In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

  • Shahada

    I have recently imagined myself standing before a man of good sense, deep learning and positive engagement with humanity, and professing to that person my basic beliefs. A profession of faith. A sort of Shahada. Once, in a much less comfortable public situation than mine, Martin Luther found himself setting out his position in similar fashion, concluding with the statement, “here I stand.” Here, some hundreds of years later, is where I stand :

    I cannot believe in some divine eye holding me in sight or mind as I go about my business, among all those billions of others going about theirs.

    I cannot believe in some figure sitting, or whatever posture that figure might like to adopt, through eternity, looking over His Creation, grieving for individual sorrows, granting individual prayers, punishing individual sins, and so on and so on.

    I cannot believe in that figure taking souls unsinful or redeemed onto His knee at the end of it all, and finding a house for them in Eternity, in some limitless out-of-world housing estate.

    But I do believe, since I must, in the plain fact and astonishment and wonder and marvel of life and Creation. There is no escape from this self-evident belief so long as I am alive, or life is animate.

    And by Creation I mean, not just the created universe, whose vastness and nature and wonder are in themselves actually beyond rational belief or measurement, but also the moment of Creation, when nothing became something.

    That force behind Creation, beyond my comprehension, I am bound to worship. I am part of this Creation and that is a wonder to me. If I do not live in wonder and worship, then I am not really alive, not really taking in the full fact of life. If I live a moment not wondering and worshipping, then I am having a bad moment, a moment in which I am switched off from and out of touch with reality.

    So there is a force of Creation and by definition, since there is only one Creation, there can be only one such force. It is beyond our comprehension. But we can see that it is Creation. And Creation acts and reveals itself through evolution, and shows its work in the procreation by which species continue and in the effort and tendency to grow and heal across all of nature, wherever there is illness or hurt.   

    So there is a force. It made and is behind the fact of life, the fact of existence across the universe, its planets and moons and immeasurable distances, and the fact of mortal life, and multiplicity of life, on at least this one planet in the universe.

    We can call this force reality, the core, the ultimate, the source of being, Alpha and Omega, the Word, the Light, the Truth, Yahweh, God, Allah. We use whatever name and names seem right or familiar or otherwise acceptable to us. To apprehend the force behind the name, the wonder of it, the bewildering fact of it, we surely cannot be in any state other than bewilderment and wonder and worship and gratitude.

    One step further  :

    I am I, one Self. I say I, meaning my Self. I preside in me, thinking and feeling, inside this Self, this Being, this Being Me. There is no other I in the universe whose experience I exactly share. Even though there are millions and millions of people who all say “I,” not one of them is “I” as I am, or will die as I myself must, in one place and one time, neither of which I can presently forsee.

    I find myself in a particular body, at this particular place and time, and I look out of this skull and see the rest of the universe outside of me, under my eye, and I cannot see the back of my head. I can see the backs of your heads but not of mine. I experience myself, therefore, as the centre of the universe, looking out at it so long as I am able to look out.

    But of course I know, at whatever level and depth of knowledge I am capable of, that you are no less the centre of the universe than I am. As a child I might think otherwise. The only centre I knew then was me. You were altogether unreal and fantasy-ridden, either a part of me, or an object to me. But I grew and – at least sometimes, in my better moments  – I became awake to the fact that you are as real, as subjective, as vital a centre as I am, both of us part of Creation and centres of it. That realisation I am willing to call Love. It is as wonderful as, and is an aspect of, Creation, made of it, and in realisation of it.

    And of course, in and through being awake to you, and the wonder and mystery of your equal centrality, I am bound to behave as properly and carefully towards you as is in me to do.   

    I know the above leaves out all sorts of pressing questions and will seem naïve to theologians of all the various faiths. And people will want to categorise what I’m saying. Oh he’s a deist. Or a humanist. Or an agnostic. But I don’t want to own any of those terms. I am just describing what I see in front of me.

    Of course I know that far better thinkers than I am have struggled with these questions all through history. And every faith has people deeply versed in their own theology and collections of thought and revelation which makes them sure and certain that theirs is the only true faith, and all others are either lesser or wicked or both. And that goes for the different literatures and collections of utterances, all convinced that God was speaking only there and at that time, and through this voice-box and not that one.  

    But that is the wrong place to put yourself. I will not defer to such people, not because I do not respect the depth of their learning or devotion, but because I do not respect the attitude you find in all faiths, that my correctness gives me the right to despise or even kill you for your incorrectness. Such attitudes and behaviours all through history and continuing in the present are a direct denial of the basic tenets and values of all those faiths and it means that no one of any faith has the right to say that they and they only can claim to have true Faith. Faith is merely human and merely reflects our human nature. All we have is our own flawed nature and by our natures all our respective and often competing faiths and sects have been flawed, all equally.

    So though guilty of presumption, I nevertheless have no hesitation in refusing to defer to anyone claiming to hold the one and only, the true faith. None of us is adequate to make such a claim. All our horribly flawed histories, though, contain gold that can help a bit to protect us from our inadequacies too. So let’s share the gold in each other’s differences, the different traditions. Let us be generous and humble.

    For my son Joe, with love.

     

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  • Fable 9 – The Ark One Hour Long

    “The ark one hour long” explores the ubiquity in modern life of only partial and manipulative human contact, person to person. Most of our encounters through the day are with people who only see our outward edge, our mask, or just a passing glimpse, and anyway do not want to see us true ; we are just their object. By contrast, an hour each week given over to true attentiveness, one to other, without ulterior motive, has power, substance and preciousness. It can make the rest of the week survivable. It is like the ark.

    “The ark one hour long” is Fable Number Nine  in a series called “Fables and Reflections” which consists of sixteen pieces in all. Each Fable takes just a few minutes to read. I am uploading them one at a time, every month or so.  The idea behind this approach is that people running all day just to keep up, are more likely to read them in short doses and at intervals.

    But for those who prefer them all at once, here is a link to the sixteen together.

    The series is a set of essays written after a working life in mental health social work. It thus records what I learned and saw while deployed for all those years at one of Society’s many fault-lines dividing Have from Have-not, Them from Us, I from Other. Above all, perhaps, the series explores the issue of what makes community, what secures connection, how are we to live in the world in such a way that neither our neighbour nor our world suffer that we may briefly thrive ?  In a sense you can say that, in exploring the constituents of community here, and at this time of strain and fragmentation, frantic materialism and crude zealotry,  the series asks and discusses what are the binding and redemptive skills of true human connection, the skills of being human, the skills of love.

    All being well, the series will soon be published in book form, thanks to my friend the poet Mevlut Ceylan.

    If you find value in “Fables and Reflections”, please send word of them to people you know who you think might want to read them. You could simply pass on this blog address, or, alternatively,  I am happy to e-mail them individually as attachments to people who would find that easier. I am already doing that for some people.  I would also be happy to send hard copy versions by surface mail.  If that is your preference, just send me your address.

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  • Mental Health Witness – Marketing “Recovery”

    In the mental health services, the “Recovery Model” has achieved good sales in recent years. Good pitch, good branding. Upwardly-mobile managers and organisations able to lay claim to being passionate about “recovery” win brownie-points and funding. We function in that sort of climate these days, in the care services.

    But this seems more than just a “brand.” I meet people who speak of it as a whole new route to enlightenment. I have heard the word “inspiring” used a lot in relation to it and I’ve seen short tracts and quotes from its literature on the walls of mental health agencies, exactly as if it were some new religious dogma. The tracts imply that all we need do, we souls lost in the wilderness of self and society, is read those words on the notice-board and we will be found, taken up, set free. Day services become “Recovery Colleges.” Trainers become bearers of the Word.

    But what Word ? Why its appeal and ubiquity ? What’s new here ? It’s hard to see anything clear through the glaze of enthusiasm, except ever rising levels of Public Relations gloss and avoidance, and a new way of excluding people with longer term needs, adding to their sense of failure and threat (“What will happen to me if I don’t ‘recover’ ? Will they tell me to pull my socks up ? Will they take my Benefits from me ? Will they refuse to accept me if I seem too serious a case to ‘recover’ in their time-scales ? Will they reject me?”). And is anyone seriously suggesting that, before this model came along, social workers, occupational therapists, psychologists, and, yes, medical practitioners, were not supporting healing, were not working in support of healing, all possibilities of renewal and growth and coping, day in, day out ?

    I am not particularly concerned here with the model itself, its provenance, history or rationale. As with purely religious sects of one kind and another, I have no reason to doubt that the original intentions were worthy and even good. I am looking instead at its shape and effect on the ground, at this time – when the cuts are biting, and morale sinking ; what it has made of present conditions, and what present conditions are making of it. As far as I can see, it is essentially a position of defiance against stigma and, by inference, against the medical model. This psychiatric diagnosis you have given me need not define me. It need not be a life-sentence. There are things I can do to make a meaningful life for myself, within Society, not excluded from it.

    So the “Recovery Model” is at least in part a kind of self-help philosophy which at the same time requires of services that they provide resources in support of self-help, even at the expense, sometimes, of people less capable, more damaged. I think also that, too easily, it allows people, both users of services and people who manage and practice in services, to deny and shy away from the reality of mental disturbance, which is often difficult and complex and resistant of quick resolution. In other words, the model has become another fundamentalist retreat from complex reality into black and white simplicities and certainty. According to this simplification, all you need to overcome your mental health problem is have the right attitude and attend some classes. Having a mental health problem is no more than having a head-cold. We are all in this together in a shadow-less world of phoney bonhomie.

    In decrying the recovery model, I am not thereby surrendering to an equally simplistic medical one, which can seem to suggest that the individual is bound by the iron laws of diagnosis which, once activated, allow you no escape ; so that, after being diagnosed with something long-standing, you cease to be you, unique and God created, you become instead your “illness“, just a set of predictable responses, determined by an incurable condition. How can one fail to understand the dread of being classified, imprisoned, in this way ?

    To treat anyone as just a diagnosis, just an “It” of two eyes and two feet, is actually a kind of escape mechanism for the perpetrator. Of course we know that the model itself allows the scientist to reach for some diagnostic conclusions drawn from research-based methods of categorisation ; in turn, this opens the way to some medical interventions. But theory is one thing, human inter-action is another. A model based on detachment and general rules can also provide an excuse for the person within the scientist to avoid real and sometimes difficult human engagement, by staying detached, humanly and emotionally absent from the individual being in front of you. As far as the recipient of that behaviour is concerned, its detachment constitutes bad and even abusive practice by any standard and from any professional point of view. No good practitioner, of whatever discipline or helping profession , would follow it.

    But that’s the point. You don’t need a whole new model, a whole new service, to change the approach of a few inadequate workers. At most, you should look to correct the fault, and the despair it can elicit, by improving your recruitment practice, the quality of your staff supervision and support, and your systems for keeping work-loads under control.

    For if, in your reaction against one form of over-simplification, you merely set up another, you have actually done nothing except caused unnecessary disruption while joining forces with the real enemy. You thought you were righting a wrong. Not so. All you have done is give wrong a new colour. You have found a new way of failing people, a new golden calf to worship, just another false god.

    I would argue that something larger applies here, as well, or at least is relevant. How do we measure our worth, our value, our place in the community ? Do you only have worth if you function like the majority of “well“ or “recovered“ individuals, taking your place in the rush hour crush and scramble, flagging up and waving about what socially acceptable emblems you can earn, maintaining your outward face ? If so, then to be labelled disabled or unable or “unrecovered” is indeed a social disgrace and puts you beyond the pale. You may have rights, and allies to help you fight for them, but you have no sense of worth to help you rest at nights, no social capital.

    But if we accept that real human worth is not to be measured by material possession, acquisition, conformity, occupation ; not by the amount of “striving“ you do in contrast to “skiving“ (what a wicked, socially mischievous, loutish distinction that was – a real Bullington Rude-boy try-on), not by the amounts of tax you can dodge, but by qualities of soul, levels of generosity and truth-telling, then having a diagnosis, being “un-recovered,” being seen as out of kilter with the norm, is of no essential matter. Of course, nobody would have wished it on themselves or on loved ones. But in essential terms, there is no matter here. Some of the most wonderful and inspiring encounters of my life have been with people diagnosed as “incurable,”“unemployable,” “un-recovered“. Human worth, and a socially valuable human life, are not threatened or lessened by a diagnosis, and you do not need to have “recovered” to be a privilege to know and a force for good.

    There is one more thing I want to say on the subject of the Recovery model. It concerns the use of language. Has anyone noticed ? Language is being used here not to describe but to persuade, not to share a fact but to convert to a belief, not to illumine but to sell, not to reveal but to dress up. We are dealing with a propaganda operation here, whereby people who are “enlightened” are trying to persuade people into the “correct” frame of mind. In plain actuality, the “Recovery College” is a mental health community centre which runs a programme of lessons, lectures and presentations. Some people with mental health problems, most of them at the less serious end of the spectrum of disability, enjoy attending. That’s fine but limited (and a questionable use of scarce resources). But to call this recreational centre a “Recovery College” is to claim something much more, both for the agency and about mental disturbance in general. It is not a description but a public relations gloss borrowed from the market place. It is spin, spin being so habitual to us now, that we can serve it up almost as a form of instant therapy. However worthy the intentions, this and similar selling slogans do subtle but profound harm to the integrity of relationship and partnership between a helping service and those who turn to it for help.

     

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  • Mental Health Witness – Who’s a Skiver, then ?

    George Osborne’s division of the nation into Us “Strivers”  and Them “Skivers” (but weren’t  we once “all in this together” ?) has reminded me of some nineteenth century history I learned at school. It provides some context for Osborne’s venomous jingle two centuries later, and a way of measuring its quality and pedigree.

    I still find the nineteenth century fascinating, gripping, a revolutionary time. Of course, the be-numbing changes of our present time are even greater and yet more rapid, yet the overwhelming nature of the changes that took place nearly two centuries ago is clearer to me, more dramatic somehow, than the changes happening now. Time travels faster and faster. The world we have made for ourselves, on top of Nature’s world, is transformed through our activities at faster and faster rate. But we’re in the middle of all that, and it’s harder to see the present from inside and we can only try constantly to catch up, in mind and in psyche, as well as in behaviour.

    We are now outside the nineteenth century, well past it, and therefore, at least to some degree, we are in a better position to see its shape. Also perhaps, partly because change was slower then, we can see the rate of it clearer, and can see how that rate must have seemed absolutely bewildering to the people alive at the time. Its effect upon Society was quite volcanic, as a country once mainly agricultural and rural and steady became a country mainly industrial and urban and frenetic.

    Just one example : the century began with a road system consisting still largely of mud, with only the main roads dressed with tarmac. Short journeys still took days and there were not even telephones. Canals were a new invention, speeding things up no end. And digging them was speedily done. In just a few decades, the whole country was a vast network of canals. A revolution in communication thus took place within a generation, transforming the country, its economy, its social patterns. But then, only a couple of decades after that, the canals were all effectively out of date and now it was railways, spreading smoke and drama across the land, and leaving the canals far behind, already slow and peaceful havens from industrial rush.

    This piece is not a history lesson. It is about the distinction recently made by a man of inherited wealth in a powerful social position, between skiving and striving. I’ll come back to him shortly. But, as I struggle to understand, I need to put him in his place and time, and to do that I need to stay in the past for a little longer.

    And what we see as we follow the story of that century is the story of governments, one after the other, playing catch-up with events, as whole populations shifted into new cities formed around factories, away from the land. Slums sprang up, built on the cheap, and these horrendous new urban conditions, unprecedented in the world at that time, did not just call for urgent action, they forced minds to change their appreciation of reality, of the nature of government, of rule and social responsibility.

    This was the century of Free Trade, when, for decades, that untrammelled Enterprise so beloved of present-day Tories, held sway. But all the time, Government, whatever the party in power, was taking on more and more responsibility, as the century progressed, to enforce essential standards and regulation which otherwise would not have materialised.

    For example, the Public Health Acts, the Factory Acts, and so on.

    We don’t have video recordings, of course, of the conditions of those times. But we do have some wonderful etchings (see those of Doré) and also we have Dickens. Dickens raged in his novels and elsewhere at what he saw all round him in the new and burgeoning city, the sub-human conditions in which the poor were living in the slums. But he wasn’t the only one appalled. Generations of social reformers, among whom Quakers were often prominent, kept pressing for amelioration, for stronger government action, for more central responsibility to be taken.

    For they began to see that the earlier models of social care and responsibility, the doing of Good Works by the daughters of the gentry, with the Poor Laws and the Work House as last resort, were unable to cope with modern urban conditions. The old interventions, founded in and for a rural economy, were too idiosyncratic, haphazard and occasional. Something more systematic, more centralised, more organised and better resourced, was needed.

    And what did those reformers and activists meet when they began to press for change ? They met the convictions of Osborne’s ancestors. There can be no other explanation for this human squalor and degradation, those ancestors told the distressed reformers, than that they have brought it on themselves through wanton living and idleness. It’s their own fault and they deserve it. They have no one to blame here but themselves.

    But there is some excuse for this line, at that time. Or at least, I can find something human in it. People need a frame of reference, by which to understand what happens and what confronts them. And of course, all of us want to insulate ourselves a bit, if the going gets rough and challenging.

    And these were new conditions, and convincingly rough and challenging, even to onlookers. No one had met such conditions before, affecting the lives of so many people. So middle-class onlookers tended to reach for the nearest and easiest way of explaining the cause, for lack of any other perspective from which to make sense of it.

    The low church Christianity professed by much of Society at that time commended thriftiness, sobriety and hard work as indicators of right living, associating it with godliness ; wealth in this life was seen to be an early reward for all that effort, to be followed by grander rewards in the next.

    Therefore, it only stood to reason, according to this frame of reference, that anyone poor was likely to be so for lack of virtue and thrift, rather than for any external reason. In other words, they were skivers.

    Yah Boo, skivers ! Rolling in the dirt ! It is you who made this dirt your bed ! So now lie in it !

    But then, around the end of the century, reports came out saying something different. There was no discipline of sociology then. So these reports had few precedents and charted new ground.  But rather than theology and accusatory moralising, they offered hard evidence, based on careful and methodical observation at first hand. There was a major study by Seebohm Rowntree called “Poverty: A study of town life.”And perhaps the most famous and influential of them, “Life and Labour of the People in London,”written by a man called Charles Booth, came out in 1903. And the findings gathered by these reports influenced and finally convinced the policy-makers. The story the reports told was irrefutable and very different from “moral fault” in the victims. They made it indisputably clear that the fault and the cause lay with the conditions those people had to live in, and their powerlessness to change them.

    It was those findings, providing hard evidence of the human and social consequences of untrammelled and unregulated capitalism, ruinous to individual and social well-being, in the long term ruinous to the whole of Society, which led to the Welfare State. Interestingly, the very first element of a Welfare State structure appeared, not in England, but in Prussia. This was a state-run old age pension scheme introduced by the arch-conservative and pragmatist Bismark.  In the UK, the foundations were built in the early twentieth century, by a Liberal Government under Lloyd George. The task was completed by the Labour Government under Atlee, which came into power just after the Second World War.

    Let’s pause a moment, just there. I am a soldier coming home after that war. I know a great man has been Prime Minister through most of these last appalling six years. He has brought us through. But I did not fight this war, under his leadership, merely to continue the world and times he belongs to and speaks for. I shall come back and vote for something new and necessary for a more inclusive and egalitarian Society, something worth all the sacrifices I have made and seen. And having built that new world, after all this pain and learning, I will not allow it to be taken back from me. I will not allow the people who once claimed precedence over me in the old world to climb back on their horses and shove me back to the side of the road.

    So the Welfare State was put in place, the National Health Service being perhaps its most iconic feature. The essential principles behind the development, were that Want, and all that follows from Want, does not belong in a civilised Society and won’t be accepted there ; that the State will act powerfully as friend and guarantor of justice for the Weak no less than for the Strong ; so that a strong and enabling State, funded by and accountable to the taxpayer, will be empowered to run essential services to the benefit of the Many, so that civilised living standards are no longer just the preserve of the Few.  

    I think we have travelled far enough along this particular story-line, this rudimentary tracking of recent history.

    It has surely shown us that the Welfare State was founded on the recognition, through decades of learning from experience, that unbridled individualism in industrial and post-industrial societies, unregulated “enterprise”, leads not to social health but to social degradation and ultimately disintegration. The story tells us too that over 100 years ago, responsible people accepted, and acted on their acceptance, that in an urban society, poverty and unemployment is not to be explained by moral fault-finding and pointing fingers ; in the vast majority of cases, the cause comes from external and other factors beyond the individual’s control.

    In other words, the whole “skiver” line was disproved ages back and history has moved on.

    We are safe in assuming that Osborne was taught as much history at school as I was. He knew that in reaching for the word “skiver” as an explanation for long-term unemployment, he was talking factual and statistical nonsense. He must have decided to go ahead with the lie, because more people would want to hear it, whether they knew it was a lie or not, than would be repelled by it. At worst he would get away with it ; at best, he and his friends would profit by it in some way, presumably at the ballot box.

    I can just about understand that reasoning, given what is already clear about how the man works. In the same way, I can more or less understand how a dishonest greengrocer might knowingly sell me a rotten cabbage, and feel himself clever as he retires into his shop, leaving me to discover his deceit when I get home. And will I ever go to that greengrocer again ? Well, of course not. But that doesn’t matter, there will be other poor fools he can deceive tomorrow.

    But there is much I cannot understand in Osborne’s wickedly deceitful sally, clearly deliberate, carefully honed to be memorable, carefully timed and swiftly followed up by dramatic skiver-stories gleefully headlined in the still unregulated hooligan press.

    It is not just Osborne the individual I fail to understand in this. I believe that, at some level, everyone knows that the Skiver/Striver distinction is a cheap and wanton lie, the throwing down of a piece of red meat for the pack to gorge on. Osborne and his friends and many of his listeners find it profitable to maintain and subscribe to this transparent lie. But henceforward, we shall all know, friend and foe alike, that Osborne is a calculating and brazen liar who doesn’t care two hoots that we know that he is. Such utterly nihilistic cynicism bewilders me. However ineptly, this man holds an important office of state in a democracy. He is showing it scant respect, even while he fails in it. Democracy is a fragile entity. We all need language to speak through, Osborne included, and to use language presupposes that we agree to preserve it for the passing on of fact and truth, one to the other. Otherwise, why speak ? Why not just grunt, or snarl, instead ? The lie is a threat to democracy and to community and leaves us no human world to live in. Osborne and his friends and his tactics are destroying Osborne’s own world. What will his children say ? We are so proud of our father. He sold such rotten cabbages.   

    I must explain, in my last paragraph here, why this piece is included in a series on mental health issues. It is because 2/5ths of people on long term state benefits have severe and enduring mental health problems. Osborne will know that, too. Many of them will have read or heard that Osborne has called them “skivers,” even though both he and they know that they are not. He used the term, having decided that the profit he could make from his lie would override the possible loss. Manifestly, his lie’s effect upon them did not enter into his calculations.

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  • Mental Health Witness – Abiding with Mental Ill-health

    This is the second piece specifically on mental health I have posted up. The first can be found a few posts further down. They will form part of a series, all sharing the title “mental health witness” and all filled of a strong sense of present emergency.(However, it’s worth saying that several of the fables, if not all of them, have a mental health theme or relevance, as well)

    I am going to start this second piece by reflecting briefly on the word “abiding,” as it relates to mental ill-health. Mental ill-health is a part of Society and a part of human life. How best can we abide it ? How best abide with it ? How best can we help, and even benefit from, its abiding with us ?

    Then, moving on, I shall argue that, having slowly built up better conditions for, and ways of supporting and helping and abiding with, people with mental health problems in this country, we have recently set about making things much worse across a range of fronts, to the point of crisis.

    On abiding, I am largely just passing on the ideas of a friend of mine called Iain. He delivered them in a pub one evening several years ago, as part of his farewell speech, his summing up and parting gift. A social worker, he had worked for many years in a community mental health centre nearby. This was his leaving do and I had been invited to it. Previously, before Iain’s time, I had been manager of the same centre. His years there and mine, added together, would make a significant total, nearly half the time the policies of Care in the Community have operated in the UK. Iain’s reflections accorded very well with my own experience and conclusions, but also threw new light upon them.

    I hope my words here do justice to Iain’s insights. In focussing on the word “abide,” they explore and reflect on some of its inter-related meanings.

    Good mental health support or – in other words – the help that is needed by people with substantive and on-going mental health problems, is a matter of abiding, of abiding with, of staying there, close by, in poised and clear-boundaried friendship and connection, accepting, containing and reliable, over time and for as long as necessary.

    By definition, if I have a mental health problem, whatever that may be and however temporary or long-term, there is presently something in my internal system, my processing of experience, myself, my feelings, my thoughts, my world, which I can’t abide, or contain, or be reconciled to, abide in. For whatever reason, I can’t encompass or captain or navigate certain aspects of myself, without help from outside. I can’t abide or maintain on my own certain aspects of my being, my experiencing, my seeing, my behaving, my coping in the world. Nor can the life I want to lead, or community I want to be part of, easily abide or bear me. I need help, but by definition the help I need is not easily come by. If I can’t accommodate myself, how can I expect others easily to accept and accommodate me, on my behalf ?

    I need someone to abide me over time, as a way of helping me, over time, the better to abide myself. To love me, over time, as a way of helping me the better to love myself. Accepted for long enough, despite everything, despite the scars, I will learn to accept myself.

    Put a slightly different way, I find some parts of me, or of my life, hard to manage. In fact, they feel quite unmanageable. I need someone else to manage those parts for me, not always, but sometimes, not completely perhaps, but partially, variously.

    By definition and by any standard, those parts of me are hard to manage. If they were not, I would not need to seek help with them. I have to hand aspects of my Self that are hard to manage to someone else, trusting that person to be capable and equipped to manage them on my behalf, at least for a while.

    It may be that that person, that helper, will spend a whole working day going from client to client, being asked to take on with skilled and open hands apparently unmanageable aspects of human self and situation. By the end of the day, the helper would feel very weighed down with all our difficulties and apparent defeats, were he or she not well-enough trained and well-enough supported and well-enough integrated as a personality, to continue to have spare capacity through this evening and tonight, and be ready for more bombardment on rising tomorrow morning.

    I have already used the word “love” in this piece. “Abide” did not seem quite enough at that point. “Abide with me.” Yes. Abide with me. Abide me. Love me. And, in fact, Iain in the pub, at his leaving-do, ended his reflection with that loaded word. It all comes down to “love,” he said. But the word “love” is a difficult word to say in a pub, somehow. And it’s a difficult word for social workers to use in any place – or for occupational therapists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, or people who work in prisons. It doesn’t sound professional or detached enough. It sounds over-emotional, over-involved. Imprecise. It smacks of religiosity, self-righteous and patronising.

    So Iain couldn’t say the word quite straight. He said it apologetically, self-effacingly, a bit like a very young man handing someone a rose. Aw, shucks, he says, self-mocking. Here’s a token of my unworthy esteem, of my, ahem, love, heh-heh. And as he hands her the rose, he fails to meet the eyes of his beloved. Then he drops it.

    I think Iain was right to end on that word, and it is understandable that he found it hard to say. But, in my opinion, he should also have insisted, dead serious and without an ahem, that there is no better, no more professional word, than “love”. “Abide” is a good route to it. But “love” has always been our only possible destination, with no religiosity attached. It is the hyphen, the fragile line of connection between human and human, human in the light and human in the shadow, “I” in here and “Other” out there. The skills of love, effectively practised, are what a civilised community is made of and cannot do without.

    Now, here are some words spoken by various people who once attended the Centre where Iain and I worked. They were addressed to me over time and I wrote them down in 1994, as part of a poem :

    “I am someone here

    I am heard

    I am not alone.”

     

    “Here I have substance

    I matter

    I mean something.”

     

    “I feel more at home

    here in this place

    than I ever feel at home.”

     

    “I have a share in the world.”

    “I am not odd

    I am even here.”

     

    “I am not assailed.”

     

    Writing this piece in the Spring of 2013, I believe those words of valuing and trust quoted in 1994 could not now be spoken by the people concerned, people at the receiving end of our Society, people who are, in effect, at Society’s mercy.

    A whole combination of factors, some already long in the tooth, others more recent, have come together in these days to create an almost perfect storm which I think has put the speakers of those words in actual danger, along with the agency I have been describing, with all the skills and resources available there. Under equal threat and in equal danger are the whole over-arching contract and commitment to basic notions of social responsibility and organised welfare provision. Such commitment, itself long-fought for, had made possible this place where, for a while, vulnerable people were “not assailed,” and where they knew they might safely abide and be a valued element in Society, treated with respect, warmth and responsiveness.

    I shall briefly list the factors which I think have played a part. In doing so, I know that, while the list holds true for me, others will disagree with it, or with parts of it. I also know that somehow it will not explain very much. It will not answer questions which I find actually agonising. These are : how can we have allowed this to happen ? How are we still allowing this to happen ?  How can we be so deceived, so quiescent ? Who are we ?

    By “we,” I mean, in one sense, particular and relevant bodies and people in positions of central authority and knowledge, who have failed in their duty of upholding standards by allowing and often even enforcing these developments, presumably in the honest but false belief that they were for the good.  I mean, in another sense, entire professions at all levels of their hierarchies, who are responsible for the actual delivery of services on the ground and who have acquiesced where they should have refused. In the ultimate sense, what I mean by “we” is all of us who live in this Western Society and way of life, since all of us are responsible for the way we treat our own.

    The list contains policies and banner concepts which will perhaps mean little to people not directly concerned in the helping professions. They are fairly recent but are not restricted to the present Coalition government or its disastrous and toxic “austerity” strategies.  

    The Business Model.

    I shall use the title the “Business Model” to describe a range of inter-related processes which over the years have radically changed the way in which many mental health services are managed and delivered. These processes began under Thatcher. New Labour allowed the developments to stand and in some ways further extended them. The present Coalition Government have extended them yet further.

    State run services are out-sourced and taken over by the voluntary sector. Organisations compete in order to win a given “tender”. Winning a tender brings a budget with it. An organisation which does not win enough tenders will not survive.

    Tenders are reviewed from time to time. Standards and costings have been worked out, by which to measure an organisation’s success or failure in delivering the service or managing the tender. Those targets are often heavily based on expenditure and other quantitative measures, rather than on quality. An organisation found to fail by the tender’s measures will be replaced by a competitor.

    As a model for commercial operations this has its own logic. As a model for mental health service delivery, I submit that it is inappropriate and destructive in very many ways. It undermines continuity and long-term development, as well as inter-organisational co-operation. It biases managers towards subservience to top-down measures and the chalking up of cheap brownie points, in order to win tenders, rather than a true and independent commitment to creative and imaginative work and genuine high standards. It creates a bias away from good practice for everyone’s sake towards eye-catching promotions for an organisation’s sake. Inherent in the system is a huge temptation and built-in incentive to cook books, take short-cuts and work by catchy slogan and flashy shop window display. But whenever people are caught succumbing to such temptation, the rule-makers of this bent game are the first to blame the functionaries concerned, even though it is the game itself that ensures and almost enforces their behaviour (a recent example is the “gagging clauses” which some NHS Trusts seem to have imposed, and which Jeremy Hunt swiftly condemned). The whole business is based on the belief that people need duress and competition, in order to function to a standard. I say with utter certainty and conviction that people have other drives than greed, fear, competitiveness and the need for kudos, and one of those drives is service. Good social care for people with mental health problems needs structures that build on the human drive to provide good service and to take pride in good creative work, not the drives of jungle, market place and grocer’s shop, dogma and zealotry, the feeding of Caesar.

    Social Inclusion

    This heading and starting point for new ways of thinking and acting on social policy is associated with New Labour. I had high hopes for it, but it has yielded ideas and approaches that have been hugely disappointing, paving the way for, and making intellectually acceptable, the withdrawal of necessary specialist mental health support services in the community for people who need them, services developed from knowledge and experience over years. The thinking here is that a more inclusive wider community should make those services unnecessary, since they are damagingly separatist and create over-dependency. The reality is that, for many people, the services are essential for them to have any community at all. The services’ withdrawal means merely a return to isolation and greater precariousness – social exclusion, in other words, absolutely the opposite of the result intended.

    The Recovery Model

    Here is another supposed “good” which, in ways I find hard to understand, has swept through the systems like a new religious faith. Professionals cease working from their own creativity and experience, and turn instead to this gospel’s chapters and verses. Agencies and organisations now flag up their loyalty to the model, as if proclaiming themselves justified by faith, sure of heavenly bliss (and budgets). “Recovery” becomes a mark of success, rewarded by funding, and thereby for some needy individuals, and perhaps for many, creates instantly and most mischievously, a new trap and category called “failure.” Insidiously, interest, resources, energies and quality of living, begin to be withdrawn from those people whose disabilities do not respond to the chapters and the verses, the rousing tracts and the classes….

    I find nothing new in the “Recovery Model” except its gross simplification of complex realities, its evangelical tone and promotion, and its tendency, in the present climate, to be another justification for withdrawing help from people whose need is greatest. It is making life yet more unforgiving for those of us who fail to break through Society’s “recovery” ceiling.

    I am writing about this model in more detail in a separate piece.

    Personal Budgets, etc. – Making Money the Medium.

    I have kept this section separate from the “Business Model” above, even though they are obviously connected.

    “Personal Budgets” have been a long time coming to mental health services, but the concept’s early prophets and messengers always made clear to their audiences that it would bring radical change to the way services were delivered, such that they would never be the same again. Those changes are beginning to bite now. Devolution of care budgets are being taken all the way through and out of the care system to the level of the service consumer, the “customer,” and will no longer be in the control of service provider, the “shop assistant”. The principles at work here are quite hard to decipher and I am going to say that I believe they are a mish-mash, some conscious, some not. “Choice” and “Empowerment” are conscious ones. The service consumer should not have to be at the mercy of institutional service providers a/ to decide what they need, and b/ to provide for them en masse. Consumers should be able to decide what they need for themselves and to buy those services individually, from wherever they might be delivered. Like customers in a street market, choosing between vendors.

    But I believe there are other, less conscious drives at work here. One is a distrust and even resentment of professionalism and its integrity and skills, even a suspicion that trained professionals are unnecessary in the first place. Another is a devotion to the god of the market and a third is plain denial.

    We have no right, actually, in our desire to be “inclusive,” to talk or act in denial of the fact that people with mental health problems do really experience mental health problems, of one kind and another. The problems can be long-standing and seriously disabling. They can often leave you confused and pre-occupied, such that you don’t actually know in detail what you need and you don’t always want the responsibility and fiddle of managing a budget yourself. Once, I lay on my back on the road, having just gone over my bike’s handle-bars onto my head. At that moment I wasn’t particularly interested in my Right to Choose between one hospital and another, or in being empowered to decide how my help should be packaged or budgeted. I just wanted help, now, help I could safely assume would be well managed, well trained and careful of me. I wanted someone to lift me up, with care and expertise, since I was incapable just then of getting up myself. Just so.

    As we now move into the era of Personal Budgets, it looks very possible, indeed likely, that they will mean the end of organised and on-going provision of mental health services in the community, working and accountable to high standards of care. Rather than take services forward, Personal Budgets seem likely to eradicate everything put in place since Care in the Community began. For people with severe and enduring mental health problems, it will be back to isolation in the bedsit and the street. Here again, dogma and denial will have undone what years of careful and sometimes painful development have built up. 

    In this same section on Money as Medium, I shall cover very briefly the topics of : the interviews being conducted by an organisation called ATOS ; the Coalition’s Benefit Reforms ; the decision by at least one Local Authority I know to make mental health service users pay, henceforward, for their support in mental health community centres, etc.

    I shall say, first, that of course a very large proportion of people on long term benefits in this country suffer from long term mental health problems.

    “Mental health problems are the largest single source of disability in the UK, accounting for 23% of the total ‘burden of disease’ (Dept. of Health 2011b)” This quote is taken from a King’s Fund Report called “Long-term Conditions and Mental Health. The Cost of Co-morbidities” Naylor et al, February 2012.

    “The numbers who can’t work because of mental health problems (1.1 million) are not much off the total number claiming Unemployment Benefits (1.5 million)” writes Neil O’Brien in The Telegraph, May 10th 2013. Neil O’Brien is Director of “Policy Exchange”, an independent think tank working for better public service.

    Against that background, it is not surprising that – as I understand it – the proportion of people on long term benefits in this country suffering from long term mental health problems is around 2/5ths. While I am sure that George Osborne, our present Chancellor of the Exchequer, would not dream of implying that people with long-term mental health problems are “skivers” – and didn’t mean them at all when he made his venomous, misleading and carefully calculated little “Strivers and Skivers” sally, I cannot guarantee that large numbers of people with long term mental health problems did not hear his words as a direct attack upon them. Here was this sleek, well-heeled political leader saying that people with mental health problems are just lazy and either need to pull their socks up or, by God, George and his millionaire friends would pull them up for them. Does Osborne realise the effect those words of his might have had on some very vulnerable people ? Maybe he does, and maybe he doesn’t. Either answer should by rights be cause for dispossessing him instantly of his position, before he does further social harm. Here is an element in our Society infinitely more anti-social than any “skiver” one might meet.  

    Onto Atos. This is a large international organisation which, having won the government’s tender, has been interviewing people on long term benefits since 2010 to ensure that all have been appropriately assessed as unemployable. (In much the same way, the international organisation G4 won the tender to cover security at the London Olympics, before being found woefully unequal to the task and being replaced by the army).

    Inevitably, people with severe and enduring mental health problems have been caught up in ATOS’s procedures, and been called to interview by ATOS functionaries. First, I want to make the point that, before ATOS came along, mental health assessments of the people concerned had already been made by trained and specialist professionals, who had decided they were disabled by their conditions and therefore qualified for long term benefits. Presumably, the functionaries employed by ATOS were considered more competent than these professionals – or was their attraction their greater compliance ? Was ATOS required by its contract to meet certain targets for State Benefit reduction, however inept and irresponsible its individual decisions, whatever the effects on the people concerned ? 

    Shocking and shameful findings are quoted in the contemporary Wikipedia entry for Atos Healthcare, as follows :

    A government study published in 2012 found that half of the people identified as “fit for work” by Atos Healthcare’s Work Capability Assessment on behalf of the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK, remained unemployed and without income.[35][36]

    In 2012, 43 complaints against Atos doctors and nurses were being investigated by the General Medical Council or Nursing and Midwifery Council.[27] Criticism has been directed at Atos over the ability of its staff to deal with complex mental health problems and conditions whose symptoms vary with time.[37] In August 2012, Atos Healthcare claimed they had appointed 60 Mental Function Champions to provide additional training.[27]

    Atos assessors have found patients with brain damage,[38] terminal cancer or severe multiple sclerosis to be fit for work.[39] According to government statistics, 1300 people died shortly after being declared fit for work by Atos.[40]

    It has been reported on good authority elsewhere that 40% of ATOS’s decisions that people they interviewed are employable after all, are overturned on appeal. It has been found, as well, that those individuals who go in for their interview with an advocate beside them, tend to do better in having their disability confirmed (rendering an appeal unnecessary), than those who don’t. Which suggests that the 40% figure, already appalling as an indicator of incompetent decision-making, is probably conservative.

    Further and still worse, The Independent has reported that if people attend an appeal with a Citizen’s Advice Bureau (CAB) officer or lawyer, the ratio of ATOS decisions overturned goes up to 70 %. (Since that Independent report, legal aid for most benefit appeals has been stopped. Furthermore, CAB funding has now been radically reduced).

    I won’t give much more detail on this, here. We should be grateful to the The Independent and The Guardian for holding some light to ATOS operations, as it works its way through the most needy and vulnerable people in our Society, with – it still seems – the electorate’s support and consent. And I need also to congratulate Re-think Mental Illness for commissioning, last year, a study on the Atos Fitness to Work tests. On October 4th 2012, The Independent reported on the study’s findings as follows :

    “..Six per cent of doctors have experienced a patient who has attempted – or committed – suicide as a result of “undergoing, or fear of undergoing” the Government’s fitness to work test.

    A survey of over of 1,000 GPs across the UK by ICM also found that one in five had at least one disabled patient who had thought about suicide because of the test, which is aimed at assessing whether people claiming incapacity benefit are fit to work.

    The survey, highlighted by Exaro, the investigative website, also found 14 per cent had patients who had self-harmed as a result of the test.

    The charity, “Rethink Mental Illness”, which commissioned the poll, said it showed that the work-capability assessments were pushing some of the most unwell and vulnerable people in society “to the edge”.

    I will add three observations of my own ; first, the ATOS interviews, already threatening and made yet more so by the reports of the organisation’s manifest incompetence, will confirm to the mental health community that Society is now out to get them by whatever means. That dread will not easily be articulated and cannot be measured, but let us keep in mind those Rethink findings. There is always and anyway a high rate of suicide in the mental health community. I have no doubt whatsoever that the conditions of dread and bewilderment presently being inflicted by these interviews, will be greatly increasing that rate, even as I write. Literally, the Atos “Fitness to Work” tests are killing people.

    Second, a literal observation. My friend and colleague Caite Doyle, Community Psychiatric Nurse, went to support one of her clients called for an ATOS interview. The interview is a rote and generic one, more applicable to people with physical disabilities than mental, a crude and clumsy, depersonalising tool. Describing it to me, Caite put up her arms in imitation of what her client was asked to do, in order to show whether or not he was capable of employment, this man with serious mental health problems.

    Third, a picture of my own, entirely fanciful, an image. But is it an image of mere fancy, or of the essential truth ? People a bit subdued after a very long and hard day’s work, are converging as usual on the supermarket, eager to buy in supplies. Suddenly, they see someone gaunt and fragile being dragged round the back of the building by a bunch of roughs and rude-boys, rather well-dressed and sleek. The shoppers quickly turn back to compiling their shopping lists. They know what’s going to happen next, out of sight and round the back, and they don’t want to think about it. “I bet that person deserves all that’s coming,” say one or two to themselves, uneasily.    

    Next, the spate of changes in Welfare Benefits, Housing Benefits, etc. etc. presently going through.  These too are directly affecting very large numbers of people with severe and enduring mental health problems. But how many of the electorate know this ? How much of the “free” press,  how many politicians,  will be correctly informing them ?

    I shall not engage here in detailed analysis of how much the income of people on State Benefits, already minimal, will be reduced by the Disability Living Allowance changes, or how many people will be adversely affected by the Housing Benefit changes.

    I shall restrict myself, instead, to suggesting, again, that dread of these changes, the consternation they cause, coupled with the distorted emphases and witch-hunt atmosphere created by the right-wing press on this issue, ably supported by Osborne and his friends, will have as much impact on people with mental health problems as the actual reductions will have, however dire.

    Now for the local example, spread rancid on top of the cake. I think it was last year that a local authority I know decided that it would be “fair” to start charging people with long term mental health problems for their use of community day care and similar support services. So a Council Policy document came out, called “Fairer Contributions.” To make sure that this development followed due procedure, there was a “consultation exercise” before implementation. That implementation is now going ahead, even as the ATOS interviews continue to take place and the Benefit Changes initiated by the Coalition Government begin to bite.

    According to the new policy, individuals who have been going to community centres for years free of charge, as part of Welfare State provision for those in need, are now receiving bills. The bills began coming through in dribs and drabs, with an apparent randomness and much inconsistency as far as individual starting dates for payment were concerned. But after several months, they have caught up with the great majority of people who attend these services, often their only link with any community. The bills are sent out from a Council department which uses the term “Debt Collection” at the head of its invoices, a phrase which must sound strange and frightening to people who have never before acted, or thought of themselves, as debtors. The department appears to have only part-time workers, who are therefore hard to reach on the phone and slow to reply to correspondence or appeals. The workers have not generally had dealings before with people with mental health problems, and lack knowledge and training in how to work sensitively with people struggling to understand what is this sudden debt they have accrued.

    To comply with the new policy, the mental health centres concerned have had to categorise and cost each element of their services and are now telling their clients in detail, how much an individual session with a worker will cost them, how much it will cost to attend a “drop-in” session in the sitting room, etc. Those clients are leaving in droves. First a conversion to this new Recovery religion is required ; then the service, their main support for years, suddenly explodes into chargeable fragments. What other religion charges its parishioners for belonging ?

    Yet these are services which for years have helped people maintain their mental health in the community, who would otherwise struggle, with re-admission to hospital all too frequent, and self-harming a common and powerful temptation. I believe the outlook is grim now for those services and for the people they once supported, now cast adrift.

    I shall briefly re-cap :

    Initially here, I described a few ideas that struck me as a good way of conveying in general terms what needs to be available in the community for people with extensive mental health needs. Then I quoted what some people with mental health problems have said about a service where they felt upheld, included, encouraged and safe, where – as one put it – “I am not assailed.” I went on to list recent policies and developments which in my opinion are misconceived and have been ill-implemented, many of them following the dogma that anything based on market principles and “Choice” must be good. On the contrary, I believe that, together, the developments constitute a perfect storm now assailing some of the most vulnerable people in our Society, in the process undoing years of good work, love and learning, and shaming us all.

    Finally, another poem. I wrote it in May 1994. It describes a typical meal which once took place in the mental health centre where Iain and I both worked. Already, the kind and quality of that meal, and of its preparing and partaking, are things of the past. From what forsaken places are we gathered here today.

    The Meal

     

    Something of power about the meal

    something electric forging the dull elements

    into a new and hushed

    and human vibrancy –

    a making.

     

    The food here is fresh, new-made,

    each choice of menu a matter of passion

    personal risk and urgent debate

    resolved in meetings weeks in advance.

     

    The tables are round

    of plain deal

    but five years on

    still surprisingly smart.

     

    They like the tables.

    They remember earlier times  :

    “We used to eat on trays

    all around the two rooms

    and we had to queue

    quietly

    in a long line.

    No-one questioned it.

    Who were we to complain ?”

     

    The two cooks get a tenner

    and a free meal.

    There is a stringent job description

    so the money’s hard earned.

     

     They sit apart

    once the meal is served

    eating with their morning’s worker.

    The morning’s sweat

    drying on three foreheads

    seals their fellowship.

     

    And they come, the people,

    from all their far edges

    from all their fastnesses     

    to sit here at the plain deal

    eight per table

    forming the circle.

     

    They come with their famishment

    no food can satisfy

    with their lostness

    no finding here can heal.

     

    The limitation of the event

    with its essentialness ;

    the simplicity of the being together

    in these plain circles

    with the distance each has travelled

    to get here ;

    simply the eating

    makes a new sense here

    a true valuing.

     

    No-one would dare

    say a grace here       

    but grace is present

    in all the racket of the business

    of eating, the clatter, the voices’

    rise and fall ;     

    in every movement

    of fork to lips, of eye to eye ;

    in every word that is spoken ;     

    in every moment the circles

    remain unbroken.

     

    From what forsaken places

    are we gathered here

    today.

           Rogan Wolf                                                                                                    

                                                                                 

               
             

                                                        

     

     

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  • Fable 8 – The Ring of Defence

    I am adding  Fable Eight here to the pieces I’ve uploaded earlier, each under the same banner. They belong in a series called “Fables and Reflections” which consists of sixteen pieces in all.

    “The Ring of Defence” describes a position and way of living given over entirely to defence. It might be said that the piece is an exploration of the nature of fear, and of the power of fear.

    Each piece takes just a few minutes to read. I am uploading them one at a time, every month or so.  The idea behind this approach is that people running all day just to keep up and apparently intact, are more likely to read them in short doses and at intervals.

    But for those who prefer them all at once, here is a link to the sixteen together.

    The series is a set of essays written after a working life in mental health social work. It thus records what I learned and saw while deployed for all those years at one of Society’s many fault-lines dividing Have from Have-not, Them from Us, I from Other. Above all, perhaps, the series explores the issue of what makes community, what secures connection, how are we to live in the world in such a way that neither our neighbour nor our world suffer that we may briefly thrive ?  In a sense you can say that, in exploring the constituents of community here, and at this time of strain and fragmentation, frantic materialism and crude  zealotry,  the series asks and discusses what are the binding and redemptive skills of true human connection, the skills of love, the skills of being human.

    All being well, the series will soon be published in book form, thanks to my friend the poet Mevlut Ceylan.

    If anyone finds value or virtue in these Fables and Reflections, please send word of them to people you know who you think might want to read them. You could simply pass on this blog address, or, alternatively,  I am happy to e-mail them individually as attachments to people who would find that easier. I am already doing that for some people.  I would also be happy to send hard copy versions by surface mail.  If that is your preference, just send me your address.

     

    Posted:

  • Word from Myanmar

    Last week, I added six new poems to the bilingual collection called “Poems for…one world.” All the new poems were Burmese, our fifty-first language.

    Remember that Burmese is a language whose speakers are themselves presently learning to be free again, to speak freely.

    You can access the six poems here .  You can read the story of how the Burmese collection came about, and how long it has all taken, here.

    Is this an event of only literary or artistic interest ? I think not. To a degree, poetry is mostly itself when it is experienced outside the bookshop poetry section, or magazine, or summer arts festival. Clear of those enclaves, it truly sings and circulates and the word “political” can start to apply. In some circumstances, poetry can become a significant political event which changes perceptions and orientation, changes  how the wheels turn.

    These poems from Myanmar are political in the most obvious sense. For instance, the first is by Zargana, a prominent politician there. His short poem was written from prison. His sentence as a political prisoner was set to be a long one, but he was recently freed in an anmesty. His poem has been translated by the ex-ambassador of the UK embassy in Rangoon, Vicky Bowman.

    (In fact, quite a few of the “Poems for…one world” collection were written in gaol, or about gaol. By definition, poetry is free speech, whether or not it is heard, whether or not the poet is incarcerated. Our mental health, our power to endure, relies on our speaking freely, even when there is only a wall to scratch our words on).

    But I think these poems are political in a less obvious sense, as well. People download the “Poems for…” collections from all over the world. The vast majority of them are school teachers, planning to use the poems in their classrooms. Next most numerous, are librarians. After that, healthcare professionals, planning to display the poems in their waiting rooms.

    The Burmese language is rarely seen or heard outside its own borders. And for years it has not been freely spoken within those borders, either. Now it will be read all over the world, not just by scholars and specialists, but by all of us. Just knowing that, will have more meaning  than the merely “literary” to the people of Myanmar.

    Finally and more generally, I would suggest another way in which poetry becomes “political.”  More and more, and with more and more practiced expertise, we are bombarded with language which seeks to seduce, lull, obscure, sell, sugar and deceive. Such communication is an all-pervasive pollutant, fear-filled, contemptuous and undemocratic. Those who use words, and our sophisticated communication systems, just to manipulate, are corrupting our language, making nonsense of it and threatening the trust upon which our community relies. We in the West say smugly that we enjoy “free speech,”  but all too often what we are describing is not free speech at all.  Rather, it is poisonous propaganda deployed by mercenaries of one sort or another, attempting to persuade us to follow their dogma, to surrender to their paymaster.

    Good poetry speaks without armour to the right hand side of the brain as well as to the left hand.  It seeks you out where you reside, where only the whole truth is told and where true connection can be made. Purely as a contrast and antidote to the prevailing poisonous mercenary chatter, it offers an anchorage on the one hand, a platform of political integrity on the other.

     

     

    Posted:

  • Fable 7 – The People who don’t Appear

    I am adding Fable Seven here to the pieces uploaded in previous posts (see further down on the blog for earlier Fables). They belong in a series called “Fables and Reflections” which consists of sixteen pieces in all.

    In this fable, I suggest that the “people who don’t appear” are the helpers, the healers, the teachers, the people whose task includes applying the skills of love and thinking with the right hand side of the brain turned on, not switched off. We tend to blame these people, and that side, when things go wrong, while also largely ignoring them when we make our policies and organise our structural revolutions. But if we are to have a future, these may well be among the people we should turn to for help in building a future of hope and sanity.

    Each piece takes just a few minutes to read. I am uploading them one at a time, every month or so.  The idea behind this approach is that people running all day just to keep up, are more likely to read them in short doses and at intervals.

    But for those who prefer them all at once, here is a link to the sixteen together.

    The series is a set of essays written after a working life spent in the care services, primarily in the field of mental health. It thus records what I learned and saw during  all that time deployed at one of Society’s many fault-lines dividing Have from Have-not, Them from Us, I from Other. In a sense you can say that, in exploring the constituents of community here, and at this time of strain and fragmentation, frantic materialism and crude  zealotry,  the series asks and discusses what are the binding and redemptive skills of true human connection, the skills of love, the skills of being human.

    All being well, the series will soon be published in book form, thanks to my friend the poet Mevlut Ceylan.

    If anyone finds value or virtue in these Fables and Reflections, please send word of them to people you know who you think might want to read them. You could simply pass on this blog address, or, alternatively,  I am happy to e-mail them individually as attachments to people who would find that easier. I am already doing that for some people.  I would also be happy to send hard copy versions by surface mail.  If that is your preference, just send me your address.

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