rollout of health hubs: believe that ?

Labour supporting Youtube channel "A Different Bias", Phil Moorhouse, has made a video on a new policy for local health hubs, for the NHS in England. "Revolutionising mental health: the NHS's game changing plan" but it's also about returning some aspects of physical health closer to communities than to overloaded hospitals. So what is it, a kind of cottage hospital able to do more than a surgery ? Surgeries are already a type of hub.

In their best imagined multifunctional form, these hubs could be one stop shops, and the videoer mentions so. He says"if the reality matches the vision, then what we are talking about here is lots of key public services in one one stop shop accessible for everyone"

"although this is a 10 year plan, they are going to need some of it to be very visible before the next election ... in terms of political strategy, what I would be wanting to do is setting up some of these centres in key Red Wall areas, you call them pilots I suppose, set them up in key Red Wall areas really quickly, Now that would not only provide a lot of useful learning opportunities for rolling them out across the rest of England ..."

Scotland's experience with the autistic one stop shops is a cautionary example. It had this rollout aspiration. Oh we will start with a couple of them and roll them out to everywhere. How many olans never get completed, rollouts most of all. More red flag than red wall - if they go this rollout way, they roll down the same rabbit hole as we have seen autism service in Scotland roll down. Regional unfair disparities and long term stuck inertia towards filling in the gaps.

Thus, this comment on the video - "Experience from autistic one-stop shops in Scotland. Pilots leads to a sense of ticked boxes to have done it in some places, leads to deferring to aspiration and never reaching the ideal of serving everywhere, leads to incomplete coverage with negative issues from postcode lottery unfairness. They are still this way 20 years after they began, and in some places outside the big 2 cities, the autistic charities chosen to run them closed them down, either at term ends, or even sooner to replace them with their own simpler services !"

spectrumites out of Carstairs hospital !

On the scandal, that was a Sunday Post headline www.sundaypost.com/fp/one-little-step-followed-another-and-no-one-would-listen-to-us-and-no-one-would-speak-to-us-and-all-the-little-steps-took-us-into-hellrestriction-on-an-individual-should-be-the-minimum-restriction-ne/, of putting autistic young adults who had got into vaguely defined behavioural situations ,but no crime, into Carstairs. Then of their families' distress at not enough access to hold to account how they are getting treated in there, which is too hard.

Call for it stopped: http://chng.it/2KKy6dKDFk

Parent of adult needs support fighting mental health act

Parent Leo Andrade in London is having an unjust hard time against rigid Mental Health Act ways of thinking, still being applied wrongly to autistic son Stephen into adulthood, now aged 22.

Support this family's petition and keep hearing listening to and linking to their testimony. Injustice stories always need telling. That is always the first basic about them. Shine a light into truth. Always makes less bad stuff possible to happen than if it goes unnoticed.

Maurice Frank

You pass on the word

See, I want wronged child authors publicised, circulated more into public knowledge as an issue. Exposed as an issue. The world is still too oblivious, and that is a further abuse of every victim.

There is a site on youth mental health, with health links on it, that I have succeeded in getting to remove their link to Luke Jackson's notorious F+G. I had put to them the damage and emotional wrong done to abuse survivors if any book attributed to a child author is publicised without publicising that wronged child authors exist.

I say attributed because the Times of 16 Aug 2002, among other profiles, revealed that it was not an unaided child author work at all, as it was structured into a book by his mother and would not exist without that.

Getting the link wiped is better than not doing anything, it's a success to count as necessary - but it's not what I actually wanted. What I wanted was to get wronged child authorship mentioned on their site, publicised to a further audience. They had an obvious logical duty to do that after they had had the Jackson book link on their site for some finite period. They could have kept the link so long as they told about wronged child authors.

Instead: "I’m sorry for any anguish this has caused by including this link on our website. At the time of producing the content for this page we were linking to information and resources we thought would be useful for our audiences. Following your concerns this information has now been removed so as not to cause any further distress."

Kindly put, but - this is more of that terrible human problem of avoiding responsibility for facts, avoiding taking positions. They have chosen avoidance of the whole thing, instead of the act of compassionate help to hurt wronged oppressed kids, the action of actually passing on the word about wronged child authors.

You pass on the word.

Maurice Frank

Something not right

Idea. Should we try writing the words "Something not right" in autistic spectrum sites? In hope that folks searching on the idea of something not right will find autism info, which they would never have thought to search for. Try it out here.

This comes from a conversation with an aspie of my age, but of much more recent diagnosis even than me, and I found 35 an unjustly late age for it, and more accidentally discovered than me too. At least I have always known that my strongly felt anti-school cause led rationally to discovering aspieness, from its impact on school problems, at the tipping point of 2002-3 when there emerged a self-organised aspie scene no longer under the medical umbrella.

It is screamingly unjust frustrating and upsetting, that in unknown numbers there are unknown aspies out there, who have heard of autism, can't miss all media that mention it, but no connecting of it to themselves has occurred to tbem. Some of whom will eventually discover it by chance, e.g. from someone else's reaction to a problem, maddeningly late in life, and with all the baggage of relief and vindication and self-explanation. The implication of the chanciness all caring aspies will choke on. That some who would feel the relief and the liberation from unfair social challenges, who would welcome the aspie scene's support and join in it keenly, never will, because the chance will never come and they will live out their lives with social unfairness and withdrawal without ever knowing about aspieness. If we pass them in the library or on the train we can't know it.

We must do anything we can think of about it. It's a key reason why the hidden disabilities need maximum banging on about. Conditions you may not at a glance notice exist, or notice in yourself as a familiar condition you have heard of or that carries any bodily difference: just as society for long missed that they exist, you can miss having them. So you need prompting to contemplate whether any hidden disability matches with personal problems you are aware of. But not a mass screening of everyone by doctors, we can't want that because not everyone would accept it or answer the questions and it would be too connected to sinister mental health screening. Indeed it's important to have the aspie scene supportive of your grounds for diagnosis before you go to the doctor, in case they are too little autism aware and want to see it as mental health instead.

In his long life of missing it, tbe aspie I spoke to mentioned he had a feeling of "something not right". I realise I have often heard a sentiment like that - though I never felt that way, because it was so obvious that school and unthinking laddish characters were what was not right, not me. But social frustrations and difference to the cool kids can often make folks feel not right. It is clearly a sentiment in the lives of many undiscovered aspies at risk of remaining missed for life. So might some of them search on the concept of "not quite right", as part of exploring their feelings and trying to understand life and their feeling? It must surely be fair to try to make that search lead to learning about being aspie.

Maurice Frank

BBC openly prevents a civil liberty question getting answered

For a month, here www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b077n7ks/scotland-2016-12042016 is a BBC election debate broadcast Apr 12.

There is a question on mental health. It is in progress when, at time 39:52, Claire Muir of Psychiatric Rights Scotland, a survivor of sectioning that was proved wrong after the event, raises the civil liberty question of mental health sectioning. She tells them about the United Nations, UNCRPD, now taking a position against forced mental health treatments, for their bad and traumatic outcomes in many cases, and seeking for all countries to abolish them. You then see the BBC presenter immediately switch the debate back to resources and stigma, so deciding that the point on forced treatment will not be answered, and she saves the 4 politicians from having to answer it. She directs them away from it.

And indeed, none of them do answer it. Citizens' safety, your safety, from a loss of liberty, was shut out of politics, on open TV and by the broadcaster that never stops claiming worldwide admiration. Now do you still trust the BBC? Or kid yourself other than that it is part of a political class intentionally filtering and manipulating the range of issues to be recognised?

Maurice Frank

Dear Luise

wp.rxisk.org/written-on-water/

The story of an aspie girl in Denmark who was slightly too old to be diagnosed in childhood in the 80s, younger than most of us, who was medically murdered by an irresponsible self-perpetuating chain of ever intensifying mental health drugging. Written by her mother. Taken up by American publisher Jorvik, perhaps from e-book impact first.

stressing me

In the news today a compensation award for stress for a teacher who suffered a ridiculous workload. Resulting in a radio Scotland phone-in this morning on teachers' work conditions and stress. I failed to get mentioned on it that the media has regularly shown interest in overstressing of teachers and none at all in overstressing of their students. Never have I heard a phone-in on that.

It's now hitting 30 years since I was overwhelmed by a ridiculous workload at school, and I never got any chance to seek a compensation award through any industrial injury type of route. Employees get that, school students don't. The system assumes their abilities can be decided for them, and they are not free to walk out of the situation if it becomes impossible as it did for me. It is a lot harder and riskier a prospect for the mishandled school student who has left school with consequently no prospects, to simply sue, and besides, crises at school bring in the teenage mental health systems, who themselves can take sharply against you if you resist getting bossed around by them just as badly as by your school. The student becomes a mental health issue, with all that means for civil status, because of their teachers' actions which are not the student's fault. Then they are not going to be supportive witnesses for you, instead their attitude that you are mental unless you change yourself to fit in with all their ideals makes any suing impossible.

The emergence of aspies has been the life miracle I needed delivering into my hands proof that aspie skills at some limited types of fact retention had been the real explanation of the personal strengths that made my teachers recklessly greedy. Never was proving this point helped by the media recognising student stress as any sort of major issue. Now, we in the aspie scene know that student stress has been a recurring aspie experience from constant misreading of us by educators. The trusting public who believe reality is everything the tabloids and BBC say it is, still have no knowledge of this at all. They still only hear of the teachers suffering.

Maurice Frank

Bus again already !

Bus 841 doing service 41, a part route bus ending at Waverley, Sep 30. Driver announced the end of service and forced folks to get off, a stop before Waverley, at Frederick Street corner, and openly told questioners it was because he wanted his dinner.

Waverley means Waverley, Bridge or Steps, east end of Princes Street. Absolutely not a point west of the Mound.

Bus complaints, with all the local companies, have a very bad track record of them hiding behind various European rules for workers to claim they can't reveal, whether drivers who bully passengers actually have suffered commensurate and deterrent retribution.

This case cuts right through that corrupt princple. If a service ends early and folks are charged a further fare on the next bus, that is extortion of false fares. When you have a free pass, if you have to bleep it again on the next bus after an incident like this, then the driver's offence extorts the company a false second fare at public expense.

Hence, the company can either be publicly pilloried as extorting extra fares by not operating as billed, or else it must tell us quite specifically and committally that as a fact it is recovering the extra fare from the driver, as retribution, not from the state.

Valuable information on the disability discrimination law has been shared by the mental health campaign Vox. It requires accommodations to be made for all disability groups' needs in using ordinary facilities which they can use, like a bus. Under this, an accommodation that autistic spectrumites are entitled to, is that all information is to be taken literally, including the destination on the front of a bus. We can't be expected to guess culturally that a bus is not really going to where it says but to somewhere short of there. Hence, disability discrimination law requires all buses saying "Waverley" to actually go as far as Waverley Bridge or Steps. See.

Local campaign on compulsory treatment

Aspies may have past experiences and/or future worries with the mental health system. We have contact with it for getting diagnoses, and some folks have ongoing contact with it over coping issues or anxiety or depression. We may have had aspie life problems grouped under the mental health label in the past, or be dealing with services where there is still an overlap.

So we are concerned with the safety of our civil liberties, and the fact that aspieness is not a mental illness and aspies are still ordinary citizens. We must be on guard against any reading of mental health issues into what are actually aspie items, and any impulse to turn them into grounds for authoritarian interventions by the mental health system.

Edinburgh Users' Forum, which is part of the local collective advocacy for mental health, is doing a local campaign on the problems arising in compulsory treatment or the threat of it. Whether interventions were unjust, the effect of being threatened with them or actually suffering them, the practicalities observed by the system when making an intervention, and whether it was avoidably frightening. They are looking for personal stories to draw info from.

So if the mental health system features as an issue in either your present or your past, please respond at the following link...

www.surveymonkey.com/s/7CTRGL2

... to speak out about it.

Even if you have not experienced anything to do with compulsory treatment, but just you have made or wanted to make an "Advance Statement", like a living will that will apply if it ever happens, you can still valuably respond. They want to know about this too. Advance Statements were introduced in 2005 but folks are still finding it difficult or confusing to get information about them.