In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: Mental Health Practice

  • Mental Health Witness – are UK services getting worse ?

    Posted:

    I was at an event at the Poetry Society in London the other night, celebrating the 21st anniversary of a small charity concerned with mental health and creativity. The charity’s Chair stood up and suggested that mental health services are actually worse now than they were when the charity was founded, all those years ago.…

  • A Statement of Principle in time for Christmas

    Posted:

    I suspect that many of us see “principle” as something we can just hive off and leave in airy-fairy land while we hurry out to do our Christmas shopping.  So I’ll say straightaway that, on the contrary,  true and meaningful principle may in the end be the only fact that counts, far more significant and…

  • Riding the Hyphen – but to what effect ?

    Posted:

    I run a small charity called Hyphen-21 and January can be an anxious month, with accounts and reports needed by the Charity Commissioners no later than the 31st. But I actually enjoyed writing the report this year. It clarified a few ideas and its overview brought out some pattern and coherence to what usually just…

  • And what is Art for, then ?

    Posted:

    For the first time on this blog, on this New Year’s Day, I want simply to report on something I did recently. I’m proud of it, but am also still absorbing what it meant. Half way through December, I ran a “Mental Health Arts” evening in a church assembly room, part of an inner-city church…

  • So when’s the Next Post due, then ?

    Posted:

    But how can there be a next when we haven’t even established a starting-point ? I suggest that to be afraid of the world ending is pointless now. There is a sense in which the world has ended already. Certainly, the solid orb our parents knew has disappeared, along with the truisms and structures they…

  • Smoking and the Skills of Love

    Posted:

    I believe that in its serious and commendable efforts to protect the Nation’s Health, the State is guilty of an injustice of high order as far as the mental health community is concerned. I would go further and describe this injustice as an abuse of state power, almost a case of bullying. My complaint concerns…