conviction rates.
This will hopefully encourage survivors to come forward, help aid their recovery and ultimately get justice.
Ultimately, it’s only when we stop blaming the victims, offer solid support and hold the perpetrators accountable, that we’re making it clear as a society that assault is wrong – it’s a crime – and you won’t get away with it.
So, time’s up folks. This issue must be addressed.
Survivors deserve better. Future generations deserve better. And we, as a society, deserve better.
The question is, with (as one fellow survivor so eloquently expressed) sexual assault being the only crime where we blame the victim, is society ready and willing to change…?
Support services and further information:
If you – or someone you know – has been affected by sexual assault, or if you’re looking to find out more information on the issue, here are some helpful resources:
Consent: check out this great video called “Tea Consent” which explains consent through a clever tea analogy
Reporting and survivor support: please contact your local police authority, and social services if the incident involves a minor. Click herefor advice on seeking a range of support
For non-survivors in particular: please speak out against abuse. Offer a confidential empathetic ear and denounce victim blaming for what it is.
And to each and every person out there: teach the people in your lives that if there’s no (informed) consent; it’s assault.
The current system frequently leaves people feeling confused, anxious and angry, a charity claims.
People with mental health problems are being made even more unwell by the Government’s system of benefits assessments, a report reveals. Almost seven in 10 (66 percent) of claimants living with conditions such as bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety told mental health charity Mind that going through the assessment process made their mental health worse.
The current system frequently leaves applicants feeling confused, anxious and angry, and assessors reach “incorrect decisions far too often”, Mind told the Express.
The charity’s CEO, Sarah Hughes, said the Government urgently needs to shift from “gatekeeping benefits” to “prioritising support for disabled people”.
She said: “Benefit assessments should be providing the Department for Work and Pensions with an accurate picture of a person’s needs, so that person can get the support they need to get by.
“Instead, our findings show that not only are far too many assessments inaccurate but that they are also leaving the majority of people more unwell.”
Mind’s report – Reassessing Assessments: How People With Mental Health Problems Can Help Fix The Broken Benefits System – highlights the urgent need for the Government to better invest in training for assessors on understanding mental health issues.
Almost half (46 percent) of those assessed for Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and over a third (36 percent) of people assessed for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) or Universal Credit (UC) feel their benefits assessor did not understand mental health problems.
Mind says this “must be addressed” as roughly one in three people receiving PIP and half of all claimants receiving ESA, have a mental health problem, cognitive impairment or learning difficulty as their main disability.
There has been a shift in focus from the Government towards getting people who are off work long-term back into the workforce.
But Mind warns this approach is likely to fail when the DWP’s own processes are making people struggle more.
The charity wants the Government to create a new commission, led by disabled people, tasked with proposing reforms to the structure and criteria of benefit assessments.
It also wants to see it establish an independent regulator for the benefits system to help hold the Government to account, protect the rights of disabled people and enforce improved assessments.
A DWP spokesman said: “Our assessors are all qualified health professionals and decisions are made using all the information available to us. If someone disagrees they have the right to ask for a review.”
They said the Government was increasing investment in mental health services in England “by at least £2.3billion a year by 2024”.
Twenty-three minutes. That’s how long it takes for your brain to refocus after shifting from one task to the next. Check your email, glance at a text, and you’ll pay for what’s called a “switch cost effect.”
“We’ve fallen for a mass delusion that our brains can multitask. They can’t,” author Johann Hari found out in researching his latest book. We’re paying a price for our stolen ability to focus and maybe that’s one of the reasons we’re falling for autocrats and punting on solving the world’s grievous problems.
Hari’s book “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again” raises all sorts of good questions like this. The book is just out in paperback. Talk about technology, though, and inevitably some smart Alec will bring up the Luddites. “You don’t want to stand against progress,” that person will say. “You don’t want to be a Luddite.”
The Luddites … didn’t start by breaking machines. They started by making demands of the factory owners to phase in the technology slowly.
Can we spare a few minutes to focus on Luddites? Read people’s historian Peter Linebaugh, or Jacobin writer, Peter Frase; check out a Smithsonian Magazine’s feature by Clive Thompson—and you’ll find that Luddites weren’t backward-thinking thugs, but rather, skilled craftspeople whose lives were about to be wrecked.
Textile cutters, spinners and weavers—before factories came along, those British textile workers enjoyed a pretty good life. Working from home, they had a certain amount of autonomy over their lives. The price for their products was set and published. They could work as much or as little as they liked. Come the early 1800s—war and recession—and machines and factories threatened all of that. The Luddites—a made-up name—didn’t start by breaking machines. They started by making demands of the factory owners to phase in the technology slowly. Some proposed a tax on textiles to fund worker pensions. They called for government regulation. Relief from the harms and a fair share of the profits from progress. It was only when they were denied all of that that they started breaking stuff up.
Today, big U.S. social media companies are facing lawsuits. On January 6th, Seattle Public Schools sued TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube for their negative impact on students’ mental and emotional health. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments next month over the protections the tech industry enjoys under the law when their algorithms intentionally push potentially harmful content for profit.
What would breaking the machines look like in our time? I don’t know. But if Hari’s right, it’s not just the quality of our lives that’s in danger. It’s the state of our minds that’s at stake.
You can hear my full uncut conversation with Johann Hari about Noam Chomsky, the subject of his next book—a man with no problem with focus it seems—through a subscription to our free podcast, and watch my scary conversation with Hari at lauraflanders.org.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
You didn’t need to hear it from me that the USA is subjected to some of the most insane and inhumane policies tied to the criminal injustice system; tied to mass public K12 education; and corporate overlording; or anti-union activities; also to taxation; or finance; and health care; tied to infrastructure care; or tied to retirement protection. I’ve written about social work and social services many times, and the terrible outcomes of those I have served: just released from prison; pregnant teenagers; foster youth, 16 to 21 years old; veterans and their families deemed homeless and medically fragile; folks with substance abuse issues as well as living homeless; gang-influenced youth; inmates in a federal correctional institution; community college students; active duty military; lifelong learning senior citizens; adults with intellectual, developmental and psychological disabilities.1
Enough, already. Plenty more where those stories came from!
Moving on: Here, the latest mainstream media-press account, again, a day late, a few hundred million dollars short: Oregon is facing a drastic shortage of mental health care workers. The state needs as many as 35,000 new workers by some estimates to fill the mental health care needs in the state. But people interested and willing to go into the field are facing high barriers to doing the work. What can be done to change the system, and open up the pipeline of behavioral health care workers?
It’s way beyond the crappy pay, the student loans, the overloads, the lack of respect, poor management, lack of trauma informed managers, and so much more. The value in this society is big time sports, big time corporate jobs, big time doctors and CEOs and administrators and, well, you get the picture: if I am paid $17 an hour to be a case manager, and then a toilet and bedroom cleaner with an Air B & B gets $21 an hour, and if a bus driver for schools gets $19 an hour, and if some of us volunteer and get diddly squat from tax write offs for all that work, and, you get the idea: money for nothing, and the Value of Nothing.
Until we have 250 elementary students to one counselor, when we have rotating visiting nurses, when we have K12 teachers swamped with the stupidity of curriculum and the stupidity of the local community hobbling teaching; when we have the hands on stuff cut — auto mechanics, construction, floral arranging, orthotics, pet techs, even beauty classes, all of that, including leather working, ceramics, graphic arts, film making, radio broadcasting, gardening, husbandry, basket weaving, well, we are in this mess of digital gulags and the deadening of the Homo sapiens into Homo erectus algorith consumo retailopethicus.
I’ve seen the blasphemy daily, as foster and group homes are going by the wayside for troubled youth and youth and adults living with DD-ID-PD. We have care homes going by the wayside, and we have retirement and terminal medical care facilities costing someone $6,000 a month for one room and pretty basic food. More and more people are paid this $15 an hour shit wage for a vital job, and additionally, they have to drive drive drive to work, and then, put in incredible stressful hours up to sometimes 10 or 12 hour work days. With some of the most despicable bosses around. Pressure pressure pressure. Forget about the fact that non-profits are for-profits, and those retirement-care facilities are monopolized by a few dozen across the land. Speaking of bullshit jobs:
We are at that crossroads of wondering just how far the human brain and spirit can take now, 2023, with the cascading of big-time issues penetrating the souls of people, stripping us bare, stripping our immune systems, and culling our brains. Good people. Vulnerable people. We are trapped in a world of complexities and counter-intuitive thinking and rationalizations, but those complexities are nothing compared to C-PTSD: complex post traumatic stress disorder. More than just a label. The foisting of so much media madness, too, on top of our personal hells, and then add to that, the reality of capitalism as a “search and destroy the competition/ mom and pop/ bricks and mortar/ people-centered businesses” sort of law of the “jungle,” Lord of the Flies style.
We have trauma deeply repressed, unprocessed, hidden, sort of hanging there, in the psyche, and alas, a trigger will pull the anxiety into the bloodstream until a whole lot of mental and shaking comes along.
It is not just a dog eat dog adventure into chaos, and more than bizarre allusion of the law of the jungle crap. Capitalism is scorched earth devaluation of humans policies. The economies of scale is for the shareholders and top brass, not for some nirvana of great benefit to the rank and file. There is so much ugliness and cut-throat shit that the world today serves up, on top of atomized families, communities, friendships; on top of the sink or swim nature of things in AmeriKa. Imagine, facing all of that PLUS the traumatic disorders.
Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear and now you’re acting out of fear. Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.
— Gabor Mate, Oct 14, 2019
Inside, hidden, pushed down, recriminated, hated, laughed at, and as the Anglo Saxon credo says, “Keepa stiff upper lip, bloke.” It’s bad enough that the systems — education, politics, local governance, media, Press, family, government business, bureaucracies — are against the 80 Percent: those that do not have political, real estate, employment, financial, familial, networking clout. But the so-called representatives we “vote” in and who are picked by those we vote in are working for THEM, the point zero-zero-zero One Percent; the One Percent; the Five Percent and possibly the rest of the 15 percent. Representation and clout and power for the 20 percent, more or less. Of course, there is the Faustian Bargain for the 15 Percenters. There is the Eichmann Syndrome. There is the lock-step belief in the hope that providing support for the elite and their legions of manipulators will get you away from decay: neighborhood, school system, environmental, familial, fraternal, transactional decay.
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
— Michael Parenti)
A decaying society pays off (benefits handsomely) for the 19 or 20 Percent. And the cognitive dissonance and the collective Stockholm Syndrome mixed witht he GAD — general anxiety disorder — weathers the shit out of us, the 80 Percent. Until we have a shortage of mental health/social services heroes (oh, shortages left and right, and everywhere one cares to look). We need navigators for almost everything in this legalistic, contractualized, atomized, disassociative society, since everything in the pipeline we need to survive, i.e. safety nets, is almost impossible to interpret and understand. People need help with bills, debts, loans, health care, insurance, housing, medical needs, and mental health. The house we live in may have some fancy furniture and amazing kitchen and bathroom redos, but if the roof leaks (and it’s leaking like a sieve), then the entire half a million dollar home is a goner, sooner than later. Flooded, soaked, warped, moldy and a tear down soon.
Think of the mental health of a child as the roof for that child’s psychic and humanistic house, world, well being. Think of the totality of those in and around that child suffering from the leaky roof. Think of the collective community in and around the youth with the leaky mental health roof gushing water onto them. No amount of Advance Placement classes and super duper athletic training will help build a child into a teen and then into an adult with some normalcy and balance and internal strength without the leaky roof being fixed, maybe R & R-ed, but absolutely not full of holes.
Lifeblood and gut-brain connections are connected to the holism of grand positive mental and spiritual health. The gut-brain-hormone-immune system is all predicated on sound mental health, and learning what trauma is, then stopping it, preventing it, and, of course, patching it up, i.e. treating it. Therapies are the construction processes for that leaky psychic roof.
And so, depression, general anxiety disorder, the new ailments of social media and Facebook shaming, and the disassociative links to all that time on tablets and surfing the internet, and hooking into a Zoom Doom room for every class, every human (sic) interaction. Think of the shame of people in the USA for being so, well, collectively stupid, impotent, flagging, when it comes to the reality that celebrities, the rich, the famous, the leadership, the administrations, the governors’ offices, the entire shit show is worthy of complete deconstruction and dismantling or imploding, yet, we are still in this continuum of never pushing the edge of the envelope and standing down those systems of exploitation, abuse, scamming and general anxiety setting progroms.
This is normal, but today, a diatribe like this would get you Tazed, hog-tied, thrown in jail, and put into a mental ward:
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’
So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’
I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell –
‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’
Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis.
But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
It’s normal, that reaction, no, and we should embrace the roots of any sort of explosion of emotion that fits this “Anger moment.” But beware: I have been a social services practitioner, and the people in it and at the managerial level are not the right folk for the job in so many cases. And, while I always connect these diatribes to my own journey, AKA struggle, this is more than about the stupidity of people in my neck of the woods — Lincoln County — who have passed me over on more than a dozen or so attempts to get employed here in this rural county as a social services practitioner. That is the way of the middling, the milquetoast, and I have to say the attitude of ignorant and destructive human beings in social services. There is no way in hell it seems that any of these middle brow folk can see me as a co-worker at the county, state or city or nonprofit level to be a case manager or social services navigator.
Here we are, then, stuck in the dead pan of AmeriKa, where conformity is the way of the sheeple, the lemming. Following the crowd or buying into the good old broken system, this is the way of the Yanqui. Oh, they say over and over — “You can’t fight City Hall. I’m just one person. They are too powerful and we are too weak.” AmeriKans have caved!
Until, well, sorry to say, the 80 Percent are begging for life support. Begging for basics. In this upside down world of an earth moving closer and closer to nuclear hell, all because of a few elites, a few money changers in Jesus Christ’s story, people are hobbled and strangled by the oppressiveness of elites running the show and ruling the roost. Money changers a la War Mongers, a la Big Pharma, a la Larry Fink and Blackrock, so many tens of thousands of top dog criminals. Can you imagine those Pseudos buying that old time religion story, Matthew 21:12!?
The crowds replied, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.” Then Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves. And He declared to them, “It is written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer.’ But you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’
Imagine that sanity, daily: distrupting the disruptors? Well, try this out for size: This is 2022 IRS 1040 filing time, but maybe also a time for 100 million USA households to declare Zelensky and his sidekick wife as OUR dependents, our WRITE-OFFS, our DEDUCTIONS. That’s $2,000 each, at $4,000 total, and with 100,000,000 filing that way, as the dirty Ukrainian couple as our “children,” hell, we’ll get back some of the drug-gun-offshore money of the Ukrainian Nazis the USA Criminal Enterprise has stolen from our taxpayer coffers to throw at Zelensky’s war — count that $400,000,000,000 total for 100 million 1040s filed with the ugly couple as our dual deduction of $4,000. That’s four hundred billion $$.
In our pockets. And then, hmm, how about massive rolling strikes. IN concert with Mutal Aid. Can you imagine all the people suffering mental illness, all the hardships of children in today’s day and age, and especially now, when there are still putrid sorts yelling at the youth that they have it easy. “Try growing up in the Great Depression. Or during World War Two.” We have to take things back or all hell will break loose. Mental Hell, that is.
Here’s one version of trauma —
And, another version:
‘Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice’ by Raj Patel and Rupa Marya takes the reader on a medical tour of the human body and reveals the relationship between our biology and the injustices of our political and economic system such as racism, poverty and colonialism. Patel and Marya ultimately offer a cure of “deep medicine” to heal our bodies and the world by reconnecting to the earth and each other.
We come down to this, uh? Canada, USA, Africa, South America, Mexico, anywhere we find the clergy! I have a friend in Australia, part of the victim class of native Australians who were despoiled and abused by clergy, in this case the robed and frocked monsters of the Catholic Church. This is one trauma piled onto another, until a victim is powerful but still at age 60, say, waylaid by the news of yet another blasphemy of humanity getting prime time news coverage recently: Do these people have no dignity, no access to a bottle of barbituates and fifth of vodka? More lies, convicted but found not-guilty? Blasphemy. There are Nine Circles of Hell. Welcome to one of them, Cardinal, where there will undoubtedly be a few hundreds of millions of others awaiting you there.
Cardinal George Pell, 81, died in Rome on Jan. 10, the Vatican has confirmed. A leading Australian Catholic and close advisor to Pope Francis, the cardinal had participated in the funeral of his friend, Pope Benedict XVI, just last week.
Pell, the former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, became the third-highest ranked official in the Vatican after Pope Francis tapped him in 2014 to reform the Vatican’s notoriously opaque finances as the Holy See’s first-ever finance czar. He spent three years as prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy, where he tried to impose international budgeting, accounting and transparency standards.
He has been living in Rome since his release from an Australian maximum security prison in 2020 after spending 404 days in solitary confinement after being wrongfully convicted in December 2018 on charges of the abuse of two altar boys in Melbourne in 1996.
His conviction was upheld by an appeals court in March 2019, but he always protested his innocence and was the first cardinal to be imprisoned on such charges. The full bench of Australia’s High Court unanimously squashed his conviction in 2020, and he decided to return to Rome, where he had previously served in various positions under Pope Francis. (Source)
There are thousands of priests who have never been excommunicated or jailed for their rape crimes. I recall when I was in El Paso, and there were some priests from Spokane Diocese in El Paso. I never inquired there, but until later. Then, just by chance, I ended up in Spokane years later, and ahh, there was the answer to El Paso and Spokane priest connection: the ones charged up in Washington, in Spokane, got sent to the border, where the “little brown ones and the brown people would just be happy to have some wise, white priest from the sophisticated Northwest tending the flock.” That’s what one Jesuit said to me, quoting one of his bosses. Send away the rapists to the other outposts, in this case, La Frontera, the border.
There are so many multiple trauma’s just in the ether, such as the head Federal Reserve Mafiosa — how does his continence settle with you?
Ahh, the fed chief, or this cabal? Vice President Joe Biden, flanked by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, sits with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on February 7, 2015, before a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany.
Yep, that’s $17 or $20 an hour with clients suffering under a massive overload of trauma, both physical and mental. Those leaky roofs, the spiritual and psychological shelters and protective covers that need attending to before almost anything else, they are gaping, and yet ‘this country tis of thee’ throws trillions away, burns it up, memory holes it, until we have all of us on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Again, I am a communist, so these two blokes below are not my normal everyday peeps I’d be hanging with, but I am certainly around so many people who are bought, sold and delivered in this exceptionalist wasteland, that I learn how to converse and have open dialogue and debates. But listen to Scott Ritter here. Have you ever seen this guy on Amy Soros Goodman’s Democracidocy Now? On any of the mainstream media? But listen to him, man. This is serious stuff, and he tells it like it is that Blinken should be immediately sacked, and that there is no one sane person in the Biden Administration, and that there are no nuclear arms control panels.
And we wonder why so so many people are on the verge of a complete melt down:
The trail of tears throughout the old colonies and the neo-colonies is epigenic trauma of the generations. The collateral damage. The Madeleine Albright murders by 1,000 economic sanctions cuts, it never just ends with her or that generation or time frame. Over 500,000 dead was-is-will forever be worth it in her psychopath’s mind. How many generations are lost and affected?
Fight until the last Ukrainian. Worth it! Yeah, death by 10,000 cuts.
•U.S. EPA fish testing in 2013–2015 had a median PFAS concentration of 11,800 ng/kg.
•Even infrequent freshwater fish consumption can increase serum PFOS levels.
•One fish serving can be equivalent to drinking water for a month at 48 ppt PFOS.
•Fish consumption advice regarding PFAS is inconsistent or absent in the U.S. states.
This is just one insult to humanity, one multiple aspects of how rotten the world is, and so, how are those children supposed to process this? Forever chemicals, all those hormone-disrupting, diabetes-creating, immune system-depleting, cancer-causing, brain fog-inducing shit chemicals/poisons/toxins that the great CEOs and the “follow the science Über Alles” or else bullshit people have put upon humanity and ecosystems?
And how do we get powerful, self-actualized, community-driven, socialist-minded, anti-authority youth activated when they have mental health disturbances via a thousand injustices?
Remember it seems so long ago, 1988? That other criminal, Ronald Reagan, and the 1988 campaign for POTUS, surely a position only megalomaniacs, narcissists and sociopaths can find themselves happy in their own element?
Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis knows about the damage that disability can cause–even its mere mention. In this keynote address given to the symposium on Presidential Disability and Succession held at Northeastern University in Boston last spring (2014), Dukakis reflected on his famous 1988 presidential campaign that, largely at his expense, redefined negativity in presidential politics, in particular the fictitious allegation that he had a history of mental illness. A distinguished professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Northeastern University, Dukakis also spends each winter quarter at UCLA as a visiting professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs. He remains active in both politics and public policy, canvassing for Democratic candidates such as Elizabeth Warren during her 2012 Senate campaign and promoting policy initiatives through the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern, which he affectionately calls a “think and do tank.” The three-term governor (1975-1979 and 1983-1991) was voted Most Effective Governor by the National Governor’s Association in 1986. After his first term in the late 1970s he lost a nasty primary election to Ed King, whom he would later defeat to reclaim office. Though it wasn’t apparent at the time, for Dukakis, that 1978 campaign would serve as a precursor for the attack politics that were unloosed during the 1988 presidential campaign. In the remarks that follow, he offers a candid assessment of how not going negative may have cost him the presidency, and how an offhand remark by President Reagan (quickly retracted) caused the press to obsess over Dukakis’ health record for the better part of a week–enough to slow his momentum during a crucial stage of campaigning. (Campaigns and disability: When an incumbent president questions his potential successor’s mental health status during the campaign)
Salaries and hours of unpaid labor during the pandemic were on the minds of University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) faculty who showed up to the picket lines on Monday for the first day of a campus-wide strike, but professors and lecturers are demanding more than just better pay. Like educators across the country, the UIC faculty union is also fighting for better mental health resources for their…
Borders inspector blames unfounded suspicions by ministers that detainees are gaming the system
Torture victims and suicidal people in immigration detention centres are not receiving adequate help because of unfounded suspicions from ministers and officials that they are cheating the system, the UK borders watchdog has found.
David Neal, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI), also questioned why Suella Braverman had ended annual investigations into the treatment of vulnerable adult detainees.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is making plans to effectively harass social security claimants during NHS treatments. It comes on top of pre-existing co-working between the department and the NHS. And it also shows that the Tories are still pursuing the ‘back to work’ ideology used by successive governments against chronically ill and disabled people – despite the potential harm.
ways to incorporate “work incentives” into some mental health treatment, and looking at ways that those with low-level conditions who could work can be helped back into work via treatment.
For those who are long-term sick, we have to work with the Health Department and employers and look at occupational health and very different approaches.
One possibility… that people referred for certain mental health treatments could be incentivised to go to a work coach afterwards, though this work is understood to be less advanced.
In other words, if the NHS refers you for something like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for depression and you’re currently claiming sickness social security, a medical professional will push you to go and see a DWP work coach as part of your treatment.
Co-working – nothing new
This co-working between the NHS and the DWP isn’t new. As the Canary previously reported, the idea came from the last Labour government. However, it was the Tory-led government that properly rolled this co-working out in 2014. As the Canary wrote, it did this via:
the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) scheme. This is where the DWP co-works with the NHS, by putting Jobcentre staff into therapy settings.
Mental health services are chronically underfunded. By ring-fencing new money for employment specialists, we reinforce the message work is the central goal of a meaningful life. This increases the shame, guilt and anxiety disabled people already feel. Even more so under a welfare system that equates worklessness with worthlessness. It is exacerbating mental health problems…
However, in recent years, policy has focused on returning as many patients to work as possible. This ‘back to work’ obsession places huge demand on patients to fulfil the neoliberal dream. One whereby health is linked to how much one can contribute to the public purse. But this is foreclosing the reality of long-term disability… So we must refuse the insistence that work is a meaningful health outcome in mental health services. We must instead recommit to patient (not government) centred care.
Now, it seems that the DWP and government want to further exacerbate the erosion of patient-centred care in the NHS. Overall, as the Canarypreviously wrote:
ultimately, what we’re seeing is a systematic plan by the DWP and the NHS. They’re tag-teaming, trying to get claimants/patients off benefits and into work… the DWP and NHS are also co-working in other areas already; for example, trying to “coerce” GPs into saying that their sick and disabled patients are fit-for-work.
NHS workers and trade unions should oppose any plans to further integrate the health service with the DWP – and social security claimants should approach this with caution.
Duke and Duchess of Sussex honoured for their activism days ahead of revelatory Netflix show
A US human rights charity has awarded Harry and Meghan its Ripple of Hope award for their activism on racial justice and mental health.
In a statement celebrating their award, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said “a ripple of hope can turn into a wave of change”. The couple received the award on Tuesday night in New York, two days before the release of a tell-all Netflix show expected to include damning revelations about the royal family.
Pasifika Futures chief executive Debbie Sorensen said Pasifika people were essentially left to form their own response during the earlier stages of the pandemic.
That was despite Pasifika people working a large proportion of jobs in MIQ facilities and at the airport and other front line locations, she said.
Many affected Pacific families experienced a great deal of hardship, she said.
It was important for the inquiry to look at the covid-19 response in regards to specific communities, she said.
Slowness of response
“We’re really clear that equity in the response and in the resource allocation is an important consideration.”
One issue was the slowness of the government’s response to both Pacific and Māori communities during the height of the pandemic, she said.
“Advice was provided to the government, you know cabinet papers provided advice on specific responses for our communities and that advice was ignored.”
An important aspect of the inquiry should be reviewing how that advice was given to the government, its response to it and how the government’s sought more information, she said.
The inquiry’s initial scope appeared to be very narrow, but it could be broadened as it went along, Sorensen said.
“The impact on mental health and the ongoing economic burden for our communities is immense — you know we have a whole generation of young people who have not continued their education because they were required to go in to work.”
Sorensen said often young people had to work because they were the only person in their family who had a job at that time due to covid-19.
Mental health demand
The pandemic also increased demand for mental health services which were already under pressure, she said.
Anyone who was unwell unlikely to be able to get an appointment within six to eight months which was shameful, she said.
Sorensen would have preferred the inquiry had been announced earlier, but it was an opportunity to better prepare for the future, she said.
But Te Aka Whai Ora, the Māori Health Authority, chief medical officer Dr Rawiri McKree Jansen told Morning Report he had some concerns that the probe into the covid-19 response was coming too soon to gain a full picture.
The pandemic was ongoing and starting the inquiry so early may obstruct a complete view of it, he said.
“I understand that there’s people champing at the bit and [saying] we should’ve done it before but it’s very difficult to do that and adequately learn the lessons.”
Understanding how to get a proper pandemic response was in everyone’s interest, but the pandemic was now still in its third wave, he said.
About to begin
Nevertheless, the inquiry was about to get underway and it could make a large contribution if it was done well, he said.
“I’m sure there will be many Māori communities that want to have voice in the inquiry and you know contribute to a better understanding of how we can manage pandemics really well.
“We’ve had pandemics before and they’ve been absolutely tragic. We’ve got this pandemic and the outcome for us is something like two to two-and-a-half times the rate of hospitalisations and deaths, so Māori communities are fundamentally very interested in bedding in the learnings that we’ve achieved in the pandemic.”
Dr Jansen hoped the inquiry would provide enduring information about managing pandemics with a very clear focus on Māori and how to support the best outcomes for the Māori population.
Inquiry’s goal next pandemic The head of the Royal Commission said the review needed to put New Zealand in better position to respond next time a pandemic hits.
Professor Blakely said the breadth of experience and skills of the commissioners was welcome, and would help them to cover the wide scope of the Inquiry, ranging from the health response and legislative decisions, to the economic response.
Reviewing the response to the pandemic was a big job, he said.
“There’s already 75 reports done so far, I think about 1700 recommendations from those reports, New Zealand’s not the only country that’s been affected by this cause it’s a global epidemic, so there’s lots of other reports.”
The inquiry panel would have to sit at the top of all that work that had already been done “and pull it altogether from the perspective of Aotearoa New Zealand and what would help best there.
The inquiry needed to make New Zealand was prepared for a pandemic with good testing, good contact tracing and good tools that the Reserve Bank could use to support citizens in the time of a pandemic, Professor Blakely said.
“Our job is to try and create a situation where those tools are as good as possible, there’s frameworks to use when you’ve entered another pandemic, which will occur at some stage we just don’t know when.”
Professor Blakely said he was flying to New Zealand next week and would meet with Hekia Parata and John Whitehead to start thinking about the shape of the inquiry going forward.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
While some women at the University of the South Pacific’s 14 campuses found working from home enjoyable during the covid-19 pandemic, others felt isolated, had overwhelming mental challenges and some experienced domestic violence, a Pacific survey has found.
Titled “University Women Remote Work Challenges”, the survey was funded by the Council of Pacific Education (COPE) and was supported by the Association of the University of the South Pacific staff (AUSPS)
The research report, released last month, was conducted by Dr Hilary Smith (an honorary affiliate researcher at the Australian National University and Massey University) for the women’s wing of AUSPS.
AUSPS women’s wing chair Rosalie Fatiaki . . . “Women with young children had a lot to juggle, and those who rely on the internet for work had particular frustrations.” Image: AUSPS
“This survey confirms that many of our university women had support from their family networks while on Work From Home, but others were left feeling very isolated,” said Rosalie Fatiaki, chair of the AUSPS women’s wing.
“Women with young children had a lot to juggle, and those who rely on the internet for work had particular frustrations — some had to wait until after midnight to get a strong enough signal,” she said.
Around 30 percent of respondents reported having developed covid-19 during the Work From Home periods, and 57 percent had lost a family member or close friend to covid-19 as well as co-morbidities.
In the survey there was also evidence of the “shadow pandemic” of domestic abuse and although the reported levels were low, it was likely the real incidence was much higher, said Dr Smith.
‘Feelings of shame’
“That was because of the feelings of shame (reporting domestic violence). In the Pacific Islands families and communities tend to be very close-knit groupings,” Dr Smith said.
Only two of the 14 USP campuses in 12 Pacific countries avoided any covid-19 closures between 2020 and 2022 — the shortest closure was two days in Tokelau and the longest at the three Fijian campuses of Laucala, Lautoka and Labasa lasting 161 days.
There had been no cases on the Tuvalu campus until the second quarter of this year.
“For women who had older children they said they enjoyed the time with their families,” Dr Smith said.
“And it was more difficult for those with young families,” she said.
She stressed the importance of being careful with the survey in relation to domestic violence.
“With this kind of survey, we had to be a little bit careful. We can’t say we got evidence of how much there is because it is a very tricky thing to survey and especially in this kind of survey,” Dr Smith said.
‘Sensitive issue’
“And because it is a sensitive issue and people tend not to identify and it is something that people tend to be ashamed about pretty much.
“The survey was totally confidential, and we set it up so no one would who the respondents were.
“It was impossible to find out through the ANU programme we used.
“But the fact people did give some evidence then I think that we know that it is actually quite significant, and we assumed that the prevalence was quite higher.”
She said that she was not saying there were more incidents, but from media reports, particularly in Fiji, she had suspicions that it was higher than reported in the survey.
“We were responding to the fact that there were other news reports in Fiji we referenced, and there has been the other report by the UN (United Nations) women about it,” she said.
The report “Measuring the Shadow Pandemic – violence against women during Covid-19” was released by the UN in December 2021 and the Violence Against Women Rapid Gender Assessments (VAW RGA) were implemented in 13 countries spanning all regions — Albania, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Nigeria, Paraguay, Thailand and Ukraine.
There was general support of national statistical offices (NSOs) or national women’s groups and funding from the policy and Melinda Gates Foundation, which found an incidence of 40 percent of reported domestic violence.
‘There in Pacific”
“So, we weren’t saying that it was more than in other countries, but we were saying it was there in the Pacific.
“It could be more, or it could be less but because the evidence had been already highlighted in Fiji, we were just picking up on that.”
AUSPS had specifically asked for it to be followed up because of “widespread murmuring” that domestic violence was occurring.
“My colleagues at USP had indicated they wanted to follow it up because they had heard that it was an issue for some women,” Dr Smith said.
In her recommendations she had suggested counselling for women and a safe space on campus, but she was unsure if it would be acted on.
Limited counselling
There was limited counselling available already and some had suggested that it should be done through religious denominations, she said.
She said internationally people had struggled with mental health issues during the pandemic, so it was common to all communities.
“There was a relatively high incidence in Fiji, and we reported the findings from the survey,” Dr Smith said.
Among the recommendations for support during isolation was the setting up of a helpline and regular calls from senior personnel and support staff.
She said even if this pandemic had passed there were other events like natural disasters, politics, and wars to be mindful of.
“Human-made or nature-made or the prevalence of other pandemics, we are basically saying the university should be prepared,” Dr Smith said.
A group of current and former Yale students is suing the Ivy League university over what they say is “systemic discrimination” against students struggling with mental health issues. In a lawsuit filed last week, they say school administrators routinely pressure students to withdraw from Yale rather than accommodating their mental health needs, a practice that disproportionately hurts students of…
The new mayor of New York City wants to use the police to clear the streets and subways of homeless people and send them straight to hospitals. No mental health teams, no offer of shelter, no medical evaluation to determine whether they pose a threat to anyone — just a bunch of police officers determining if they think someone has the capacity to think clearly. The decision to use police to round…
A recent paper by University of Canberra researchers found women with larger breasts are less satisfied with their breasts and that this has significant implications for their quality of life and physical activity participation. BroadAgenda Editor Ginger Gorman had a chat with two of the paper’s authors, Dr Celeste Coltman and Dr Vivienne Lewis about their findings.
First of all, tell us about women and their breasts. There are so many different shapes and sizes of breasts. Why do we have low breast satisfaction at all? What are we measuring our breasts against and why?
Breasts vary widely – in fact no two are the same! We know that breast size ranges between 48 – 3100 ml, per breast, so the spectrum of breast sizes among women is really wide. Women can have small, medium, large or extremely large breasts due to excessive breast tissue.
As size increases, shape typically changes. Some breasts can be quite saggy, others not so much. Those that are sagging tend to splay outwards. The bigger the breasts, the more likely they are to sag, thanks to the force of gravity. It is likely that all of these factors influence women’s breast satisfaction.
Why did you decide to investigate how breast satisfaction was linked to health outcomes?
The breasts change substantially across a woman’s lifespan – think puberty, pregnancy, breastfeeding, menopause, as well as body mass fluctuations (which affect breast size) and changes to skin properties with aging (which affect breast shape).
Research to date has mainly focused on specific cohorts of women when examining breast satisfaction (e.g. mature women), but given the size and variation among our participant cohort we were really interested in better understanding the link between breast satisfaction across the lifespan and as a function of these key physical factors – age, Body Mass Index (BMI) and breast size.
From a health outcomes point of view, better understanding this link was important because there was some evidence to suggest that poor breast satisfaction is associated with reduced physical activity participation in women over 40 years, and this is linked to a host of negative health implications.
Who took part in your study?
Three hundred and forty-five Australian women aged 18 to 84participated in the study. The cohort was reflective of the variation among Australian women, with a range of body and breast shapes and sizes..
You found that breast satisfaction was influenced by breast size. Please explain this to us.
First, it’s important to understand how we measured breast satisfaction in our study – breast satisfaction was measured on a 4-point Likert scale (from 1 = “very dissatisfied” to 4 = “very satisfied”). Second, it’s important to highlight the range of breast sizes (volumes) of participants in the study – ranging from 70 – 2,789 ml, per breast.
What our study found was that as breast size increased, participants were more likely to report being “Very dissatisfied” or “Somewhat dissatisfied” with their breasts.
Your paper found “greater breast satisfaction was associated with improved psychosocial and sexual well-being-related measures of quality of life, and time spent participating in physical activity.” How is breast satisfaction linked to improved psychosocial and sexual well-being measures?
The key takeaway from our study is an association between breast satisfaction and Quality of Life (QoL) measures and this is influenced by BMI. We found that the effect of breast satisfaction on QoL measures was reduced among participants with a higher BMI. This means we must address the link between breast satisfaction and BMI when implementing public health initiatives regarding female body image and psychosocial and sexual well-being.
And now please explain why feeling better about your breasts might lead you to be more willing to participate in physical activity?
We found that participants with increased breast satisfaction, which is strongly influenced by breast size, reported higher engagement in physical activity per week.
It’s important to note though that while breast satisfaction and breast volume (size) were found to influence physical activity behaviour, there are numerous other influencing factors that were not measured in our study including cultural factors, existing physical activity participation habits, personal control (decision making regarding self and health situations), interpersonal support systems and smoking status.
What does this mean for women with extremely low breast satisfaction and their overall health?!
What we do know from this research is that women with larger breast sizes are less satisfied with their breasts compared to their counterparts with smaller breast sizes.
Although the effect of breast satisfaction on physical activity participation was mild, the impact upon psychosocial and sexual well-being related measures of quality of life was substantial and needs to be considered when implementing future public health initiatives.
In order to improve psychosocial and sexual well-being related measures of quality of life, we need public health initiatives to increase total breast satisfaction. Critically, these initiatives must address the association between breast satisfaction and breast size and BMI.
This seems to mean it’s critical to get women feeling better about their breasts! As a society, how do we do this?
Public health initiatives are required to normalise the conversation around breasts, in particular the NORMAL variation that exists in breast size and shape between women. We must also design inclusive equipment and garments that cater to the diversity in breast shape and size – in particular sports bras.
Women with large breasts report difficulty finding a sports bra to correctly fit and support their breasts during motion. However, a correctly fitting and supportive sports bra removes the ‘bra barrier’ to physical activity, and enables women to undertake physical activity comfortably and supported.
This story had editorial input and support from Emma Larouche from the UC communications team. Thanks Emma!
In Chicago, the Treatment Not Trauma campaign won overwhelming community support for a non-binding referendum calling for investment in public mental health centers and a non-police crisis response system. Authored by 33rd Ward Alderperson Rossana Rodriguez and envisioned by a coalition of community groups and stakeholders, the ordinance calls for developing a Chicago Crisis Response and Care System within the Chicago Department of Public Health.
On November 8, residents in three wards said “yes” to the Treatment Not Trauma campaign, for an overwhelming win. The 6th, 20th and 33rd wards received 98 percent, 96 percent and 93 percent “yes” votes, respectively. The Treatment Not Trauma campaign — which includes the Collaborative for Community Wellness, Southside Together Organizing for Power, 33rd Working Families, DefundCPD, and most crucial of all, individual community members — sustained the effort through thousands of calls, conversations and doorknocks from mental health professionals, community organizers and residents.
The referendum results combat the idea that Black and Brown residents of Chicago are opposed to mental health investment and divestment from policing.
And Chicago isn’t the only city where organizers are fighting for non-police mental health responses and mental health care systems. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, the city council voted in April 2021 to invest $3.5 million in federal stimulus funding into a non-police mental health crisis response system. On November 4, the city officially closed its community engagement survey, which asked for input from residents in an effort toward community accountability.
Studies show that people who encounter a police officer while experiencing a mental health crisis are 16 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than people who are not experiencing a mental health crisis. Thirty-three to 50 percent of “use of force” incidents involve a disabled person, according to research by the Ruderman Family Foundation.
Election Day canvassers pose for a picture holding a sign saying, “Vote YES to reopen our mental health centers” at The Breathing Room and Garden in the 20th ward neighborhood of Garfield Park.Asha Ransby-Sporn
Why Cops Are Wrong for the Job
Mental illness stigmatization has led to a widespread narrative of the out-of-control, violent mentally ill person — but in reality, people experiencing mental illness are more likely to be victimized. Mental health calls to emergency services are usually handled by police, which poses a public health danger. By putting officers in the position to act as mental health professionals, local governments endanger people’s lives, increasing the likelihood of imprisonment and death. In 2021, officers trained to use force for compliance claimed over 100 lives during mental health or wellness checks.
Mainstream analyses often attribute the risk factors of mental illness to individual ailments without a structural analysis of the systems that put people’s lives at risk. To paraphrase longtime abolitionist political leader Angela Y. Davis, carceral solutions only disappear people, not problems. Prisons have become some of the largest mental health institutions in the United States,with systemic racism and structural inequality exacerbating the criminalization of Black and Brown people. Policing is a reactionary measure rooted in social inequality that enforces white supremacy.
Public health investment could create infrastructure and preventative measures by establishing multiple points of crisis intervention before police involvement. Crisis intervention could include access to health and trauma care, nutritious foods, clean built environments, and more. Mental health crises can be mitigated or reduced in severity by meeting basic needs and developing clear care plans. Police respond to situations after they occur, so preventative measures would create more opportunities for community empowerment and combatting police violence. However, police budgets continue to increase in many cities whilepublic infrastructure investment has declined.
Community members and organizers submit petition signatures to the board of elections in downtown Chicago, Illinois, on August 8, 2022.Karina Martinez, BPNC
Of the original 19 public mental health centers in Chicago, 10 were shut down between former mayors Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel. Five public mental health clinics remain in a city of 3 million people, where 79 percent of the city has less than 0.2 therapists per 1000 residents. Rahm Emanuel also participated in an attempted cover-up of the police killing of Laquan McDonald, a teenager experiencing a mental health crisis, after he was shot multiple times by police officers in October 2014. Community members have not forgotten the killing of Laquan and the attempted cover-up as police officers continue to harm young Black and Brown children.
Going forward into Chicago’s local elections in early 2023, the Treatment Not Trauma campaign will be calling on candidates to support structural mental health investment and demand that the City of Chicago invest in systems of care. Chicago will hopefully be among the ranks of cities running non-police crisis response systems and public mental health centers for all of its residents, not just the few.
A recent experiment suggests that money can indeed buy happiness — at least for six months, among households making up to $123,000 a year.
A study published Monday in the journal PNAS looked at the effects of giving 200 people a one-time sum of $10,000.
The money, which came from two anonymous wealthy donors, was distributed on PayPal through a partnership with the organization TED.
Participants who got the money were required to spend it all within three months. They recorded how happy they felt on a monthly basis, as did a control group of 100 people who did not get any money. The researchers measured happiness by having people rank how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale of 1 to 7 and how frequently they experienced positive feelings, like happiness, and negative feelings, such as sadness, on a scale of 1 to 5.
The group that got $10,000 reported higher levels of happiness than those who did not after their three months of spending. Then, after three more months had passed, the recipients still reported levels of happiness higher than when the experiment started.
However, people with household incomes above $123,000 did not report noticeable improvements in their happiness.
The participants recorded how they spent their money, but the researchers are still analyzing the data to see whether any types of purchases led to the most happiness.
Those in the study came from three low-income countries — Brazil, Indonesia and Kenya — and four high-income countries: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the U.S. The findings indicated that participants from the low-income countries gained three times as much happiness as those from high-income countries. And people who earned $10,000 a year gained twice as much happiness as those making $100,000 annually.
“Ten thousand dollars in certain places around the world can really buy you a lot,” said Ryan Dwyer, a co-author of the study, who conducted the research as a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia. “Some people spent a lot of the money paying down their mortgage or doing a big renovation on their house.”
The study participants did not know what they were signing up for at first: In December 2020, TED invited people on Twitter to apply for a “mystery experiment” that would be “exciting, surprising, somewhat time-consuming, possibly stressful, but possibly also life-changing.”
A few months later, a select group got emails telling them they would receive $10,000.
Dwyer said he thinks higher sums — closer to, say, the recent $2.04 billion Powerball lottery jackpot — would yield even bigger boosts in happiness.
“Typically, people who do win the lottery are happier many, many years later,” he said.
Research in 2019 found that big lottery wins increased people’s life satisfaction, and a 2007 study concluded that people who won up to $200,000 from the lottery had better psychological health than people who did not win at all.
The findings contradicted earlier research that suggested winning the lottery did not have much effect on happiness.
Ania Jaroszewicz, a behavioral scientist at Harvard University, said there is still no scientific consensus about whether money can buy happiness. Jaroszewicz oversaw an experiment that gave one-time payments of either $500 or $2,000 to 5,000 low-income people in the U.S. Neither group reported improvements in their financial or psychological well-being up to 15 weeks after they got the money.
“There is a lot of mixed research, and a lot of it does depend on the specifics of how much you’re giving, who you’re giving it to, what measures exactly you’re using and so forth,” she said.
A famous study published in 2010 suggested that emotional well-being improved as incomes got higher for those making up to $75,000 a year. However, a 2020 study found that no such cap existed and that people making $80,000 or more a year reported higher levels of positive feelings and fewer negative feelings as their incomes rose.
Dwyer said it is possible that some of the happiness reported in his study had to do with people’s initial excitement and that the feeling “probably decays slowly over time if they’re not receiving any additional income.”
That makes it challenging to compare his results to those of experiments with basic income, which have given smaller stipends on a regular basis.
Such pilot programs have largely focused on lower-income, unemployed or unhoused people. For example, a city-led experiment in Stockton, California, gave people $500 monthly stipends. Participants, who had to live in neighborhoods where the median household income was $46,000 or less per year to qualify, reported improvements in their emotional well-being, decreases in anxiety and depression and increases in full-time employment after a year.
In Dwyer’s study, incomes ranged from $0 to $400,000 per year, averaging around $54,000. Most participants had bachelor’s degrees or higher.
Jaroszewicz highlighted that in any study of money and happiness, outcomes can also depend on the particular circumstances of people’s lives and their expectations.
Some people might mistakenly assume the sum will be life-changing, she said: “Then you get there and you’re like, ‘Oh, actually, I still have all of these problems that are unrelated to money.’ Maybe you still have a personal relationship problem or you’re not satisfied at work.”
Bird encounters | Thérèse Coffey | Cop or Copout? | Open University | Boycotting Qatar
Now I’m in my late 60s, I have started using a hearing aid, and on a recent autumnal walk was delighted to discover that the birds still sang at this time of year (Bird and birdsong encounters improve mental health, study finds, 27 October). I had become so used to hearing only the occasional twitter of a bird when almost within arm’s reach that this experience was like discovering the joy of being outdoors for the first time. I now wait for spring, when I hope to hear the cuckoo once again. Sue Hunter Brockenhurst, Hampshire
• Thérèse Coffey has said Cop27 is “just a gathering of people”, so hardly worth the prime minister attending (Report, 28 October). Her arrogance and lack of moral concern are amazing. The only good thing about her move to the environment job is that she won’t be wrecking the NHS. Peter Brooker West Wickham, London
Queensland will introduce legislation that would allow United Nations officials to visit its mental health wards in a move that could leave New South Wales as the only Australian jurisdiction to refuse entry to inspectors.
Dr Vivienne Lewis is a Clinical Psychologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Canberra. She specialises in eating disorders and body image in her clinical and research work.
Recently Vivienne wrote a fascinating article for The Conversation website busting some of the myths about why people develop eating disorders. BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, had a chat with her about that…and plenty more!
When it comes to eating disorders, what do we misunderstand OR what do we need to think differently about?
I work with young people and adults with eating disorders and we know that a person’s relationship with food is complex and can be very anxiety provoking. A person with an eating disorder feels that their body weight, size and shape is an important part of their identity and this influences how they feel about themselves and cope with emotions.
When a person doesn’t feel happy in their body or their ability to cope with their emotions feels strained, this often leads a person with an eating disorder to either restrict their intake, binge eat and engage in behaviours to try and control or change the body in some way. A person with an eating disorder finds eating distressing a lot of the time.
There’s often a misconception that a person with an eating disorder should just be able to ‘eat normally’ and not worry about food. But this is precisely what is challenging about having an eating disorder, there is immense fear around eating. There’s also a misperception that a person with an eating disorder looks a particular way.
For example, thinking of the stereotype of an adolescent female with anorexia that looks extremely thin. But majority of people with an eating disorder don’t fit this myth. Eating disorders effect men as well and people of all ages. As well, you don’t have to be thin to have an eating disorder. For example, I have treated many middle aged women who are in a healthy body range/size.
What factors influence eating disorders and a person’s attitudes to eating, food and their body image?
V: Most of the influences on our eating come from our upbringing. So what we learn from our parents and carers and our peers. I speak to a lot of parents about the importance of positive role modelling around body image and eating. For example, being respectful of all body types, talking about food for its function in the body, not labelling foods as good and bad, not using food as a reward or punishment.
A healthy relationship with food comes from eating a variety of foods, eating when hungry and stopping when full, having enough food for your own body’s needs, being able to eat without anxiety, and feeling positive about your food choices.
We learn so much rubbish in the media about what foods we should and shouldn’t be eating and how they affect our body weight. That’s how eating disorders often develop, where we learn to feel bad when we eat certain foods or have a certain body shape or weight. Or when we are brainwashed in to thinking we should lose weight and associating being thin with admiration which is often the case with celebrities.
How does gender play into it? I know more men are presenting with disordered eating. But it’s still predominantly women. What can you tell me about this?
Yes, you’re right it’s still more of a female issue. This is mainly to do with the portrayal of ‘idealised’ figures in the media which are a thin female figure.
This is more significant for females than males (males often have a more fitness, strength and leanness focus). As well, there is far more advertising around dieting targeted at females then males. This has been the case for many years. However, it is becoming more and more of an issue for males.
1/10 people with an eating disorder are male. I have treated many adolescent boys and men with eating disorders. So by no means is gender a protective factor. Males receive the same unhealthy messages around the negatives of certain body weights and shapes and eating certain foods as females and there’s a lot of emphasis in the media about males being trim, fit, muscular and toned and shame attached to being overweight for example. You only have to turn on the TV or follow social media to hear about the latest diet or fat blaster or man shake.
Why do people develop aversions and sensitivities (and how does this relate to eating disorders)?
People often develop aversions to foods because they have been ‘taught’ that they are ‘bad’ for you. This comes from the media, upbringing and observing others. For example, when a person is dieting to lose weight or change their shape they are taught (usually incorrectly) that certain foods are bad and shouldn’t be eaten if you’re trying to lose weight.
But this just sets someone up to feel bad about themselves when they do eat these foods. There’s a lot of guilt attached to food and it is these emotions that we try to avoid. So if we avoid these ‘guilty pleasures’ we often feel better about ourselves and then the reverse if we do indulge. All foods are good foods. It’s about their function in our body.
Our bodies need a balance of sugar, fats, carbs etc to function well. Just like only eating sweets makes our bodies not function the best, just eating carrots has the same effect. We need variety and to enjoy a range of foods.
University of Canberra Clinical Psychologist Dr Vivienne Lewis urges us not label foods as “good” or “bad” and attach emotions to food. Picture: Supplied
What’s the issue with treating some food as “good” foods and others as “bad foods”?
Labelling foods as good and bad makes us attach emotions to foods. Such as feeling good about oneself because you’ve eaten something ‘good’ and negative about yourself if you’ve eaten something ‘bad’.
All food is good food. It’s about listening to our bodies and being truly in tune with our body’s needs rather than eating foods because we’ve been told (often my advertisers trying to get us to eat their diet food) to eat them.
“All food is good food,” says Dr Lewis. Picture: Shutterstock
And what about the idea of food as a reward?
All food is good food. When we use certain foods as rewards for good behaviour for example, we learn to associate that food with being ‘good’. So that means we can’t have it unless we’re good.
This often leads a person to eat certain foods in secret, such is often the case in binge eating conditions, because a person doesn’t perceive they are ‘good enough’ to eat it in front of others. Using food as a reward with children also teaches children that certain foods are nicer or better than others. All foods are good foods and when a person eats a variety of foods and doesn’t deprive themselves, they often have a healthier relationship with food.
How can we treat some of these issues or approach them better?
As a parent it’s about modelling a positive relationship with our bodies and foods. Speaking about our body and other’s respectfully. Also, not labelling foods as good and bad. And stop dieting! Dieting is one of the main causes of the development of eating disorders because it teaches us to restrict and ignore our hunger signals. Think about food for its function.
If I need to concentrate, what sort of food do I need? If I want to sleep well, what sort of dinner do I need to eat? Where we feel we can choose what we eat based on our body’s needs, and truly be in tune with our hunger and fullness signals, we set ourselves up to have a better relationship with food and our bodies.
Is there anything else you want to say?
If you feel that you or someone you know may be suffering from an eating disorder, the first point of call can be to discuss with a General Practitioner, counsellor or psychologist. The Butterfly Foundation has some great resources for individuals, parent/carers and professionals.
[Editor’s note: Dr Lewis has also written a book called No Body’s Perfect, to help parents and Positive Bodies: Loving the Skin You’re In, to help individuals with body image and eating issues.]
The Branch Covidian putsch is the most heinous crime ever perpetrated in the history of medicine, and some would argue, in the history of the world. Its success is attributable to the strong presence of Nazi bioethics within the ranks of Western physicians, as well as a broad base of support from the ranks of neoliberals. This inhuman cult dogma, so destructive to the human spirit and antithetical to democracy, is anchored in a contempt for informed consent, and is fueled by careerism, hubris, blind obedience, and an unwavering belief in the infallibility of the public health agencies.
Like any other cult ethos, Branch Covidian dogma operates outside the boundaries of logic and reason. Moreover, all totalitarians are amnesiacs in the sense that they have lost the ability to place political events in their appropriate historical context. Consequently, they can be lied to repeatedly without this leading them to question the veracity of an official narrative mired in pseudoscience and malevolent propaganda.
American doctors have been groomed for the biosecurity putsch for years, as their military-style training is predicated on the notion that their superiors are demigods that must be obeyed unquestioningly. Pronouncements frequently parroted by the legacy media that end up being demonstrably untrue, such as the tale that the mRNA vaccines will take us to herd immunity, fail to break the stranglehold that the cult has over its followers, but rather, as Mattias Desmet has noted, only seem to reinforce it. The claim (reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitism) that the unvaccinated are spreaders of disease, and that they will have to live with the shame of having murdered their friends and relatives, is still being reiterated even long after it has become apparent that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.
There are dozens of studies that show the ineffectiveness of masks, and dozens that underscore their deleterious health effects when worn incessantly. There are also no less than 140 studies demonstrating that natural immunity to Covid-19 is durable, robust, and long-lasting. The new claim by the apostolic power, that the vaccines diminish virulence, is clearly an attempt on the part of the health care papacy to invent a new narrative following the failure of the “immunization drive.”
“Follow the science” is, in fact, a euphemism for “Be quiet and do as you’re told.” The claim that an experimental vaccine can be rigorously tested in under a year and found to be “safe and effective” is absurd, as the process typically takes at least ten years using traditional vaccine technologies. Yet the Branch Covidian isn’t interested in the rule of law, science, morality or even basic common sense. Like the followers of Jack in Lord of the Flies, they are transfixed by the intoxicating power of the death cult.
A few weeks ago I asked one of my doctors how the vaccines could be safe when there were over 30,000 deaths on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), to which he replied, “Well, a lot of people took them.” In other words, this is an acceptable degree of collateral damage. In many ways, this is an even more deranged line of reasoning than that made by Dr. Gerhard Rose, head of the Koch Institute of Tropical Medicine during the Third Reich. Rose attempted to justify doing typhus vaccine experiments on concentration camp prisoners at the Doctors’ Trial by claiming that it was acceptable to sacrifice a hundred men if tens of thousands of German soldiers could potentially be saved, as the Wehrmacht was being ravaged by typhus. This argument was rejected by the court, and he was incarcerated. Like Fauci, Walensky, and Collins, Rose was also “really smart.”
Yet another one of my physicians recently brought up the issue of Covid and suggested that I might consider getting the mRNA vaccine. His reasoning was as follows: he had a difficult bout with Covid despite being “fully vaccinated.” In other words, instead of concluding, as any rational person would, that the Covid vaccines demonstrate questionable efficacy, he concluded that the vaccine saved his life, that it dramatically reduced virulence, and that without it he might have ended up in an intensive care unit. Both doctors attended prestigious schools, and at least ostensibly, are of sound mind.
When the FDA panel met to discuss whether to go ahead with approving the investigational inoculations for children aged five to eleven, Harvard professor and editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of MedicineDr. Eric Rubin said “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.” Does one have to be a graduate of an elite medical school to see that this is an utterly depraved argument?
The government of the Third Reich deceived millions of Germans into believing that they had a vast array of enemies, all of which were the spawn of the Nazi propaganda apparatus: Jews, communists, Russians, and Poles to name some of the most prominent. A similar thing has transpired with the Branch Covidians, who have been taught to despise “anti-vaxxers,” “science deniers,” “flat-earthers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “misinformation spreaders.” This obsessive need to scapegoat is also on display with regard to the neoliberal hatred of “white privilege,” “white supremacists,” “nativists,” “misogynists,” “Trumpers,” and “Putin apologists” – the list seems to be growing by the week.
Furthermore, this scapegoating is inextricably linked with efforts to dismantle the First Amendment, as authoritarian regimes cannot abide criticism. In an article in The Federalist by doctors Harvey Risch, Robert Malone, and Byram Bridle, the eminent authors warn of a regime which is increasingly intolerant of dissent:
Questioning the competence and integrity of government bureaucracies like the FDA doesn’t make someone a bad person or a spreader of disinformation. Government bureaucracies can be wrong, and historically the citizens of democracies have viewed it as not only their right but their duty to scrutinize public officials’ decisions. Dissent is an integral part of the sacred compact between government and governed that underpins a free society, and Americans allow the current regime of censorship to continue at their extreme peril.
When giving an introduction to Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others at a book event in New York City, Dr. Harvey Risch denounced the devastating effects of the lockdowns, saying that the isolation has turned us into “sub-people.” Chelsea Manning has compared the lockdowns with putting billions of human beings into solitary confinement, saying “people are going to take years to recover from this.”
Blatant lies spewed by the three letter agencies, such as the claim that Hydroxychloroquine can damage the heart, or that Ivermectin is only a veterinary drug when it is on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines, fail to shake the Branch Covidian belief that the orchestrators of the Covid response are irreproachable. (As Dr. Pierre Kory has done with Ivermectin, an entire book could be written on the war on Hydroxychloroquine).
Calls to halt the disastrous mRNA vaccine program are being ignored, even when they come from distinguished voices such as the World Council for Health and renowned cardiologists Aseem Malhotra and Peter McCullough. Only those who represent the Branch Covidian priesthood – replete with its artful pope, cardinals, and bishops – are ordained to be “the experts.”
The Western elites are acutely aware of the fact that if they can obliterate informed consent they can destroy democracy, as this would render both freedom of speech and habeas corpus obsolete. Having reached the zombie stage of capitalism, the Branch Covidian wallows in a state of unreason, amorality, and an atavistic yearning. Like Adolf Eichmann, they no longer live in a world where good and evil exist. There is only one’s career, the illusion of having overcome an excruciating alienation, and the sense of ecstasy that comes from a newfound sense of belonging to the Covid religion.
For many years the education system has played a key role in fomenting totalitarianization by replacing humanities courses with increasingly specialized vocationally oriented courses, while rewarding ideological subservience and punishing creativity, integrity, honesty and critical thinking. It is not a coincidence that many of the most indoctrinated Americans went to the most competitive schools, as they were invented for this very purpose.
Intertwined with the ongoing weaponization of medicine, medical students and residents are often mentored in a manner where they invariably acquire a derisive attitude towards informed consent. For example, practice pelvic exams done on anesthetized patients, patients arm-twisted into accepting the presence of trainees during their physician office visits, trainees instructed to disregard do-not-resuscitate orders (or its antithesis), trainees immersed in an environment where unnecessary surgeries are regularly performed, pediatric residents inculcated with contempt towards parental informed consent, gynecology residents trained to blackmail women into having Pap smears in exchange for birth control; and a willful failure to caution trainees regarding the highly addictive nature of opioids, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and many psychotropic drugs – all are commonplace in American teaching hospitals.
As transpired in Weimar Germany, the West is undergoing a period of cataclysmic destabilization which has led to a growing sense of meaninglessness, alienation, unprecedented levels of atomization, and an unraveling of centuries-old mores and ethical norms. This disintegration of communities, coupled with a growing economic inequality, has brought about the rise of a hyper-careerism where millions of people will do anything to advance their careers. The more coveted the job, the more professional success demands a deep-seated ideological and political conformity. Since there is no perceived benefit in the eyes of the hyper-careerist to being educated regarding the many serious and complex political and socio-economic problems that we face, self-imposed ignorance presents itself as a sensible course of action.
The failure of the Branch Covidian doctor to acknowledge the irrationality behind “the science” (often preposterous even to a layperson), along with their inability to acknowledge the absence of a sound risk-benefit analysis behind any of the official Covid policies, is indicative of their having lost their souls to the cannibalistic machinery of corporate medicine. Every physician, especially in the West, should have been able to immediately ascertain that the lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, forced testing, etc., had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with authoritarianism due to the utter absence of informed consent. That this didn’t occur, underscores how, with the exception of the handful of courageous doctors that have spoken out, the medical profession has been led into a morass of profound moral degradation.
Undoubtedly, those who have doubts about the official narrative yet remain silent, do so out of fear of losing their job. What they fail to understand is that this craven silence may eventually lead to a situation where the penalty for speaking out will be a loss of freedom which is total and absolute. Indeed, if informed consent is irrevocably lost, the pathologizing of dissent will be normalized. This is evidenced by the fact that Canadian physician Dr. Mel Bruchet, and for a somewhat shorter duration, Swiss cardiologist Dr. Thomas Binder, were committed and handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry for expressing heretical views on Branch Covidian theology, and so the process is already underway. This is the last stage of biofascism.
The penchant for overspecialization (which many doctors are presently hiding behind), ruthless ambition, and an indifference towards the most outrageous forms of regulatory capture has caused the biomedical technocrat to be molded into an insensate automaton of a rapacious oligarchy. How is a Branch Covidian doctor who believes that the psychopathic Covid mandates have been necessary to protect people from a virus any less deluded than an American soldier who is sent to Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan and believes that they are “fighting for democracy?”
Writing in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt emphasizes the connection between evil and mindlessness:
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
Karl Brandt, Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation and one of the most senior Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg, insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing when taking the stand at the Doctors’ Trial, despite having been a leading proponent of the Nazi euthanasia program and having been involved in forced medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. The Nazi medical establishment believed that these ghastly crimes, which were in such incontrovertible violation of the Hippocratic Oath, were acceptable due to the credo of “the greater good” being upheld. Indeed, the Nazi doctor’s sense of utilitarianism regarded German society as one organism, with each person like a cell that collectively comprised this organism. Hence, killing Jews, the mentally ill, along with other Untermenschen, was rationalized in the same way that an oncologist today would regard liquidating cancer cells in an attempt to save a single human life. Today, the Volk is not a race, per se, but the Western elites.
This extreme collectivist mentality, which is as intertwined with Branch Covidian doctrine as it was with the Nazi medical ethos, is antithetical to the informed consent ethic and has played a critical role in laying the foundation for a burgeoning health dictatorship.
One must get vaccinated to protect other people. One must wear a mask to protect other people. One must practice social distancing to protect other people. One must get tested to protect other people. The foundational precept of the Nuremberg Code is that medical ethics is rooted in the right to informed consent of the individual.
Dr. Paul Alexander, a pandemic advisor under the Trump administration, who has repeatedly decried the catastrophic harms of the lockdowns, and who possesses more empathy than the overwhelming majority of American doctors put together, has recounted a story about how he asked a senior CDC official where they got the science of the “six feet rule” of social distancing from, to which the official laughed and said it had nothing to do with science – it was about power.
Mindless compliance with policies which are obviously not backed by science, which have an irrational risk-benefit analysis, and which trample on every human being’s inalienable right to bodily autonomy, have brought us to a crossroads where we are hovering over an abyss of a brutal authoritarianism. Nevertheless, it is essential that we continue to intellectually challenge the sleepwalkers.
The Pentagon sacked Iraq; the Romans, Carthage; and the Greeks, Troy. Yet the Branch Covidians have sacked the whole world. Only through the restoration of reason and compassion can humanity cleanse itself from this demonic and fiendish scourge.
From acclaimed author Anna Spargo-Ryan comes A Kind of Magic, a tender, and at times, wry insight into complex mental illness, and indeed, the moments of magic in among it all. BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman had a chat with Anna about her stunning new work.
In a nutshell, what’s your book about?
A Kind of Magic is a memoir about life with anxiety: how it starts, why it happens and how we can understand it.
You said that, “Writing it [A Kind of Magic] has transformed the way I understand myself and this kaleidoscope life.” Can you unpick this for me?
When I started writing, I was very angry. I didn’t realise it at the time – or if I did, I felt justified and virtuous in my anger. I wrote about terrible things that had happened and people who had wronged me, and the way no one understood how I felt and how isolating it all was.
At the same time, I was researching the way memory works. I’ve always struggled with memory, particularly with big gaps in what I remember, and I was trying to understand if there was a reason for it.
As I wrote (angrily) and researched (earnestly), I learned that trauma and some mental illness changes the way memory works. It affects what we remember and what we use those memories for. We’re more likely to remember negative memories and more likely to combine multiple events into giant, awful memories.
From there, I learned about identity. We form a self based on what we remember – even if we can’t consciously recall these formative moments, they can exist in other parts of our memory. People who live with trauma are more likely to remember negative things and therefore more likely to build their identity on a negative sense of self.
As I learned these things about myself, I understood who I was better than I ever had before. I recognised there was a scientific basis for my confusion and anger, and that helped me to contextualise and reimagine it.
By the time I got to the end of the book, I understood myself in a whole different way. I didn’t want to write about terrible things and people – I wanted to share what I’d learned with others who might also find peace in it.
A Kind of Magic is by Anna Spargo-Ryan.
What do you mean when you say it’s an “‘anti-self-help book”?
To my mind, a self-help book is paradoxical – directing a reader to think or behave in a certain way. I wanted to write a book that would help someone feel comforted through a process of learning and being seen, I think. A book that’s also a friend. You know how when you’re supported to be courageous? That’s what I want the book to do.
As someone who has dealt with Australia’s mental health system myself – as a reporter but also in attempting to get support myself and on occasion for someone close to me – I know there are massive gaps in the mental health system. What can you tell me about that?
I’m not sure there’s a succinct answer to this! There are shortfalls at every step of getting mental health care: a lack of government funding, a lack of private funding, a shortage of psychologists and psychiatrists, exorbitant gap payments, poor access especially in regional and rural areas, stigma, dangerous public mental health hospitals, poor communication between patients and clinicians, no standardised performance criteria for therapists … it goes on and on.
The work to get the right help is extensive and complex enough without also being unwell on top of that. I wrote something in the book like: you have to be both well enough to figure out how to navigate it and unwell enough for someone to believe you need help.
You’ve said to me previously “the whole mental health industry is gendered.” What do you mean?
The whole mental health industry is gendered. Men are more likely to complete suicide by a significant factor. Women are more likely to live with debilitating depression and/or anxiety. More women than men experience high levels of psychological distress.
This has been true since before there was a “mental health industry” – women have long been “too emotional”, “hysterical”, these gendered words without nuance. As with so many aspects of women’s healthcare, men have charged themselves with the policy and governance, men have made decisions about our needs, men have controlled our bodies and minds.
The mental health model is male-centric, as so many medical models are. It’s the same reason women die of heart attacks – the way the medical industry treats them is modelled on a man’s heart attack.
We can see this in action in the under-diagnosis of girls and women with ADHD, which is not a mental illness but has crossovers (both in symptoms and genetics) with bipolar and borderline personality disorder. For decades, it wasn’t identified – and so opportunities for early intervention were missed – because it simply didn’t look the same in girls as it does in boys. So, no one saw it.
Anna hopes her book with support others to be courageous. Picture: Supplied.
In your writing, you’ve mixed brutal honesty with meticulous research and compassion. Why did you take this approach?
Mental illness is hard to understand and hard to articulate. At one level, I was worried about reinforcing a stereotype – being self-indulgent, being hard work, all the things I had internalised about myself.
I wanted to counter that perception by sharing the research and contextualising it. Because these things are so poorly understood, I wanted to draw connections between what the science tells us and what the lived experience looks like.
And I wanted to do that for two discrete groups of people: those who would see themselves in it and be reassured; and those who don’t share the experience but need to be schooled. Basically.
What do you want people to take away from this book?
I want this book to be part of moving mental health care forward. That’s a complex ask, so I want it to be different things to different people. I want it to offer clinicians better ways of understanding and talking to patients, so they can provide more effective treatment. I want policymakers and politicians to read it and reimagine what “a person with mental illness” looks like and what they need. I want a carer to recognise their own enormous effort and the gratitude I – and people like me – feel for what they do. I want the wider population to come away with new vocabulary and empathy.
And for those who live with mental illness, like I do, I want them to feel like someone’s glad they’re here.
Picture at top: Editor, writer and cat lady, Anna Spargo-Ryan. Photo: Supplied
Researchers at the University of York played a key role in a major new study which suggests that Universal Basic Income could help to reverse the epidemic of mental health problems among young people in the UK.
Soaring living costs are causing unprecedented pressure on UK households, resulting in a dramatic increase in the number of people suffering from mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression – particularly among 16–24-year-olds.
A new Royal Society of Arts report, compiled by a team which included Professor Kate Pickett, of the Department of Health Sciences, and Professor Richard Cookson, of the Centre for Health Economics at York, explores the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as an alternative to conventional policy options.
Public support
Under the UBI scheme, every UK citizen would receive regular payments to support their basic needs and provide them with a level of financial security. This addresses a frequent criticism of the existing welfare system: that it does not support those who are aspirational, hard-working and responsible.
The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust and led Northumbria University, reveals that:
UBI is economically feasible,
that it can prevent or delay a wide range of health conditions
that it is particularly effective in mitigating the mental health pandemic among young people
that public support for UBI is strong, especially in the ‘red wall’ constituencies of Wales, the Midlands and North of England.
Epidemic
Professor Pickett said:
“We really do have an epidemic of mental health problems among young adults in our society. This has been made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic and you can only imagine it is going to become worse in the current economic crisis.
“UBI would raise the income floor for a lot of people, reduce inequality and take away some of the sources of anxiety which young people particularly find so challenging. It would also save massively on costs to the NHS and other services.”
Professor Cookson added:
“There is already overwhelmingly strong evidence that reducing poverty and income insecurity in childhood and adolescence can improve mental health; our work using up-to-date data tells UK policy makers by how much.”
Anxiety and depression
The project, which began in August 2021, involved detailed modelling work using links between income and anxiety and depression, a series of focus groups to gauge young adults’ views on UBI as well as a series of surveys in ‘red wall’ constituencies to assess support for Universal Basic Income.
The research is part of a project called Assessing the Prospective Impacts of Universal Basic Income (UBI) on anxiety and depression among 14-24-year-olds. It serves as a pilot study for a broader, long-term examination of the role of Universal Basic Income as a public health measure.
Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade, a professor of Latina/Latino studies and race/resistance studies at San Francisco State University, believes that optimal learning requires meaningful relationships: relationships between peers; relationships between students, school staff and instructors; and relationships between schools and the communities they serve.
His latest book,Equality or Equity: Toward a Model of Community-Responsive Education, lays out clear recommendations — mandates — for student success and zeroes in on creating an environment that prioritizes student health over standard markers of achievement like grades and test scores.
“The primary purpose of every school,” he writes, “should be to cultivate the well-being of every child.… Healing a child’s wounds heals the classroom, school, and community entire.”
This is not a new conclusion. Nonetheless, thanks to COVID-19 and the burgeoning mental health crisis facing many children and adolescents, healing has now become a central concern for school districts throughout the country. Reducing class size has become the linchpin of this effort, and teachers from Boston, to Columbus, to New York City are organizing to limit the number of students they teach so that the relationships Duncan-Andrade advocates can develop and flourish.
Educational historian and theoristDiane Ravitch calls this “the most powerful reform” a district can enact.
Regina Fuentes, an English teacher at Eastmoor Academy in Columbus, Ohio, and a spokesperson for the Columbus Education Association, told Truthout that public school teachers in Columbus went on strike for three days in August, in part over the number of students they are expected to instruct. “COVID increased the number of kids with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues,” she says. “Overcrowding makes everything worse and we can’t possibly deal with the emotional needs of students when they are crammed into classrooms.”
The strike led to a two-student reduction, to take effect in Fall 2023, from 27 to 25 kids in grades K-5 and from 36 to 34 in grades 6-12. “It’s not great,” Fuentes admits. “But we’re going to keep tapping away at it.”
Research supports this effort.The Student Teacher Achievement Ratio, or STAR Project, was conducted in Tennessee from 1985 until 1989 and monitored what happened when the number of students in grades K-3 was reduced from between 22 and 26 to between 13 and 17. “Smaller classes resulted in substantial increases in the academic performance of children in primary grades,” the study found. The results were particularly striking for low-income kids and those in Black or Brown communities. Nearly 30 years later, in 2014, a new survey — one of many post-STAR studies conducted in both the U.S. and internationally during the last three-and-a-half decades — came to a similar conclusion.
Furthermore, the researchers noteda slew of benefits when class size was reduced. Not only did fewer students fall through the cracks, but many were able to get more attention, including individualized instruction and tutoring. The researchers also reported an increase in student confidence and self-esteem; this resulted in greater class participation, from more questions asked, to more shared opinions, to more thoughtful assessments of what was presented and ultimately learned. What’s more, the researchers found that smaller cohorts tended to foster deeper relationships between peers and between students and their adult mentors.
But not everyone supports these efforts, and right-wing naysayers have been quick to condemn these measures as the work of do-nothing teachers’ unions. They also cite financial concerns, since reducing class size will inevitably cost money; additional teachers will need to be hired and school buildings will need to be altered to create additional classrooms. And then there’s the issue of standardized test scores — which, the right wing asserts, show little-to-no change when class size diminishes.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) finds the latter stance particularly galling.
Reducing class size to its impact on test scores fails to consider the importance of student well-being and fails to treat students as whole people.… If the only goals of schooling were math and language arts test scores, a cost-benefit analysis might make sense. But the goals of education are much more than simply a score. Lower class size addresses the needs of students both academically and socially.
Michael Mulgrew is president of the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing New York City’s 200,000 public school teachers and school-related professionals. He and his colleagues recently led a successful legislative push to reduce class size throughout the five boroughs, and although the full phase-in will not be completed until 2028, classes will eventually be capped at 20 students in grades K-3; 23 in grades 4-8; and 25 in high school.
“We started organizing for this reduction in the fall of 2021, when we realized we had a problem returning to in-person learning,” Mulgrew told Truthout. “Approximately 85 percent of our students were coming back with social and emotional damage, learning loss, or both, and we knew that we needed to lower class size to facilitate helping them. We’d been fighting to reduce class size for about 40 years, but we’re now finally going to do it. We will be starting with the neediest children, in the schools with the highest levels of poverty, beginning next fall.”
Mulgrew is confident that the change will have a positive outcome — benefiting both students and teachers — but he knows it will not be a panacea. “Teachers are not mental health clinicians,” he says. Still, thanks to an influx of state, city and federal funding to enable more school social workers and counselors to be hired, he is hopeful that increased teacher-staff collaboration will give city students the support they need to excel.
Shelley Orren-King, a New York metropolitan area psychotherapist, agrees that this is important, but cautions that teachers also need training to do initial mental health assessments. “A kid may be quiet, which can be read as studious, but they might actually be depressed,” she explains. “Without training, teachers who are overwhelmed or unsure about what they’re seeing might not know how to evaluate what’s going on with a particular child or a particular teen. Basically, a teacher can only deal with one kid’s emotional and social needs at a time. You can’t do this work if you are multitasking.”
In addition, Orren-King adds, teachers also need support since they, too, are struggling.
Cara Berg Powers teaches in the education department of Clark University and has seen this up close. “The mental load of having to be ‘on’ for so many hours a day, in the aftermath of COVID shutdowns, is taking a toll on many teachers,” she told Truthout. “Thirty-two kids per class is still common in many places and, due to teacher shortages, some districts are now having teachers hold classes in auditoriums where they’re expected to teach upwards of 50 students at a time.” This, she says, makes it impossible for them to form relationships with, or even get to know, the kids in the room.
“As people returned from the exodus of 2020, many educators have become more and more frustrated,” Berg Powers continues. “They are expected to teach for six hours, with kids and teens who are still dysregulated by the pandemic and who are unused to being in groups. Some of them may not have had a ‘normal’ school year since elementary school. Meanwhile, teachers have few resources to do the healing work that is needed. They see kids who don’t pay attention, get in fights or tune out with their phones. They see kids who are obviously stressed by what’s around them. Yes, these were issues before the pandemic, but they’re far bigger issues now.”
So, what to do?
While efforts to reduce class size are ongoing, both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are also continuing to push for the hiring of additional social workers and counselors, and for better material and emotional supports for classroom teachers.
Local unions are also getting into the act. For example, the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) is pushing for smaller classes to promote better mental health, better interpersonal relationships and better classroom pedagogy. But BTU members are also eager to integrate kids with learning and other disabilities into mainstream classrooms — this will begin in the fall of 2023 — something that requires fewer students in each classroom.
BTU president Jessica Tang emphasized to Truthout that smaller class sizes are crucial “if we are going to create successful integrated classrooms and address the social and emotional needs of every student.”
Meanwhile, educational experts such as Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Cara Berg Powers argue that if we want students to thrive, they need to be in small, culturally relevant classes. Courses that promote student immersion in project-based or experiential learning, they add, are the gold standard.
“We could, if we so desired, choose to see all children for their potential and invest in them accordingly,” Duncan-Andrade writes in Equality or Equity. He calls it choosing between schooling children and educating them. We can, he explains, tinker with the current system or we can make a complete pivot and finally and completely move toward equity, challenging racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, homophobia and transphobia as we upend the status quo.
“Educators who are unwavering in their responsibility to stand by the side of the most vulnerable and wounded ones teach our children that equity is not a program, it is not a policy, and it is not the responsibility of an equity office or an equity officer,” he writes. “Equity is justice, and, as is so often said, a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
And smaller classes are part of making educational equity happen.
A man has died after Hertfordshire Police restrained him during a mental health crisis. Police arrived after receiving reports of a man running in the street in distress late on Friday 7 October. Hertfordshire Police have now referred themselves to the IOPC (Independent Office for Police Conduct).
The BBC reported the IOPC as ‘understanding’ that:
officers reported the man appeared to be having a mental health crisis so the ambulance service was also called.
The man is understood to have become unwell while being restrained at the scene…Officers began CPR until paramedics arrived shortly before midnight, but the man was pronounced dead at 00:17.
The IOPC confirmed that Hertfordshire Police used PAVA spray (pelargonic acid vanillylamide), an incapacitant. It is unclear, and likely will remain so, why exactly the police chose to use an incapacitant spray on someone experiencing a mental health crisis.
Incapacitant
The director of the charity INQUEST, Deborah Coles, set out the facts:
A man in mental health crisis is Pava sprayed, restrained and dies. A long pattern of deaths and no systemic change or accountability. We need to end police being first responders to people in crisis and invest in emergency mental healthcare. https://t.co/9pu93lwc3s
The Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) also noted the use of PAVA spray:
On Friday, a man having a mental health crisis and in distress died after he was sprayed with CS spray and restrained by Hertfordshire Police officers https://t.co/RWg2XvKKW3
PAVA spray is a chemically concentrated version of pepper spray that’s been a controversial deterrent due to its £2m rollout expense and its proven misuse in pilot trials.
PAVA spray is used as a defence tool to stop people resisting. It is sprayed into people’s eyes causing them to close and resulting severe pain. It is mainly used by police officers.
Mind also cited a study which found that PAVA spray was used disproportionately against certain groups:
[the study] revealed disproportionate use of force in prisons against younger people, black people and Muslim people, which the Ministry of Justice was unable to explain.
PAVA spray is a type of pepper spray that is clearly controversial, whether used by police officers or in prisons. The fact that Hertfordshire Police used it on someone who was in mental distress is a travesty.
We don’t yet know more details about the man who died in the custody of Hertfordshire police. However, it’s clear that police turn mental health crises into tragedies. A report from the IOPC found that:
In the majority of cases involving either allegations of discrimination or common stereotypes and assumptions, there was evidence that the individual concerned had mental health concerns or a learning disability. This supports findings by others that the intersectionality of race and mental health can increase the risk of higher levels of use of force.
Obviously, higher levels of force mean a higher incidence of serious injury and death.
As advocacy organisation Liberty argues:
When people are in mental health crises, policing is not the answer.
Instead we need mental health care and interventions which: – support those in crisis – address the root causes of mental ill-health and distress – put human rights at their hearthttps://t.co/RWsg9T0T9u
Police do not protect the public, or communities at large. Given their endemic racism and regular lack of accountability, we cannot rely on them to be truthful. We must resist police violence, and we must do so together. How many more times do police need to kill people experiencing mental distress before anything changes?
